How to use data to direct your content marketing plan

What is content marketing?

Content can be blogs, videos, podcasts, photography, graphics, and more. Essentially it’s various mediums to provide knowledge, entertainment, value or education to your audience, not simply sell to them.

This is valuable because it positions your business as an expert, authority, influencer or leader within your industry. It also encourages your target audience to actively engage with and enjoy your content, making them more likely to take action when you do push sales messaging. 

How do I choose what content to share?

In this article, I dive into how insights from Answer The Public can inform your content strategy to ensure it’s not only valuable but ultimately gets seen. 

Answer The Public is one of my favourite tools because of how insightful it is. The amount of information you have access to can be a goldmine; with the following tips, I’ll guide you beyond simply scratching the surface.

What is Answer The Public?

Answer the Public works by scraping and collating data from Google to provide you with the top searched terms and auto-suggestions around any given topic. Everything is current and timely, meaning that you can perform a search now and then compare it in three months to see if things have changed. You can use these insights to create content people are actively searching for. This not only enables you to be genuinely helpful, but it also means you’ll be able to optimise content with informed search engine optimisation for greater exposure. 

How it works: 

1. If I wanted to create content around podcast production, I would type in ‘podcast production’ to Answer the Public, then set my location and language. 
2. I can view the results in a visual graph or I can choose to view it as a list. The darker orange spots indicate a higher search volume than the lighter orange spots.

So if it shows ‘Are podcasts good for business’ and ‘podcast production tips’ are highly searched for, I could make a blog or YouTube video to answer this. I could also use these keywords as subtitles within my blog and description on YouTube for better exposure. I could also make the informed decision to make content answering this on other social media sites like Instagram and TikTok, as although the algorithm works differently, I know the content is genuinely useful. 

Answer The Public Tips 

1. The platform suggests using one or two words only so that you’re not influencing it too much with your own bias. 
2. Look at the entire report so that you get a broad insight for each term. The alphabet section can often show some high-volume search terms you weren’t expecting. It will also include location information which you can optimise for e.g. “podcast producers in London.” 
3. Use multiple seed terms, so instead of just searching ‘podcast production,’ you could also search ‘audio production’, ‘podcast’, ‘podcasting’, ‘podcaster’ and more.

    

4. Click the actual search term on Google to see what comes up in real time. Here you can click through on businesses and articles that are currently ranking at the top on these terms. The top ‘related questions’ such as ‘How a podcast can benefit your business’ might also be valuable. You may also notice a lack of video content here, an opportunity. 
5. Use the word “my” instead of “they” when searching, as most people search in the first person.

I wish I had time for this!

I know, this sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but it’s worth putting the time in now to get off to a strong start next year. If you have limited resources, we guide, assist or do it all for you.

Email info@alicevioletcreative.com to set up a discovery call.