Don’t take the content marketing leap without knowing your audience first. Analyzing data makes it possible to create content based on audience intent.
This is the first in a two-part series. Check out Part 2 here: Intent-Driven Content: Turning Data Into Action
With the majority of marketers increasing their investment in content marketing, the concept of “brand as publisher” is fast becoming cliché. The new dilemma is not merely whether to create content, but instead what to create. And brands should not take this decision lightly.
Effective branded content creation is resource intensive and famously tricky to do right. Competition for readers’ attention is fierce. Organizations that spend time and money on content without knowing exactly who it is going to reach (and how) are playing fast and loose with their corporate coffers.
At the same time, customer interest in and exposure to traditional forms of advertising is at an all-time low, thanks in part to a fragmented media space, ad blockers, and highly curated social media usage. With a majority of marketers now using content marketing and the quality of leads generated on the rise, it has never been more important to have a strong, differentiated branded content strategy.
In the face of this dilemma, companies are often tempted to approach their content marketing programs in the way they perceive as safest: from the top down. They start by asking their leadership team what they want to say to their customers, and then proceed to invest millions on messaging strategies derived from internal priorities.
While business objectives are important to content production efforts, brands cannot be led by their own sense of who they are. Everything they produce must consider what their prospective customers demand. Just like their products and services, their content is only as impactful as the success it has in satisfying a need.
One of the best ways for brands to create content that resonates is by speaking to what customers are already looking for. By digging into the data and generating intent profiles, brands can identify opportunities to create high value, in-demand content that satisfies user needs, provides positive brand interactions, and identifies prospective customers at opportune moments.
Unlocking useful content means thinking audience-first
Content marketing cannot be successful without an enthusiastic audience. Never mind how well written or beautifully designed it might be. The reality for most brands, however, is that content creation is not a core competency. This leaves them in a default position of having no audience, or at least not one that is looking to them for content.
Rather than selling themselves and their wares in more traditional ways, brands can instead become authoritative voices on the issues that matter most to their customers. Approaching content production with this customer-centric mindset gives marketers the ability to:
- Initiate and carry on meaningful conversations with their customers.
- Provide helpful resources that users are looking for in their moments of need.
- Anticipate and react to future or unexpected problems.
- Stress actionable utility and real benefits over empty brand promises.
Ok, that sounds attractive. But how does it work?
To meet audiences where they already are, brands need to locate the intersection between what they currently produce and what kinds of content users care about. Interests in content can vary. Customers may be looking to be informed, instructed, or entertained. A brand publisher’s most important responsibility is to figure out which and act accordingly, taking into account the customer’s preferred format, voice, and platform.
Finding where brand content provides value
As a word of caution, it’s important that brands are realistic in how they view their capabilities relating to content. A few years ago a study by Vibrant Media showed that consumers trust content from brands almost as much as content from publishers. But we’ve probably all seen recently that trust in media is declining.
What does this mean for your content creation efforts? Well, for example, if you run a boutique hotel, you can easily become a credible provider of travel and hospitality-related content. But if you stray too far off subject, you risk alienating your captive audience.
By gauging customer intent first, brands can determine the most relevant topics in which they have sufficient credibility and expertise to address that intent. That’s the sweet spot.
How to measure customer intent
There is no magic formula for assessing customer intent. However, compiling, analyzing, and interpreting search data for what users need is a great place to start. Search queries, by definition, are the best data-based snapshot of a user’s intent because they offer a reflection of what’s in a user’s head in the moment they perform the search.
They also allow inferences about information that is not provided. For instance, the average query consists of four keyword terms, but longer query strings often indicate a user is closer to making a purchase decision. As a result, it’s possible to infer that longer queries for specific, relevant keywords are more valuable to target than other keyword terms.
Because search data do not include things like a user’s age, gender, or marital status, they often help overcome common misconceptions. A Kantar Millward Brown study found that demographics-based messaging puts brands at risk of missing more than two-thirds of mobile shoppers.
Intent data can disprove demographic misconceptions
Making assumptions about who your content might appeal to without knowing who already cares can lead to missing out. See the image below from Google.
While user research and polling may provide valuable input for building digital content and experiences, people’s opinions can be misleading. Study after study shows that what people say they would do is almost always different from what they actually do, especially when hypothetical money is involved. Search data cut through these biases by offering a glimpse at what people want, irrespective of who they are or what they say.
That does not mean that search data alone are sufficient to put together a solid customer intent analysis. First, there are many types of keyword data (Google vs. Bing, external vs. internal), and many different lenses through which to filter them (by device, geography, or seasonality). YouTube subscriber information offers additional signals about customer interest. Social listening data from Twitter and Facebook may provide a great complement to search data, particularly when brand building, entertaining, or sharable content is the ultimate goal.
Determining the right combination of data to compile will be different for every project depending on relevance, fidelity, and access. Whatever the case, the key to collecting the best intent data is basing the assessment on topics that are applicable to the brand’s strategic marketing objectives.
Hero image by Anthony Martino on Unsplash.