How to Find the Best Content to Create
I’ve said this a number of times, but people are consuming content at insuperable rates and they will always want more.
Marketers have a huge hurdle to overcome to feed people the right amount of content they want and with a high quality.
Content Marketers must become Michelin-starred chefs that then serve their content at all-you-can eat buffets for their audience to consume like a gaggle of hungry hungry hippos who are eating for the first time in days.
So, besides actually creating massive amounts of content, which can be easily done, how can marketers find the best content to create? It’s hard to be an endless pool of ideas and thinking of content before your competitors do. All at the same time of creating this content faster than the speed of light.
Ultimately, with the combination of time and quality of the pieces of content the question that is always asked, “How do I find the best content to create?”
No need to smack your head against the wall out of frustration. (We’ve all been there.) It may take a little digging, but there are pain-free ways to find the best content to create.
How to Find the Best Content to Create
Most Effective
If you already have amassed a load of content that you’ve created, this part should be a little easier for you. You don’t need to rack your brain anymore on what to do next because you can create more content based on the previous performance of other content.
Go through your previous blog posts, emails, reports, etc. and look at what pieces were the most effective. Did that blog post on corgis receive over 1,000 total social shares? Or was the email open rate at 70%? Hey, how about that report you put together — did you get 331 press mentions?
Look at those pieces of content and you should be able to deduce why they did so well. It was probably a combination of things, but the main point was probably the subject of the content. Take that and run with it.
Let’s say that piece of content was on Instagram…maybe it was a huge, comprehensive report on Instagram about the Fortune 500. It received high praises from press everywhere and it was even trending on Twitter. (This is a perfect world and the truth may have been slightly stretched in order to provide you with a superb example.)
Guess what? You’ve struck gold already, so get ready to mine the best content ever. So that Instagram Report was successful, you can create blog posts out of the sub topics, graphics with the shining stats to tweet, pin, Instagram or post on Facebook, or even if the report did so well, why not create another report along those lines?
Tools To Use to Figure This Out:
1. SharedCount
Helps to track and tally up the number of shares, likes, tweets, and more. You can then see the total sum of interactions with content you have released on a certain subject to determine if you should write more content on the matter.
2. Google Analytics
In Google Analytics, under the Behavior tab, you can look under site content and under all pages you can then see the top Pageviews. These should give you insight on where people are landing for keywords, what pages are clicking to, and what are the top performing pages. You can then use this to explore into content ideas more.
Be a Mad Scientist
If you have two pieces of content then you should test them to see what works. Hypothetically speaking, creating an elephant ton of content isn’t necessary in trying to figure out what content works best to create. It’s not a secret formula, but you have to be willing to try multiple things. And the perfect test environments to test out different pieces of content lies within social media, specifically Twitter. At the rapid pace the users on Twitter are sending out tweets, its the perfect testing zone to figure out how to find the best content to create in a relatively short time.
Tool to Use to Figure This Out:
1. Bit.ly
Not just a tool to shorten links, but also a pretty sweet analytics tool as well.
You can easily track the number of clicks a link has received, so when you are testing what content to use in tweets or Facebook posts, you can see which received the most clicks to rope people into your content ideas.
Image via (My own personal Bit.ly account)
Competitively Compelled
What are your competitors doing? What content is working best for them?
Both of those questions represent pretty tough nuts to crack, but while you are on the hunt to create the best content to create they are both questions that shouldn’t be overlooked. If you competitor has been tackling a certain issue that is getting them more traction, shouldn’t you turn your focus in that area as well? Content ideas are everywhere and I’m truly not saying you should copy your competitors content; however, if something is working for them, then by all means head in that direction.
Tool to Use to Figure this Out:
1. TrackMaven
Slight shameless plug, but I have a hard time grasping not including our platform in this blog post because it will will help you find the best content to create. I also could have inserted TrackMaven into all of these subsections, but I refrained. ;)
With TrackMaven you can track all of your competitors activity in real-time and be more proactive about your marketing. However, one of the most important factors when creating content is how to find the best ideas and what ideas will be the most effective with your audience. You’re in luck because TrackMaven will track how effective the individual pieces of content are from your competitors and yourself. You can then use these benchmarks to determine what content you can create to resonate even better with your audience.
6 Predictions for the Marketing World in 2014 and it’s effectiveness as found on TrackMaven.
Real-Time
Events are happening now and people are talking about them now, so that is where your content should be — present and in real-time. It’s entirely easier said than done, but capitalizing on topics that your audience cares about in real-time can pay off for you. There is so many ideas happening now, that you can find a pool of content ideas to create without feeling left behind.
Tools to Use to Figure this Out:
1. Google Trends
I always forget about Google Trends, but it’s a pretty useful resource in finding what are the “hot” topics that you can easily create content from.
2. Twitter Lists
This one is a little more manual, but you can happen upon some golden nuggets. At this point, it’s beneficial to have a list of influencers in your industry (LittleBird is a pretty cool to help you out with this) and having their Twitter handles should also be on the list.
Setting up a list to keep them all in one organized place is just the first step, but you can dive into the list in real-time to see what content these influencers are tweeting about to give you ideas for content creation.
Fulfilling Customer and Sales Needs
Honesty time — One of the biggest reasons why I decided to write this post was because our sales team, customer strategy team, and customers all have had this question on how they can find the best content to create. It’s a pretty difficult question to answer when you’re at your wits end on trying to create the best content for your audience and we completely understand.
But, this is another perfect example in finding the best content to create as it’s right underneath your nose. Like my reasoning above, why not try and find out what your customers want or what your prospects want in content by going straight to the source. Ask your sales team what are the most common questions your opportunities ask about your product or what are their most pressing problems? Or ask customers what they find difficult with your product and then write a piece of content to answer it.
You have so much content just waiting for you to create that lies right with your prospects, opportunities, and customers.
A tactic from Andrew Dumont from Moz shows a good example of this with his post on How to Grow: 21 Tactics to Acquire Customers. One of the tactics is use your FAQ to target long-tail queries. Summarizing his main point though is to target potential customers who are farther down the funnel; however, this does get you in the mind set to ask your customers common problems they have and then to create more content to get more customers like the ones you already have.
Tool to Use to Figure this Out:
1. Your Sales Team and Customers
Just give them a holler to see how you can create content to make your process easier and their lives easier. Just think when these opportunities or customers have problems and bring them up with either team, both can reference your content.
Marketers need to get out of the idea of guessing what will work because it’s time to be proactive with all arms of marketing, especially content. All the tools are right in front of you.
