How to Do a Content Gap Analysis That Uncovers Winning Topics?
Deciding on the right content marketing strategy for your business is a tough nut to crack. With more than 4 million content pieces getting published on the Internet every day, it has become even more challenging to achieve solid growth via content marketing.
In such a cut-throat competition, you cannot just rely on intuitions or assumptions; instead, start focusing on applying a strategic approach to the ways you produce your content. However, analyzing your competition will help you gain beneficial insights and identify the content gaps.
Content Gaps are the specific topics that are missing from your website, but your competitors may have them. Content Gap Analysis provides you with the opportunity to make precise content that your audience might be interested in and keep them engaged.
In this blog, we are going to discuss efficient techniques to identify and fill the content gaps.
What is Content Gap Analysis?
Content Gap Analysis is the process of identifying and filling the gaps in your content inventory. Marketers also say that it is crucial to see what your customers want and what the market is offering.
It is essential for businesses as it helps you create content that your audience truly needs and eventually helps you stand out. It will help you build a strong relationship with the target audience and convert leads into sales, thus, taking you one step ahead in the competition.
At times it sounds sensible to create a demand for specific content and then outshine by offering it to your audience.
How to Conduct Content Gap Analysis?
To ease this process for you, we have divided it into six simple steps below.
- Plan your buyer’s journey
The majority of marketers believe that personalized content is far more effective, so you must understand your buyer’s journey – how they search for products/services before they finally purchase.
Besides that, knowing your buyer’s journey will help you in creating demand for your product/service. Capturing your prospects at an early stage will put your business in the best position. You will be able to capture ready-to-act leads by creating a more productive content marketing funnel. You won’t have to spend your ad budget on creating brand awareness, as content marketing would have done it already. Your high quality and valuable content will help you build authority and credibility.
There are three stages in a typical buyer’s journey – Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stage.
- Awareness Stage – The customers realize that they have an issue, and start looking for content related to it.
- Consideration Stage – The customers have identified their problems and are now searching for a solution.
- Decision Stage – They have picked a solution and now ready to move forward with it.
By the time the customer reaches stage 3, they know all the advantages and disadvantages of your product/service. Now all you need is to give them a gentle push to encourage them to make a purchase. This little push can be an appealing review, a great discount, or anything to make your offer look delighting.
- Interview your loyal customers and industry experts
Once you have understood your buyer’s journey, it’s time to know how your customers act at each stage, and what content they require. You can do so by starting a survey and collecting insights. There are plenty of tools available online; you can create an appealing survey using one of them. You can ask questions like how do you explain your goals/challenges or what positives and negatives are you relying on particularly?
To encourage your audience to participate in your survey, you can add a special bonus for them – maybe a gift card or coupon! This extra advantage will make them feel that their time and efforts are valued. However, interviewing industry experts is not easy, for obvious reasons. But approaching with a humble request won’t do any harm. Research about the top experts in your industry and start reaching out to them one by one. Luckily, you might be able to get answers from a few of them.
- Perform Keyword Research
Once you have acquired insights about your customers are searching for products/services, it’s time to perform keyword research.
Keyword Research is the process of finding keywords and phrases that your audience enters into any search engine. You need to connect the dots, which means you need to make sure that all your future posts contain those specific keywords so that your customers find them easily.
Doing keyword research will help you:
- Discover how your prospects interact with the topic, what kind of words they are using to search, etc.
- Knowing the keywords competition to figure out how much effort you need to put to increase your website’s ranking.
- Lastly, the main search terms will form the base of our future content strategy.
Also, it is always smart to review your competitors’ keywords—research on the websites in your industry who have a high ranking on search engines. See what keywords they are using, which you are not. This will help you stay in the competition.
- Review your existing content on the website
The main objective of content gap analysis is to find the content pieces missing from your website. Reviewing the existing content on your website will help you understand the areas that need improvement.
The majority of the marketers fail in this step by neglecting the content that is already published on their website. Maybe your content goes in line with your audience’s interest, but it just requires a little bit of tweaking.
Gather the content you have posted on your website and then evaluate what posts are resonating with your buyer’s journey. Check the topics you have not covered, but they have decent search volume on the search engines. You must have found them during your keyword research.
Update your old content by adding the keywords and tweaking it. Reviewing content is helpful for your SEO strategy; therefore, you must keep reviewing them often. Keep track of your analytics.
- Analyze your competitor’s content
Once you are done with all this, it’s time to move to the next step i.e., analyzing your competitor’s content. Go through their content pages and spend some time understanding how they are structuring their content. What things they are including, what type of language they are using, etc. This will help you understand why they are ranking better on search engines. Once you have got it figured out, you can implement the same on your website too!
- It’s time to connect the dots
By the time you reach this step, you will be all set to frame an outstanding content strategy, based on the information you have gathered through:
- Plan your buyer’s journey
- Interview your loyal customers and industry experts
- Perform keyword research
- Review the existing content on your website
- Analyze your competitor’s content
Connect these dots – you know the content gaps, which means you have the new topics for your content. You know the keywords, process, content structure, and how the customers will reach out to you. This will help you in creating some killer content.
However, to make sure that this content reaches your audience, do not forget to put the same efforts in promoting it. Use social media platforms, email marketing, campaigns, etc. to connect with your audience. For lead generations, try adding lead magnets and call-to-action within your content.
Conclusion
So this was all about the techniques of identifying and filling the gaps. For the best results, we would recommend you to follow the process step-by-step only. Start with mapping out your customer’s journey and then proceed further. Skipping steps would do no good to you. Instead, you might end up with incomplete or insufficient information. You are now all set to go!