Research. If you’re a content marketer, you gotta do it—or invest in someone to do it for you.
Creating great marketing content doesn’t start with writing copy or taking photographs or designing eye-catching graphics. Those come at the end of the process and they’re by no means the hard part. First, you have to:
- Audit your existing content
- Write an editorial mission statement
- Develop your organization’s persona(s)
- Develop your content strategy
Research happens at each one of those steps. That’s how you know what information to deliver and how and when to deliver it to make people take action on your website.
As a full-service content marketing agency, content research takes the most time but offers the greatest value of anything we do for our customers and clients.
We understand that what separates ordinary content from content that is invaluable to the user is the research that supports it. Without it, you’re just guessing.
How does your audience search online for products and services? What do they want in a brand? What are your competitors presenting online? Is it working? What differentiates your company from others in your marketplace?
You need to answer the fundamental questions about you, your audience, and those you compete against before you write the first paragraph on your site.
Electric Lemonade Gives You an Edge
In our 15 years at Electric Lemonade, we’ve proved to be really good at content research for our clients. In fact, we’re proud to say that it’s what distinguishes us from our competitors.
We’ll put in the foundational work to produce content for your website that brings in business because it’s accurate, useful, and stands the test of time.
That’s a promise.
We can say that with confidence, because we’ve done it. One of the best ways to increase traffic to your site is to become a trusted source of information for authoritative websites.
We grade the content we produce by the inbound links and social shares it earns from news sites and “influencers”—people who publish on the internet who have the clout to move opinions and push behavior.
We have created content for clients that has been linked to or shared by The New York Times, the U.S. government, The Washington Post, CNN, MTV News, and many others.
We do this by taking the necessary time to gather and analyze an enormous amount of information, distilling it, and making it easily digestible for consumers.
The Nuts and Bolts of Content Research
There are no shortcuts to this process. If you engage Electric Lemonade for content research, here are the steps we typically take:
- One-on-one recorded phone interviews with our clients (the subject matter experts); these may be ongoing during the research period
- Content research analysis
- Content research fact-checking
- Content topic analysis
- Extensive keyword research—both organic (unpaid) and pay-per-click data
- A deep content competitive analysis to understand your competitors’:
- content strategy
- persona content topics
- content quality score
- performance on Google
- following on social media
- Content authority and influencer research (Who are the existing authoritative publishers and influencers in your space?)
- Social media content topic analysis
- Content trending and projection analysis
- Research “long-tail” and “granular” topics (highly specific keywords or phrases that consumers may use when they have narrowed their search and are close to buying; think of them as less frequent but high-yield search terms)
Our content researchers immerse themselves in the topic and use many resources and tools to best understand your organization before they write about it.
Sources we use for content research—just to name a few—also include:
- Internal surveys and polls
- Google Suggest (terms that pop up when you start typing a search term), Google Trends, and Google’s Keyword Planner for keyword research
- Online communities where questions are asked and answered, such as Quora.com
Social media - Forums and discussion boards
- YouTube
- BuzzSumo, a popular site for analyzing content
- Search engines such as Bing and Yahoo
- Small Google Adwords campaigns pinpointed to mine and validate information for content research
Ready to Get Started?
Content research is part of Electric Lemonade’s full-service content marketing package. We also offer it as an a la carte service on a monthly or quarterly basis to organizations and other digital marketing agencies.
Before we begin, we need to audit your existing content. For more information or to schedule and audit, please complete our secure online form below.
