If you read our last post, you will have a number of different audiences to test and see whether or not they have an active community. This post will go through the process that we use at NeoMam to evaluate these audiences and identify those that we can use content marketing with.
How to check audience activity?
I like to define the world as BBS (before Buzzsumo) and ABS (after Buzzsumo.)
Back in the day, you had to search a wide range of sites just to see if a community existed and it was a pretty time consuming process. Now we live in the era of Buzzsumo, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. By entering a keyword, you can find all the top shared relevant published content.
To show how this works, let’s assume one of the audiences we identified in stage 1 was “Small business.”
Step 1: Enter keyword
Step 2: Filter by date – Past week
Example 1: Small Business
As you can see from the screenshot above, there is a lot of content (116 pages) that is shared in large amounts – nearly 800+ shares from the last item on the first page.
We also know that this audience is active right now due to the filter of content only this week.
It would be annoying to target an audience only to find out that people cared about it 10 months ago have since moved on.
Example 2: Copper Mining
There is not enough demand for this audience with less than 5 pages of content and even the top content is shared in very small numbers.
Example 3: Mining
This audience is far more active with lots of content (94 pages) and significant sharing happening.
As a very basic yardstick, you just want to see whether content is being shared well – in the thousands and plenty of it. So be aware of terms that mean something else such as the name of a popular film as these results will be skewed, example: “red” is a colour, a film from 2010 and part of the British red cross.
Finding influencers
Once you have identified a target audience for your content, you can start to locate the influencers of that audience.
In terms of tools for doing this, Buzzsumo works well and I prefer to have one tool to do most of the work.
Let’s say we want to target a small business audience:
Firstly, we will use Buzzsumo’s “Top Content” search feature. We want to filter by infographics and articles, as video content can often be quite irrelevant – but adjust it to your specific needs if you’re planning on creating video content.
This time, we will also want to look at a wider time period, so we will look at the entire last year.
I would suggest going down the list until you start hitting content that has less than 2K total shares. It’s important to be wary of content that has loads of shares for one social platform – such as Facebook or Pinterest and then very little in the others. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, but could be heavily supported by paid advertising, so is not a truthful indicator of great content.
Naturally, high performing content is usually something that is shared across all networks so in this case, I am going to ignore the weird URL in the top position as I don’t see it as relevant.
Start pulling a list together of all the influencer sites – feel free to also include the article that you used to find them – this can all be very useful for the promotions team at the end.
So for small businesses, we would have the following (again I have ignored any irrelevant or questionable shared content):
- http://www.entrepreneur.com/
- http://www.inc.com/
- http://www.forbes.com/
- http://money.cnn.com/
- http://www.techtimes.com/
- http://www.businessinsider.com/
You will notice that these sites are pretty big and might think “I’ll never get my content on those types of sites,” and that may be true. However, these sites are big for a reason, which is that they publish great content and more importantly, they produce a lot of it. If anyone knows what the small business audience want, it is these guys.
We are going to then use these sites to help us understand the issues that exist within the sector we’re researching. We’ll find issues we can use as a starting point for our creative process, moving forward with confidence in the fact that we are creating something that real people in our target audience care about.
The successful content by each influential publisher
The next step is analysing the content produced by these top influencers.
Let’s assume for this example that we are the provider of a tool that offers marketing benefits to small business.
So our key customer is someone who is interested in growing their small business.
However, we don’t want to restrict ourselves to just content with the phrase “small business marketing” but when we analyse the content by top publishers we need to keep asking “would this be of interest to small business owners looking to grow?”
This stage can be quite time consuming, but it’s really useful as you are immersing yourself in content that has performed well for big name publishers.
Example 1: Analysing the content on http://www.entrepreneur.com/
You can start with a very general search and see how that goes – but it might be worth looking at playing around with the filters (e.g. date and content type).
To help speed the process up, you might need to add a keyword alongside with a URL if there is a lot of irrelevant content – the “marketing” example below.
The next step is to take a note of any content that you think is relevant to your target audience, in this case “small business owners.” Be sure to include details of the content itself as well as the total number of shares.
An important step here is that I wrote down any trends I could spot by going through the first 6 pages of Buzzsumo and that led me to the following list of topics, which continued to pop up again and again.
- Habits
- Quotes
- Inspired
- Books
- Self improvement
- Mindsets
This is no accident. Publishers spend time tracking what works and what doesn’t, and they will always want to publish more articles around those topics that work.
One of the other things to learn is that there are certainly at least two distinct groups for the entrepreneur audience: those who have a business and those who want to start a business. I can now update my chunking diagram with this information.
Depending on what you sell, you might want to target just one and ignore the other. The audience identification process is something you should always be improving upon as you gather more information.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Publishers spend time tracking what works and what doesn’t — learn from them! #ContentMarketing” quote=”Publishers spend time tracking what works and what doesn’t — learn from them! #ContentMarketing”]
Building your content dossier
The above example showed you how to identify high-performing content that is relevant to your target audience with just one influential site. The next step is to roll this out across the full range of sites contained in your list.
Again, keep an eye open for overall trends for that specific audience, especially trends that occur across multiple publishers.
Based on our experience with http://www.entrepreneur.com/, we know that we now want to target those people with an established small business instead of those looking to create a start-up.
Example 2: Analysing the content on http://www.inc.com
The big topics I noticed that appeared in Inc Magazine were:
- Inspiration from the greats (Gates/Jobs/Musk/Branson)
- Self-help (How to be happier/live better/work better)
- Business Tips
Once you have developed a spreadsheet with content from all the big publishers in your niche, you are ready to move onto the next stage, which will be pulling inspiration from social media channels including:
- Quora
- Forums
I will talk about this in my next blog post.
Part 3 of this blog post series is now available, read it here now: Identifying the Problems of Your Content Audience
Photo credit: Yap
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