A lot of business owners find it difficult to create content that their audience wants.
The 2016 B2b content marketing report stated that 54% B2b marketers find it difficult to produce engaging content for their audience.
Every online marketer wants one thing from their blog:
To attract attention.
You will agree with me that it is difficult to attract everyone’s attention.
But the fact is:
You don’t need everyone’s attention to sell your products and services.
What you need is your audiences’ attention. Your audience is the people who like your products or services and want to do business with you.
So, the question is, how do you get the attention of your audience?
One way to get their attention is to create content that resonates with them.
The problem is, how do you know what content resonates with your audience?
This post is created to answer that question.
Attracting your audience attention is very important for the following reasons:
- It makes it easy for you to create the content they are looking for.
- It brings enormous traffic to your website/blog
- It makes it easy for your audience to engage with your content
- It will be easy to convert them to leads, when they like your content
- It will be easy to make sales repeatedly.
Now that you know the benefits of creating content around what your audience want, it is time to find out what they want.
Below are 5 ways to know what your audience needs in order to create a blockbuster content for them.
1. Know what they want to read
Creating contents without the knowledge of what your audience wants to read is a waste of time and effort.
It is dangerous to focus on what you want to write or what you hope to write that will go viral. You can’t take those chances anymore.
You will need to create content that your audience can share, comment and engage with, if you want to achieve your marketing goals.
So, how do you know what they want to read?
The answer is by focusing on comments and shares on sites that your audience visits.
One tool that will help you greatly here is Buzzumo.
So head over to Buzzumo and type in your topic/niche. You will see a truckload of topics with the number of shares.
For example, if you are in the skincare niche, you can type in “natural skincare”. Below are variations of the topics you can use.
Take a look at the third item on the list – “Homemade beauty solutions … natural skincare recipes for eye-creams and gels“.
It has 102 Facebook shares, 20.1k Pinterest shares and the total number of shares is 20.3k. That is a great topic. That means a lot of people actually like the topic.
What you will do now is to click through to the website and have a look at the content and the comment section. A note of warning here, do not copy someone else’s article, but you can read and get ideas to create your own content.
So, head over to the website, by clicking on the topic. Below is the website.
Scroll down to the comment section. There you will notice the following comments:
As seen from the comments above, most of the readers loved the idea of using natural products, especially the ones made from home.
With these 3 comments, you know that writing about “home made cosmetic ideas“, “Advantages of making your own natural cosmetic products” etc, will be a hit on your website.
Your audience will love and share it.
2. Pain points
What is troubling your readers? What are their concerns? What is keeping them up at night?
You need to find out your audience’ pain points.
How will you do it?
One way to do this is by looking for surveys and industry trends, among other sources. You don’t need to carry out the survey yourself; you can find it online, in magazines and newspapers, industry trend reports, trade publications, and association newsletters. You can also gather ideas from new innovations or current trends in your field.
For example, as a Content marketer for small business owners, I read the 2016 report for the industry produced by contentmarketinginstitute and marketingprofs.
In it, a large percentage of business owners were surveyed to find out how they use content marketing in their businesses. One of the survey questions dealt with the challenges business owners are facing in content marketing. From the survey, it was discovered that business marketers are facing 10 major challenges (pain points) as shown in the chat below.
With this information, I can concentrate on providing solutions to these challenges by writing extensively on each and every one of them.
You don’t have to solve all their problems, but you need to provide support by creating information that can help them overcome these problems. This way, you will be helping them as you offer your products and services. A good format of content to use here are “how to” posts.
3. Trends
Another way to know what content to create for your audience is by looking for trends your audience is interested in.
A good tool you can use for this is Google trends. It shows trends for a particular term over time based on what people are searching for. You can try a generic keyword in your niche and look up the trend. For example, using the skincare niche, you will see the following keyword variations.
You can see different variations of the keyword. You can create your content around them.
4. Google’s related keywords
This is a great tool that can give you a clue about what your audience wants. Most of these keywords are long tail and you can find them under the google search page as shown below:
All you need is to type in your keyword. For instance, I typed in natural skin care and got the above result.
When you want to create content on a topic, check this goldmine and do some research on it.
Two good examples of companies benefiting from this strategy are Amazon.com and Neil Patel’s blog (quicksprout).
Amazon is a good example of a company that is benefiting from using long tail keyword. The company makes 57% of sales just from using long tail keywords because it covert well.
When Neil Patel started targeting long tail keywords, he increased his search engine organic traffic to 173,336 visitors per month.
Long tail keywords are easier to target and they are profitable too.
For instance, keywords like “skincare” may have a lot of competition that may be difficult to outrank, but targeting terms like “do it yourself natural skin care” may not have lots of searches per month, but because it is longer than the main keyword, you can easily get traffic and leads by using it.
All you need to do is to plan your content effectively and put in the right long tail keywords and your blog post can go viral above your competitor’s.
You can learn how to properly use long tail keywords in this post by Neil Patel.
5. Social listening tools
Social media listening tools will help you to uncover key topics in online conversation. When you employ the right social listening tools, you will be able to track trends and gain a better understanding on conversations on social media networks. This way, you can create content that your audience wants to read and keep them engaged.
There are lots of social listening tools on the web that will help you to listen in on your audience conversations on the social media. Some of them are:
- Topsy
- Social searcher
- Icerocket
- Tweetdeck
- Social mention
- Trackur
- Tweetreach
- Klout
- Hashtagr
- Hootsuite
You may need to use more than one listening tool to get all the information you need. Each one of them has unique insights on audience conversation.
Conclusion
The era of creating content for the sake of it, is long gone. I am sure you are not ready to waste your time and effort creating such contents. The best way to avoid that is by creating content that your audience wants to read. You can do that by using tools like Buzzumo, Google trend, Google related searches, Social listening tools etc. This way, you can be sure your audience will love your content, read and engage with it.