Identify Topics for Your Content Marketing
Before we get into how to identify questions/problems that should be part of your content strategy, please allow me to set the stage. If you’ve bought something in the past few years, you should recognize this; it’s the modern buying process ...
Identify problem (before school care for my 8 year old, new refrigerator, things to do in NYC, etc.)
Take out your phone (40.7M vs. 17.9M mobile only vs. Desktop/Laptop only internet users respectively)
Search on Google for the product or service that best solves your problem (94% market share in mobile search vs. 82% on Desktop/Laptop)
SERP (search engine results) These will include AdWords, Shopping, Images and Organic … Identify the product via image in shopping or image search. Browse metadata description for non-image based products/services. Compare prices and read reviews (interchangeable) and in the process, identify suppliers/companies that can solve your problem.
Review offerings/options
Decide which company to use or call to have questions or concerns addressed prior to buying.
What stood out about this process? No one from any of the competing companies were contacted prior to a decision being made. Hell, the competing companies likely had no idea that they were in the running for the business.
The modern consumer has copious amounts of information at their fingertips to aid in their decision making process. They know what they are looking for and where to find it.
If your product or service doesn't fill a need in the marketplace, there is no amount of content marketing or promotion that will bring you customers.
Consumers are vastly more savvy than they were just 5 years ago. If it’s a purchase that matters to them, emotionally or financially, they know everything about it. (car, TV, lawn service, child care, fertility treatments) They research everything and have all but wrapped up their purchase before they engage a representative from your company for the first time; if at all.
“Your business is the #1 answer to only a segment of the population in your space; it’s shit to the rest.” [Tweet This]
The one thing that you must understand in order to succeed in business today … Your business is the #1 answer to only a segment of the population in your space; it’s shit to the rest. You’ll never have a product that is THE solution for 100% of the population, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Ask questions, improve your offering every day. Don’t be afraid to enhance or scrap aspects of your business. If you are sentimental, this will be a very hard lesson to learn. Change for the sake of moving forward is necessary.
Slack, the team collaboration software started off as a video game company. The game sucked but the internal tool they created to communicate during the development of their game, Glitch, was awesome. They scraped the game and built out their collaboration tool, an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge.” Depending on where you look online, Slack is worth anywhere between $3 and $9 billion dollars.
Which Questions Should You Answer?
I don’t have a nice and tidy “Top 10” or even a top five, because there are only four ways (in my estimation) that would be effective for gathering the most relevant questions surrounding your business.
1. Most frequently asked questions (as recorded by your staff)
If you have a process in place to gather data from your frontline staff to refine your persona profiles and value prop, then this information should be readily available. If you have no idea what I just said, please, resist the temptation to answer the “questions” that you want to answer.
What I mean by that is too often we think we know what the top selling features of our product or service are, and we regurgitate this onto every customer facing sales tool. Content marketing is not a sales tool, it’s the sales process. And you don’t know what you don’t know. You may be surprised by the results.
Start having your public facing employees collect feedback from your customers. What problem were they trying to solve by buying from you? What impact will your product or service have on the buyer’s life? Keep this information in a centralized repository (Google sheets works great) and maintain it frequently. Clean up entries and assign codes to repeat responses for ease of future entries. Answer all of these questions with content. Dedicate more resources to the most frequently asked questions. Video production, case studies, white papers, etc. And, create for the platform. We’ll talk more about this in a future post.
2. Survey responses
You’re a custom denim retailer. Your website details how customers can record and submit their custom measurements, desired style, color, pockets, and even rivets. Because of the customization and the manufacturing, your price point is on the luxury spectrum. What questions/problems should you address with your content? Find out in a survey of your current/past customers. Your survey questions will come in handy if you elect to hold a focus group or two as well. These should be open ended questions that require text input responses. Some sample questions might look like this …
What is the allure of custom made products? Why did you decide to purchase your last custom product? What types of products do you prefer custom made? Describe your last clothing purchase (that wasn’t ours). What types of clothing would you purchase online? Describe how price influences your clothing purchases. How does the perfect pair of jeans make you feel? Why did you decide to buy from us?
You’re looking for overlapping answers/topics. If a third of the respondents cited referrals from friends that own your jeans and the amazing texture of your denim as the reason they bought from you, then your content needs to describe the softest and most comfortable jeans ever. If you see a pattern relating to status as the main attraction to custom made products, then your content needs to position your product a status symbol and talk about how people that buy them will be the envy of their social circles. Are these thin markets? Sure, but the content is extremely relevant … and it goes back to your product isn’t a perfect fit for everyone.
3. Focus group or usability study responses
A focus group is an inexpensive way to collect data on someone’s predisposition toward something; in this case your product or industry. It is time consuming, and slightly awkward to pull off the first few times. Done properly, the information you collect is extremely valuable. There are so many great pieces of content out there on how to execute a focus group that I’m not going to go into detail or recreate the wheel. Instead, here is the link to a fantastic resource that I Googled especially for you.
4. Top search queries that drives traffic to your website
By far and away the best source for collecting unbiased, super targeted, uber relevant topics pertaining to your product or service … actual user behavior data. This is not dependent on what people say, rather what they do in search of your product or service. Look in Google Search Console or Google Analytics (secondary dimension “search query”) and review the top search queries that bring people to your website. Look specifically at the queries that result in a visit to a product page or service feature landing page. If the [soft denim jeans] query brought 20 visitors last month to one of the product description pages featuring the term soft denim for on-page SEO, that is indisputable proof that your denim texture should be a content topic.
