Would you like to create content that truly engages your audience?
The best way to do that is to build content that people really want to read. Although doing this may seem self-evident, it’s not really that intuitive.
Businesses often create content from their own perspectives and can struggle to write blog posts and social media content that users really want.
In this article, we’re going to look at how your business can create content such as blog posts, social media content, and more, that your audience will love by finding the right topic ideas.
Let’s get started!
Do Your Research
If this post could be replaced with one sentence, it would be ‘do your research’. If there’s no other takeaway from this article, you’d still have the knowledge you need to improve your content. That’s how important research is.
Research matters because you may find that your assumptions about what people need and what you think they need can be quite different.
It will also help you build and draft your content better since research will help you develop better post titles, give you topic ideas, and help you structure your material effectively.
Also, when you do research and get to know your audience as well as what they want, you’ll offer personalized information guaranteed to improve all your objectives. This means more engagement, conversions, referrals and anything else that matters.
Want to learn a few practical ways to do research? Here are a few steps you can take.
Carry Out Keyword Research
Keyword research does more than help you boost your SEO ranking. It’s also a powerful way to understand what people are looking for and how to shape your content so that it best answers their questions. When looking for content ideas, you can use these helpful methods to create meaningful posts.
Do basic searches: You can do a simple search of your product or business area on a search engine and use the top post titles as inspiration for your own content. The ‘People Also Ask’ and ‘Searches related to SERP’ ideas that appear in a search result are also great sources of ideas.
Use your customer’s perspective: Content ideas can also come from a little bit of common sense thinking. Try to put yourself in your customer’s mindset and imagine what they’d search for. Here’s an example inspired by Ahrefs’s Blogging for Business course. If you’re a writer of fantasy fiction, avoid creating obscure blog titles that no one would think about just because it’s also the title of your book. Writing about topics such as ‘Books like Harry Potter’ or ‘Fiction like Game of Thrones’ is a common-sense approach to creating content that reaches your target audience.
Work with content curation tools: There are several tools that will help you get tailored content suggestions. Ubersuggest, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and many others are some of the top platforms to help you find relevant content ideas. If you’re looking for a free option, it’s a good idea to use Google Adwords and its Keyword Planner tool to help you out. You’ve also got AnswerThePublic, another free online tool that will show you what people are asking for online.
These are a few ways for you to do research so that you can write about content that matters to your customers. An added benefit is that you’ll also get virtually limitless ideas for future content while boosting
Gather Research Through Surveys
Your most powerful source for relevant content is your audience itself. When you reach out to your current customers and blog readers, you’ll accomplish several things.
- You’ll show that you’re listening and that you care about your audience. This will build loyalty over time
- The information you gather will be directly relevant and actionable, meaning you won’t waste time on guesswork
It’s important to use the right tools to ask your audience about what they want. You can launch email campaigns or create a helpful survey form tool to make it easy for your audience to give answers. Add multiple choice answers, drop-down menus, or simply offer a paragraph element for them to write about their interests in a freestyle manner.
Refer to Social Media
You can find in-depth information from your audience itself by exploring social media spots where they hang out online.
These social media groups are where real conversations happen without the interference of branded communication. Here are a few ideas for social media platforms online where you can study your audience ‘in the wild’ and look for content ideas to write about.
- Facebook groups
- LinkedIn Groups
- Focused membership sites
Some of these social media platforms are obvious sources for ideas, like LinkedIn and Facebook groups. You’d also do well to explore Reddit where there are topic-focused subreddits that are heavily moderated. Here, commercial or marketing communication is frowned upon, which means that you’re more likely to come across real conversations.
Also, check out discussions from membership sites that are focused on helping people with specific problems. If you’re a business that deals with child development toys, then going on an online network for mothers can help you understand the kind of toys they’d like for their children.
I attribute the growth and success of my own business to the fact that we answered people’s questions about WordPress that they asked on Twitter. We would create blog posts with answers and share them as Twitter responses. This would bring traffic to our site and build a loyal support base. We always listen to people’s problems and look at them as inspiration for new content.
Conclusion
Businesses often make content with the idea of promoting themselves. In the process, they miss out on engaging their audience and building a solid base of readers.
You need to listen to your audience and understand what their needs are. We’ve looked at a few helpful ways that you can carry out research and design your content well. Make use of these suggestions and you stand to win people over into loyal blog readers.
colleagues discuss ideas -DespositPhotos
