Leveraging users to create valuable content
Tl;dr — Use common user research techniques to identify new content ideas that deliver meaningful value to your audience.
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate sales and growth for businesses of all sizes, but engaging your audience is easier said than done. For most of us, finding the right voice and content is a major challenge — but it doesn’t have to be.
Conducting some user research is a great way to develop content ideas and discover exactly what your audience finds valuable so you can successfully grow your reach.
User research & content: a natural fit
Content marketing is based on the simple premise that your expertise, data, or other proprietary insight is valuable to a group of people. By sharing that insight for free, you can build trust with your current & potential customers, develop awareness of your product and ultimately grow as a company.
But how do you know which content is valuable? It depends on your audience, since ‘value’ is in the eye of the beholder — and it can be hard to guess what your audience needs to know.
We end up pumping out content, guessing and hoping that something will resonate. Fortunately, there’s a more straightforward and reliable option: talk to your customers.
Strategy
Before you have those conversations with your customer, take a moment and define your content goals. They might include:
- Educating the market about a new trend
- Enticing people to download your app
- Explaining how to solve a problem using your product
It’s not sufficient to simply create content people like — you also want it to have a real-world impact on your brand image and growth. Hubspot writes about marketing, Intercom writes about customer support, Invision writes about design, etc. Choose an area that will establish you as a leader in the market you’re aiming for.
Conducting some user research is a great way to develop content ideas and discover exactly what your audience finds valuable so you can successfully grow your reach.
Niche is better than general. The more focused your content is, the more value it delivers to your audience. It also allows you to take advantage of the ‘long tail’ of search results that are far less competitive — from an SEO perspective — compared to keywords that get millions of searches per day. There’s a fair number of people writing about user research, but there’s not many writing about how to leverage user research for content marketing ;)
Tactics
First, grab contact information for a handful of your users. Reach out over email, phone, or with a research tool like Steadfast Messenger. You’ll want to focus the conversation on specific problems in their individual experience — not the needs of the company they work for. Don’t forget: companies don’t buy software, people do.
Here are some questions you can use to anchor the conversation and generate the content ideas you need:
- What are some of the biggest frustrations you experience relating to your domain?
- What are some of the knowledge gaps you worry or think about in your current role?
Use open-ended questions to let them guide you to the areas they think about most. When you’ve gotten some good responses, you can try getting them to prioritize some of the ideas you’ve generated:
- If you had to pick one of idea A, B, or C for us to work on, which would you choose?
Here’s a pro-tip: when you’ve found an idea you really like, ask them how they’d find the answer to that question on Google. It’ll help you figure out which language and keywords to optimize for to generate organic traffic to your content.
Creating content is easy. Creating great content that leads to significant growth is not. If you’re having trouble figuring out how to create content your target audience finds valuable, some quick user research can help you ideate and prioritize the right content for you.
