In content marketing, the success of your content relies heavily upon how well it resonates with your target audience. Why spend time and resources creating content that will fall flat once you’ve hit publish?
Before you begin working on your next piece of content, make sure you’ve done preliminary research to understand what your audience wants.
In this post, we’re listing five tools that will make your content marketing research easy. Once you understand your target audience, you can start creating content that better aligns with your buyers’ needs and priorities.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a staple for content marketers around the world. With their free or premium tools, you can research the topics that are performing well in your industry, as well as how your competitors’ content is performing.
Just enter a topic or company website, and you’ll see links for popular content around those terms. In the free version, engagement is broken down into different social media networks and given an evergreen score. With the paid tool, you’ll receive that information and much more, along with the ability to export the data.
SurveyMonkey
What’s the most effective way to learn what your audience wants? Ask them!
With tools like SurveyMonkey, you can send out surveys and ask specific questions about your content, offering, and company. Leverage real-time feedback to inform your content marketing strategy and double down on topics and formats that are resonating with your audience.
Check out this example to see how one company used SurveyMonkey in their content creation process.
Google Search
After you’ve decided on your topic, you’ll need additional information to add credibility to your content. Do a quick Google search to find relevant statistics, facts, and quotes from third parties that you can build into your content.
You can also research what other companies or publications have written about your specific topic and see how you can provide a different perspective. Just make sure you’re properly citing your sources for any information you use in your content.
Feedly
To create good content, you have to stay on top of what’s going on within your industry. Set up a Feedly account to curate and organize multimedia content based on your interests.
Once you set up your customized feeds, you’ll automatically get alerts for new articles, videos, tweets, keyword alerts, and more. It’s an easy set-and-forget tool that keeps you in the loop without wasting time seeking out individual pieces of content to consume.
Brand24
After you’ve built up a following, you’ll start to see more people mention your brand online. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to keep up with all of the chatter on your own.
Brand24 is a social media listening tool that helps you monitor the conversations that people are having about your company. Track the content that your audience is sharing, measure how much engagement it receives, and use those insights to invest in the strategies that work.
With so many marketing tools available in the marketplace, it can be tough to decide where to focus your resources. Try out one (or more) of these tools to kickstart your content marketing research and create stronger connections with your audience.
