NBA great, Michael Jordan once said:
Talent wins games but intelligence and teamwork wins championships.
I’m not going to get into the importance of teamwork but I am going to share some insights around the power of content intelligence. Content intelligence comes from asking a series of questions:
- Who influences your audiences perception & beliefs?
- What websites is your audience reading?
- What content is your audience sharing?
- What trends are your audience following?
- What motivates your audience?
- What is your audience’s persona?
The answers to these questions should guide everything you do. Too many marketers are using gut instinct to make decisions around what topics they should cover instead of looking closely at what’s actually working. Sometimes what seems like the most obvious ideas are actually the worst.
For example, when the entire industry is talking about X, it might be worth talking about Y. Or if the entire industry is taking a certain positioning on a hot topic, it might be worth taking the contrarian approach. You see, it’s easy for marketers and publishers to play the copy game but audiences can see right through it. Instead of embracing and accepting the status quo, make a stand to create something different.
In this blog post, I’m going to uncover a few different strategies and tactics that you can use to uncover insights and content intelligence. Some of these are ideas that you can start leveraging and capitalizing on immediately, others will require a bit of Software and an understanding of how to navigate the social web. My hope is that it will at the very least give you the inspiration and insight you need to start placing more value on content intelligence. Let’s get to it.
Gather Personal Intelligence On Your Followers
The first step to creating content that resonates is gaining a deep understanding of who your readers are. While posing the right questions is crucial, finding the answers requires you to explore the platforms and communities where your audience spends their time.
Today, your audience is likely engaging on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, or following blogs that align with your niche. A powerful way to comprehend who you’re speaking to is by analyzing their online behaviors and interests using modern tools designed for audience intelligence.
SparkToro is an invaluable tool that helps you gather detailed insights about your audience. By plugging in a subreddit, website URL, or social media handle, SparkToro provides a wealth of information about that audience’s demographics, interests, and online habits. This data empowers you to tailor your content strategy to better meet the needs and preferences of your followers.
Let’s say you manage a blog all about personal finance. Without concrete data, you might assume your typical reader is a middle-aged parent with a passion for the outdoors. However, using SparkToro, you might discover that a significant portion of your audience consists of young professionals who are active on investment forums and follow certain finance influencers on social media. This insight allows you to create content that more effectively engages and serves your actual readership.
By leveraging modern audience intelligence tools like SparkToro, you can obtain actionable insights that enable you to craft content truly aligned with your audience’s interests and needs.
Understand The Hot Topics & Audience Interests
You already know that the internet is filled with millions of different communities. To identify what content works best for your audience, you must search for these communities and gather insight from what’s being said and shared within them.
When I’m brainstorming new ideas for blog posts on Marketing or Business, I often visit sites like Reddit, Inbound.org, GrowthHackers or HackerNews to see what’s trending. Once there, I do a quick search for a topic of interest to my readers and study the results.
Similar to the example above, let’s pretend you’re managing a blog that is all about personal finance. It’s easy to assume that people want to hear about savings for retirement or buying their first home. Sure, it’s likely that those topics are of interest to your audience, but hundreds of blogs have covered that exact topic. Researching active communities on the other hand, will shed light on new discussions and new topics that your target audience is interested in.
For example, if you visit the subreddit /r/PersonalFinance – You will uncover a handful of topics that can lead to content inspiration. I did a quick scan of this subreddit, clicked “Top Posts” to ensure the content I found was the most popular and here’s what I found:
The top post, “Should I Put All My Child’s Savings Into Bitcoin” was bang on with what I was looking for.
It’s something that most personal finance blogs aren’t discussing but it’s something that the personal finance community on Reddit found very engaging. I’d take this insight and create a very high quality piece of content that focuses on educating people about Bitcoin and come to a conclusion around the answer to this question.
As I scrolled through the list, I saw a handful of other topics that could make for great content but found two in particular that really caught my eye. The second post that caught my interest was about buying a car from a car dealership. The post generated more than one thousand comments and fifteen thousand up-votes. Recognizing this high level of engagement, it would be stupid to not cover this topic in the form of an infographic or written guide.
Finally, the last post that caught my eye was intriguing because it made such an aggressive claim. I’d take this insight and create a blog post that asks the question “Should You Ever Co-Sign A Loan?” or take a more intriguing approach with a blog post titled Everything You Should Know Before Co-Signing A Loan.
Understand The Format Your Audience Wants
A few weeks ago, I found myself in a thoughtful debate with a friend about the merits of listening to audiobooks versus reading them in print. At the end of the day, people have their own preferences for how they consume information, and this diversity extends into the content marketing landscape. With countless options available for sharing our stories, it’s essential to choose the format that best resonates with our audience.
You need to decide whether your audience wants to receive content through blog posts, podcasts, ebooks, infographics, webinars, or any other medium. To better understand which format your audience prefers, look at the channels they regularly engage with and identify the types of content that are most shared and consumed.
Modern tools like BuzzSumo and SparkToro can offer valuable insights into what content is trending within your industry. For example, a quick search on BuzzSumo might reveal that 9 of the top 10 posts from a competitor’s site are quizzes. This insight suggests that quizzes are highly engaging for their audience, indicating that you might benefit from incorporating quizzes into your own content strategy.
Take a close look at your competitors to see which content formats are driving the most engagement on their sites. While some formats may require more time and effort to create, it’s important to recognize the long-term value that a single piece of high-quality content can offer your brand.
Look For Common Interests In Your Audience
Understanding your audience is key to creating content that really hits home. Platforms like Facebook and tools like SparkToro are fantastic for digging up insights about what makes your audience tick.
Let’s say I’m a Paleo blogger wanting to get to know my readers better. I could hop on SparkToro and search for folks who engage with “EverydayPaleo,” a popular blog in the Paleo scene. This could show me their common interests, demographics, and other content they love.
But here’s where it gets interesting:
As I dive into the data, I notice a cool trend—a lot of these Paleo enthusiasts are also into CrossFit. Bingo! This overlap means there’s a golden opportunity to create content that appeals to both Paleo fans and CrossFitters, potentially boosting my reach and engagement.
Now, let’s take it up a notch.
By spotting this crossover, I can identify influencers who are active in both communities. Tools like SparkToro help me zero in on these key players who have high social authority—when they share something, people listen. Building relationships with these influencers could open doors for cross-promotion, guest posts, or awesome collaborations.
So, how do you reach out without sounding like just another person asking for a favor?
It’s all about genuine connection. Reach out and make sure it’s personalized. By leveraging modern audience tools and building real relationships with influencers, you can tailor your content and amp up your brand’s reach in a big way.
Conclusion
If you can take these strategies, tips and tricks and apply them to your content marketing efforts – You’ll likely be more successful than your competition. I’m a believer that insights and intelligence are where every strategy and plan have to start. If you start your plan based on nothing more than assumptions and guesswork, you’ll likely be communicating and telling a story that doesn’t resonate with anyone.
What other channels can you leverage to gather insight about your audience? Let me know in the comments below!