4 Key Questions to Ask for Successful Content Expansion

The success of your content expansion strategy is not gauged by your constant efforts to produce whatever is trending in the market. Instead, it calls for a comprehensive analysis of the needs and interests of your target audience.

This content expansion process has generated an overwhelming obsession with “fresh content” for search marketers today. People are entirely convinced that creating fresh content is the only way to help websites thrive on the web.

But in an already fast-paced environment, the drawbacks of these waves include many marketers hurriedly producing content without really grasping its primary goal.

A couple of years ago, when this blogging craze first hit the market, people started building site blogs merely because it looked like that’s what everybody else was doing at that time. However, this approach also comes into play with other trends in new content genres like infographics. Back then, when infographics were all the rage, people started making them speedily, and yet again, it was only because everyone else seemed to be doing that.

Truth be told, a genuinely effective content expansion entails a level of critical thinking. Think about why content is being produced and what it needs to do to help a business or website? Before hopping on the bandwagon impulsively and blindly following whatever is trending currently, you must try and answer some of these critical questions.

To simplify things a bit, we have presented four key questions that every marketer needs to ask themselves before taking up any content-driven initiative.

#1 Why Are We Producing Content?

The first and most important thing to understand is why you are producing content in the first place. One of the most common reasons why the majority of people do so is to gain more organic traffic.

Nevertheless, keyword-rich content on an authentic website might help SEO objectives but does it still fulfill the site goal?

Content could be produced for many reasons such as to:

• Improve social engagement
• Fulfill on-site conversion objectives such as sales or lead generation
• Build a brand or establish thought leadership
• Imitate tactics of the competitors

Well, this is only the tip of the iceberg. In simple words, it is essential and probably best if all the team members involved in the content creation process understand the purpose of the content first.

#2 Who Is Our Target Audience?

Once you and your team are clear on why you are producing content, the next thing you need to understand is who are you making the content for?

In case you already have a decent quantity of content and types of content on your website, and you aim to produce extra content to support the existing ones, analytics can give you valuable insights that can direct and guide you.

Make sure to invest a decent amount of time examining your analytics during the planning stage. Check your Pageviews (by age, gender, interests, etc.), review sections, and even your website landing pages.

Are different types of users performing better or worse in terms of bounce rates? Your existing content might not necessarily be a first-touch conversion point, but it can help make users acquainted with your website and kickstart the conversion funnel.

Which types of content perform better when it comes to generating leads or sales on the website? If you are thinking about publishing more videos on your site and observe that particular demographic group(s) are performing better than others, you might want to cater your content to that user group.

Examining this demographic data will make it easier for you to slice and dice data by things such as website sections and mediums to analyze the way existing content performs for multiple user groups.

#3 What Content Works Well for Your Website?

By now, you and your team understand why you are building additional content and who you are probably making it for. You also know what content works well when it comes to driving site visits from aspects such as organic search and social media and how well this content retains initial site visitors. However, we are still left with determining the actual purpose of this content.

You will have to spend some more time in analytics to generate more site awareness and conversion potential. If you are producing this content to create a digital ripple effect, you need to check how well the outside world receives it first.

There are various tools that can search and track content. You can use such tools to see which content has performed well for your website in the past. This will let you find out what topics and social properties generated the best social engagement. You can also utilize link-building tools to get an idea of what content acquires the most inbound links.

#4 What if We Want to Test a New Type of Content?

It is totally fine to test a new type of content. The only time it gets dicey is when you go “all-in” on something just because everybody else seems to be doing it. That’s an approach we would never recommend taking.

However, since this is a new content type you are looking to test, there won’t be any historical data for you to depend on, as we did earlier. The first thing you need to do here is to go to your content tracking tool.

Search keyword topics, and you will be able to see the best socially engaged pieces of content across multiple domains for any given subject. You can also analyze how they performed by content type. Is this keyword genre featuring competitors who excel at blogs, infographics, videos, research articles, etc.? Hopefully, doing so will give you a bit more clarity on the type of content you should ideally approach first.

Once you do this, you will know what content type you want to follow and also have a general idea of what demographic groups are engaging the most with the website. Although you might think that you have keyword topics to focus on now, don’t dive in and get started with it just yet. You need to find out what your target audience is interested in and then pick a keyword genre or topic based on your findings. Survey your existing customers via email, social polling, or focus group surveys and ask questions regarding a specific keyword genre. Just remember you might be limited by your overall budget’s depth, but you can acquire excellent insights on the types of content your audience is interested in seeing.

Wrapping It Up

Testing new content opportunities can help you explore new and perhaps better ways of reaching your target audience and engaging with them actively. And well, there is no harm in that. The only mistake you can make here is to blindly follow the digital crowd and impulsively dive into a content expansion strategy. Keep these four questions in mind and make it a point to find answers to these before doing anything else. Spend some time in analytics and find out what appeals the most to your target audience. Use your findings as a foundation for your overall content expansion strategy for the best results. We hope this helps!