How To Choose Content Marketing Topics
When choosing content topics, most digital marketers try to write about things they believe is relevant to their audience. While relevance is important, alone it’s not enough. Furthermore, some seemingly relevant content topics may not be a good fit for your brand.
Effective content marketing grows only when you understand the competition at stake when trying to get the audience’s attention. One of the biggest questions you can ask yourself is, how do you determine topics that are a good fit but also have a positive impact on ROI?
Here are a couple tips on how to choose your content marketing topics effectively.
Find the content topic that your audience is most interested in
If you have two related topics in mind, write about the one that gets more average engagements on social media. While this may sound simple, its often times overlooked. A common problem most people run into is quickly sorting content or blog ideas to find the best topic out there. Evaluating topics with alongside of your social data can be a significantly easier step for analyzing content.
For example, if you’re writing about nutrition or fitness, you might want to critique different diets. In this search for the terms “Paleo” and “Vegan,” it’s easy to see that content about vegan eating is more popular.
“Vegan” has a much higher average level of engagement. So, writing about it can give me a competitive edge, making it easier to get my audience interested in my content, and extending its reach with more social shares. This search took less than a minute, making the Content Analyzer an efficient choice for maximum ROI.
Find topics with less competition
Just as it can be wise to opt for long-tail keywords with lower competition instead of core keywords with tons of competition, using content marketing topics that meet your business goals AND are less competitive is a great option for maximum impact.
Another option would be to pursue different types of content based on how saturated or competitive the content landscape is. If you are writing about a topic with high competition, here are a few tips:
- Create higher production value content such as videos, courses, ebooks, or original research
- Consider paid distribution, such as advertising on social media
- Collaborate with influencers to increase the distribution power behind the content
- Make sure you have a promotion plan in place that extends beyond the initial post-publication phase
Can the message be shared across multiple mediums?
Social networks are where conversations take place on different topics. In most content areas, the conversation will gravitate toward one network over another. By comparing the performance of different topics through various networks, you can develop content that will appeal to target audiences on specific networks.
Content marketing takes a good balance of storytelling, educating, convincing and should include a call-to-action. Once you’ve landed on a strong topic, it’s equally important to ensure you’re able to create multi-purpose content out of it. You want to choose topics that you’re an expert on, but you don’t want it to be too niche. This may cause a shortage of material and of those actually interested in reading it. Not only that, but it might also be difficult to share that content across multiple mediums and platforms.
For example, mobile app development content performs better on Facebook and low code performs better on Twitter. If you want your content to reach people on Twitter, it would be a good idea to frame the piece around low code. You want to find the sweet spot between broad and niche. Ideally, you will find content pieces that can be featured in a number of ways. For example how-to content could be created as:
- A YouTube video
- An infographic
- A blog post
You want to be able to then share these pieces of content across social platforms. Having flexible content ensures that all members of your audience will be able to find something they best relate to and be able to find it in multiple places. This also creates less work for you, as you can successfully reuse and share topics.
Final Thoughts
Mapping out and choosing the right topics for content marketing takes strategic planning. Learning what content performs best among your audience takes time and experimenting. Continually measure and track your strategy and make changes when necessary. Choosing the right topics is essential to developing and driving an effective coverall content marketing strategy.
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