As a modern-day marketer, hitting the right marks with your content strategy can take a lot of effort. As the search landscape becomes more competitive than ever, it’s estimated that more than 3.5 billion searches occur online daily.
As a content marketer, it’s important to create original content on every channel, especially when battling competing brands for engagement. The best-performing content usually surrounds exciting new topics, covers unique angles on audience trends, and ranks in the top position on social media and SERPs.
The question is, how do you ensure that your content strategy is up to scratch? One foolproof way to ensure that your content rakes in engagement is to find as many gaps in the market as possible and fill them before your competitor does.
The key here is to find new keywords, topics, and angles yet to be seen in a viral space online and take your chance to lead a new conversation.
With this in mind, we’ve put together a guide to conducting your content gap analysis in six simple steps using social listening.
Measure Your Current Content Performance
Step one is to measure your current content performance. Using social listening for content research is a brilliant tool to add to your arsenal.
Using a social listening tool like Mention, you can measure your content performance, engagement, audience sentiment, and more. Mapping the same content on multiple channels allows you to see how it performs in front of different demographics and monitor your audience’s feedback on your current content topics/styles.
To use this data to begin a content gap analysis, work out what aspects of your content strategy your audience likes, dislikes, and wants more of. Use this information to influence the type of content gap your audience is likely to respond well to.
“The magic, you see, is in the sentiment. Using social listening, we discerned not just what people clicked but how our content made them feel. Were they advocating on our behalf? Or just passively consuming? Critiques weren’t feared; they were goldmines. Each comment is a lesson,” says Sandro Meyer, Head of Content at Swiss Pioneers.
“Content’s worth isn’t clicks; it’s connections. Dive deep. Adjust. Connect genuinely.”
Identify Current Customer Challenges
Understanding the needs of your target audience is the key to hunting for the right content gaps for your brand.
The key to establishing the most popular search queries used by your audience on Google and within social search bars is to dive deeply into the topics your demographic is currently interacting with.
What common queries do they search for online? What keywords and hashtags rank highly amongst your demographic? Using trend discovery tools such as Google Trends, you can quickly identify what topics your customers are most interested in and highlight any popular pain points not currently satisfied by your competitor’s content strategy.
Once you have established these customer pain points, use this data to create a detailed customer persona that reflects the behaviors, needs, and gratifications of your target audience.
Use this buyer persona to create helpful content around these particular pain points that aim to solve the problem for your target.
Use Brand Mentions To Highlight Content Gaps
One of the key benefits of social listening is the ability to discover what your audience is saying about your brand. This is especially helpful when conducting a content gap analysis.
Using a tool like Mention, you can track popular mentions of your brand on multiple social channels. Here, you can analyze audience sentient relating to your current content, as well as set up alerts for any opinions, questions, or mentions followers have about your brand.
These options and vocalized pain points are key to generating relevant, helpful content. For example, you may take a negative misconception of your brand and use this to create a piece of content debunking a common myth associated with your company.
“Use social listening tools to track conversations around topics related to your industry or niche,” says Ghazaleh Abolfathi, Campaign Manager at Digikala. “This can help you identify popular topics your audience is interested in and create content that resonates with them.”
Lead Surveys and Interviews
Another easy way to identify content gaps is to ask your audience directly.
It’s never been easier to conduct surveys and interviews online. Whether you attach a survey to an email newsletter or simply ask a question in an Instagram story, there are plenty of ways to generate feedback from your audience in seconds.
The key here is to choose the best platform for survey engagement. For example, if you have more followers on Instagram, you will most likely receive replies to your Instagram story.
(Image Source: Social Stamina)
For a content gap analysis, we recommend adding a reply box to an Instagram story that asks the audience ‘what content they would like to see more of’.
This is a foolproof way to generate answers that can be used to help your brand identify content gaps that need filling.
Stay Up To Date On Industry Trends
To identify relevant content gaps from which to profit, you must first be ahead of the consumer trend curve.
To stay up to date on industry trends, ensure that you insert your social listening team right into the front line of social platforms. These are areas like TikTok FYP or Instagram Explore.
Alongside this, stay informed from multiple sources. These include having active social listening accounts on multiple social platforms, subscribing to industry blogs, and following relevant news sources related to your industry.
Analyze the data in front of you and identify which trends and topics appear more frequently. As trends emerge, some topics lose traction, and some gain thousands of likes and shares overnight. These are the topics you want to leap onto with a piece of content.
This can aid you in anticipating what trend might become relevant in the near future and help you fill the gap before your competitor does.
Join Social Media Conversations
Another brilliant step to take as a social listener is to insert yourself into the conversation.
We know that social media platforms are brilliant sources of insights into your brand and your demographic’s pain points, so making your brand part of the conversation is essential.
Why not reply to customer comments or encourage a conversation in the comments of a social post? This will allow you to find the correct information for a successful content gap analysis.
Wrapping Up
Social listening plays a critical role in a successful content gap analysis.
To make the most of your content research, why not try Mention’s social listening tool? With the ability to track brand mentions in real-time and receive an alert when you’re talked about online, social listening has never been so easy.
