- Choosing the right topics
to focus your content on can feel overwhelming.
With all the available options,
it's difficult to narrow in on which subjects
your customers care about the most.
And at this point,
I bet you've experienced the frustration
of publishing an article, or a report
that you thought was the perfect match for your audience
only to have it met with silence.
To avoid this, let's review effective techniques
for finding relevant topics.
Start by referencing your customer personas.
More specifically, the challenges
each of these customers are faced with
to decide which could be addressed in your content.
For example, a company selling agricultural equipment
could review its customer personas,
and identify that its customers struggle
mostly with increasing their crop yield yearly
and limiting operating expenses.
These challenges should be then researched
since they could be the ideal topics
for this agricultural company
to use to connect their customers through a webinar,
e-book or a series of articles.
No matter what topics you're considering
they must be related to your organization's expertise,
or the product or service you're offering.
If they aren't, it might be too difficult
for your audience to make the connection
between the article they're reading,
or the video they're watching,
and what your organization actually does.
For example, it wouldn't make sense
for this agricultural company
to produce content about the best video games
being released this month.
It is just not relevant to them or their customers.
Another useful source of topic inspiration
is paying attention to patterns
in the questions and feedback
you receive from your customers.
Is there a topic or question
that keeps popping up from your customers over email?
Maybe this might be a place to start as a topic to cover.
Keeping records of common questions or pain points
will help you down the road
when looking for topics to cover.
This feedback can be indirect as well
if you have access to behavioral data
about your customers activities through an analytics tool,
CRM or a POS system.
For instance, you might review your analytics
to understand what content
kept visitors on your website the longest,
or pay attention to which tweets
generated the most feedback.
These spikes in activity
can indicate what types of topics
you might want to explore further.
Lastly, it is great to review what's already been published.
This is less about keeping tabs on competitors
and more about finding the gaps
in what's been covered by googling a topic
you've been considering,
or searching on social media.
A few months ago, a client of mine was hesitant
to publish a video on an important educational topic
because a competitor had already covered it.
But after we looked at it,
the competitors video was only three minutes long,
and only provided a brief overview of the subject
without any additional insight.
We decided that this was actually an opportunity
for my client to go more in depth in the topic
and explain how to take action in their video.
When it comes time to ask
what topics should we be covering with our marketing,
remember these techniques for identifying topics
that matter to your customers.