9 content research tips: Your roadmap for creating great content

Content marketing is a never-ending battle for your customers’ and prospects’ attention — and let’s be real, it can be exhausting.

Every new piece of content is a link in a taut chain that connects your offerings to your target audience. But, to be part of a successful chain, you need your articles to come up in related searches, receive backlinks, and get shares across your audience’s key social media platforms.

If you’re missing out on all that, then there’s a strong likelihood you’re skipping out on the first (vvvv important) step of your content strategy: effective content research.

Content research: How to create the high-quality content

Content research is all about analyzing online content, picking out the best-performing ideas, and crafting a unique content strategy based on those conclusions.

You want to align your content to what people are talking about, and look into how they’re talking about it to get traction — even if you’re going for a controversial edge to get that traction.

If you want to go beyond mere hunches and actually churn out actionable, data-backed, high-quality content that actually resonates with your audience, then keep reading. 

The research process: How to efficiently conduct content research

Here are nine quick tips for effective content research (and maybe a little sneak peek at how Optimizely fits into your content marketing strategy):

• Hit that Google search button

• Make BuzzSumo your best friend

• Discover the questions to answer with Quora

• Capitalize on the infographics search engine

• Strive to understand your target audience

• Conduct (intensive) keyword research for SEO

• Get on LinkedIn

• Discover the magic of influencers

• Pay attention to your competitor’s content

Okay now, let’s take a more in-depth look at each of them to take your content ideas from zero to hero... and give you an idea of the content research tools you need.

1. Hit that Google search button

Our very first content research tip is also the simplest one: perform a simple Google search with your chosen content topics.

Here are some ways to tap into the power of search engines:

• Make the most of autocomplete predictions: (..and the People Also Ask SERP feature). This gives you an understanding of high-value long-tail keywords and the search intent behind them; not to mention a probable lower keyword difficulty so you can use them to rank better to gain more organic traffic.

• Don’t ignore paid search ads: If a search query brings up ads, you know there’s some business intent behind the topic or keyword you’re searching for. Add this to your competitor analysis research.

• Utilize the skyscraper’s technique: Read through the top 10 ranking posts on the SERPs for the primary keyword you want to target. This will help you understand how to outwit and outperform your competitors, whether that be through different content types, adding FAQs, or bringing in some subject matter experts.

2. Make BuzzSumo your best friend

If you’ve not been using BuzzSumo to inform your content research tactics, you’re missing out on some big wins.

At its core, this content research tool allows you to discover new keywords, trending stories, and top-shared content to inspire you to create valuable content that drives traffic, social engagement and backlinks.

And here’s another big win for you: Buzzsumo offers a free trial.

3. Discover the questions to answer with Quora

Search intent isn’t always black and white, but when your audience is asking specific questions, it is.

Quora provides content marketers with all the questions people are asking about specific topics... so they can develop their content to answer questions and provide solutions.

With this extra useful content research tool, you’re sure to find something that's worth crafting content and ultimately, get the engagement you want. All you have to do is sign up.

4. Capitalize on the infographics search engine

In case you didn’t already know, there’s a full-fledged search engine dedicated to finding infographics. And as we know, people love visuals and infographics.

It’s known as Infographiqs. Enter a specific topic or keyword to find scores of infographics you can cite, review and attach to your content.

5. Strive to understand your target audience

This is arguably the most overlooked (and most important) part of content research.

To craft the most effective content, you need to be speaking to your target audience’s desires, goals, frustrations, pain points, fears and favouritisms.

Here are three ways to know your audience better:

• Keep an eye on your competitors: Use competitor analysis to see what your competitors are and aren’t doing well, how they’re targeting the audience you share, and what those audience members are engaging with.

• Monitor audience feedback, engagement and comments: Keep track of audience feedback overtime through surveys, online forms, as well as their engagement (likes, comments, etc) on your web page, blog, social media channels, forums, and customer support avenues.

• Stay up to date with Google Trends: Marketing trends are not something you want to ignore in your own content, so make sure you’re updating yourself with what’s happening on Google Trends recently to understand what people are searching for.

• Craft thorough buyer personas (if you haven’t already): Think of buyer personas as semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on research and data. In short, they are outlines of the main customer categories that convert for your brand — sticking closely to those buyer personas = more conversions.

6. Conduct (intensive) keyword research for SEO

Keyword research tells you what topics people care most about, and how relevant those topics actually are among your audience members... AKA great information to fuel your content writing and creation.

By researching keywords for their intent, popularity and search volume, you can address the questions that the majority of your audience wants answers to in your digital marketing efforts, and get the engagement rates you’re after.

A robust keyword research tool you can utilize is Optimizely’s content marketing platform, which surfaces real-time SEO data, keyword suggestions, and social shares to uncover new content opportunities. Other notable keyword research tools include Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and Google Keyword Planner.

7. Get on LinkedIn 

Linkedln is a great research resource for marketers and content writers alike.

Once you’ve signed up, use the content suggestions feature on your LinkedIn page to discover content that your member community is interested in.

This will really fuel your next brainstorming session and get your inspired for your next best content piece, so take note.

8. Discover the magic of influencers

True to their name, social media influencers have the numbers on their side. They also know their demographic’s pain points — and if you choose wisely, that will be your target audience’s pain points too.

Influencer marketing has taken the marketing industry by storm because it’s effective, however there is a drawback. Influencers are not necessarily affordable. Don’t forget to consider micro-influencers if you’re a smaller brand, but if your brand is willing to make the investment, it will be well worth it.

9. Pay attention to your competitor’s content

Alando mimicked eBay and made a killing. Xiaomi imitated Apple and made a name for itself. Google Home copied Amazon Echo and took the home-assistant market by storm.

See a trend forming here?

We’re not telling you to copy your competitor’s content marketing strategy in order to rank high on SERPs. In fact, there’s nothing that Google hates more than copy-pasted content. 

All we’re saying is, during your content research, consider monitoring your competitor’s content strategy (and we’re talking all content formats, here) with some serious competitor analysis.

Finding out what works for others in your niche will allow you to gain insights into the type of content to which your audience responds best.

Optimize your content research game

If you want to create successful content, knowing the ins and outs of content research is not enough. Being willing to put the aforementioned research tips into practice is not enough.

You must go the extra mile. Do something out of the ordinary. 

Try a different content marketing tool.

And by that, we mean…try Optimizely.

Beyond SEO and keyword research, with Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform, you can:

• Discover seasonal and trending keywords to catch the attention of your prospects

• Manage and optimize the entire content creation process, from research to publishing, in a single workspace

• Drive collaboration across the entire campaign and content creation lifecycle

• Coordinate content across marketing thanks to a built-in template as well as plug-and-play integrations

• Deliver exceptional content experiences for more conversions and better retention