Content Marketing Topic Analysis and Ideation
The biggest content marketing challenge that many firms have is coming up with good ideas for content creation: What content will you put on your website that will inspire and motivate prospective buyers to stay in touch with you or, better yet, learn more and become a customer?
Walker Sands can partner with you to develop a list of content topics and create an editorial calendar that you can execute on your own or in partnership with team members at our Chicago content marketing agency.
Our Approach to Content Marketing Topic Analysis
If you’ve been charged with the task of coming up with content topics, you’ll like our approach to topic analysis and content ideation. It starts with understanding your buyer personas — not just who they are but how they buy. For each target audience, we identify their interests and desires at all stages along the marketing funnel. These customer insights inform the master list of content topics and timing, but that’s just the first step in our process.
The second step is critically important. We mine search engine analytics data, both your proprietary analytics data and aggregated third-party search data, to find the questions people are asking when looking for what you sell. Some call it the “moneyball” approach to content marketing — letting statistics drive your editorial calendar. We also inventory competitor content to see what they have in their content marketing inventories and add topics to our master list, where appropriate. Lastly, we augment the resulting list of topics to include topics that are recurring in social media chatter. What we end up with is an extensive list of topics that people are interested in that pertain to your particular offerings.
The third and final step is to identify market inefficiencies in the content topic list. What topics are not being adequately addressed by the market? If everybody else has already covered the topic, it’s a lower priority for your content marketing program. But if there’s no good content covering the topic but everybody wants to know about it, that’s a content opportunity that will likely move to the top of your list. We love these missed opportunities because they represent a classic high demand, low supply situation for content marketers — the low hanging fruit that we all are looking for!
After culling the list, we do a final pass on it based on our client’s goals and on content suitability. The end result is a content creation calendar that can drive all of your marketing initiatives. It feeds the SEO content program for your website, the blog, the email newsletter and every other content delivery mechanism.
The art in this exercise is mining the data to find content opportunities and juxtaposing it against buyer personas. Throughout the process, we map your customer needs against your existing content and we fill the gaps where content is missing. We prioritize content for you, based on bang-for-buck ROI.
Reasons to Give Walker Sands Content Ideation a Try
Getting the resulting editorial calendar in an actionable format is a Walker Sands deliverable that our clients greatly appreciate. For companies that struggle with content marketing, it gets them out of their rut and on a path to productive content marketing that generates new customer leads and drives business growth.
Intrigued? Call us at (312) 267-0066 to see if we’re the right partner to help you with content marketing topic ideation and analysis.