The heartwood of any content project or campaign is a compelling subject. The excitement around the idea is what sustains the long labor of creation. It’s the part that motivates your audience to share, share and share. And hopefully, help you nail that target ROI.
However, most of us marketers often capitulate to the so-called overconfidence effect. Since we are technically-inclined, we tend to overestimate our ability to predict content performance and our industry knowledge as well. These two has adverse effects as they drive us to rely more on intuition than data when it comes to brainstorming new ideas for blog ideas.
Then you assume that it will generate engagements because the audience will like it. They will like it because you like it.
The Problem Though
Just because you like your topic idea doesn’t mean your audience will want to read it. You need to let the preference and behaviors of your audience drive your new blog ideas. Instead of basing it on your persona. Otherwise, you’ll risk publishing insignificant content.
Here are the statistical reasons according to Hootsuite why you need to more prudent on picking the right topic for your audience.
- 75% of marketers know that high quality and relevant content is still the dominant player in the content marketing field, other than Social media marketing strategy. They also plan to produce more high-quality content in general.
- 70% prefer to engage in high-quality articles than in traditional advertisements.
- Content marketing budgets and investments are projected to grow in $300 billion by 2019.
So, you see, the numbers are no joke. Thus, it’s important that you’re well-versed in context strategies right from the beginning and such is the case of choosing a topic that your audience will like and read. Below are the important considerations, we at SEO Agency Sarasota have figured out and you need to take seriously.
Picking the Right Content
When you conjure something that your audience will find engaging and valuable, it sparks a dialogue. On this point, you can convert this conversation into business results. It’s the reason why the best content topics are the ones that can generate the greatest ROI or business results.
You can determine the best topics that produce ROI through making a goal-specific list. Then score each topic by value and volume.
Here’s how you should do it.
Ask yourself first before writing a topic, “What questions or issues will your content help or resolve?” Create a list of topic that supports your answers. Then cut down your list with the best answers. You can now score each topic by volume and value.
Value and Scoring Volume
In the world of content marketing, delivering value is a vital business objective. And content that delivers value is what you need to focus on.
After narrowing down to topics that are valuable to your audience, pick the strongest ones through scoring each according to value (benefits to your business) and volume (audience reach).
Value is about more than just adding numbers to your bottom line — it’s about providing something of real value to your audience. That’s why we’re looking at these seven factors in determining which topics will deliver the most value:
- Deliverable Value: The amount of money you’ll raise by selling or licensing your content or product.
- Scoring Volume: How often you have to publish new content each month (or quarter) in order to generate the desired number of leads and sales.
- Scoring Volume vs Subscriber Growth: A simple way to think about it is this: If all customer accounts were equal, then there would be no point in using either factor as a measure of success; all subscribers would grow equally regardless of what method was used for measuring them (i.e., subscriber growth would not help determine value). However, since most companies have different levels of value-added features depending on which product/service they offer (e.g., basic vs premium)
- Quality Score: How likely your audience is likely to read the content they receive from you, given their past behavior with similar publishers or websites.
Gathering Data
It’s also important to gather relevant data that are relevant to your topics such as the number of people who find the topic or keywords useful or the things that people care about. The potential sources of data may include the following;
- Looking for keywords and keyword phrases people use.
- Analyzing themes from customer support inquiries.
- Collecting keywords from internal search data.
- Reviewing topics from social media channels.
Prioritize and Cut
Cutting and prioritizing will help you determine the reach of each topic. You should see from the data on your new list, the number of people who care about or find a topic useful.
For example, if you have a list of 100 topics, you can decide which 10 are most important and which 10 could be cut. The top 10 topics on the blog will be used to drive traffic to their respective pages while the rest are irrelevant to the overall strategy.
If the number is high, it means the subjects have great potential. After you prioritize your list, cut it through retaining the topics with the biggest revenue potential.
Remember: You don’t have to publish everything on your list. The goal of prioritizing is to create a hierarchy where you can cut out the lowest-value content from the top.
Check
Filter your topic list further through keeping only the topics that suit your entire marketing strategy. Do you want to upsell existing customers or do you want more top of the funnel visitors coming in?
Perhaps you want to optimize for the top of the funnel, then develop leads using engagement strategies like email capture. This process is time-consuming and laborious, but you’ll be thanking yourself afterwards for doing it. You’ll end up having a substantial list that will keep you on track, save resources and support your business and marketing goals,
Takeaway
Now that you have to know the procedures of farming for ROI-producing topics, the next thing for you to do is conjure a good Content Marketing Strategy and distribute it to your audience. Although strategy and engagement are the part where most marketers stumble, the bottom line is put together a content marketing strategy before you write a single blog post.
