6-Step Content Writing Research Process
Professional athletes log thousands of hours in the gym preparing for competitions on the sector, court, bike, or ski trail. Athletes can’t be great at what they are doing without fixing that critical preparation time in the gym.
It’s the work that most people never see — all those hours of workout time —
that makes the difference between an honest athlete and a very great one.
In the world of Content Writing Services, you would like to consider yourself as an athlete.
Your market research is your training — it’s what you have to do, day by day and week by week, to be great at what you do.
Most of the time when we talk about “work” in our world, we’re talking about writing content, creating products, managing social media or email campaigns, answering emails, and taking care of our customers.
But before we can do any of that, we need to get prepared. And we get prepared by doing our research (see Chapter 1).
So what should your research process look like? What steps can you take to gather the best possible data on your target audience?
1. Get (truly) motivated
Doing marketing research helps you better understand what your community needs and that information allows you to help your audience in totally unique ways.
Getting the inside track on how your audience thinks (and what it needs) not only allows you to create perfectly targeted content, but it allows you to create products and services that solve very specific problems. And yes, that puts cash in your pocket. But I’ll bet money isn’t the only reason you started your business. I’ll bet you started your company because you genuinely want to assist people. So remember why you would like to try marketing research. We do our research so we can help people them solve their problems and enable them to measure better, fuller,
richer lives. If you let truly important motivations light a fireplace under you — instead of just visions of big payouts — your research process will be a lot easier (and considerably more fun.)
2. Be a part of the community you’re researching
The best (and easiest) thanks to doing audience research is to be an integral member
of your market. So if you’ve got your blog, and you have readers who regularly chime in with opinions, questions, complaints, and insights, you'll gather fantastic market data from that community.
If you don’t have your audience yet, you can participate in other websites and blogs that attract the audience you’re trying to connect with.
Join the community you’re trying to serve. Take part in discussions and conversations via social networking sites, blogs, forums, and other online groups.
Give freely and generously. Answer questions. Participate. Ask nothing reciprocally when you’re a replacement member of the community — just provide helpful insight to other members of that tribe. And as you’re participating and helping other community members, you'll learn tons by watching and learning.
3. Research your audience’s mindset
The first thing you need to study is your audience’s mindset — the way they look at the world. What’s important to them? What types of people do they admire? What are their values?
Tools like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, and Facebook allow you to gather information about the audience mindset by letting you pay attention to their digital worlds (NOT during a creepy way). These online tools offer you a daily peek into what people do and say a day — which stuff is marketing research gold.
You can also do keyword research to get more about the way your market looks at the planet. Use keyword research tools like Word Tracker and Google
Keyword searches to seek out everything you'll about the topics your audience is curious about and therefore the things they need to understand more about.
Yes, keyword research is vital for program optimization, but it’s also a number of the simplest marketing research around.
4. Discover your audience’s problems
When conducting market research, you’re also trying to find out what your prospects’ problems are — all those annoyances and complaints, all the whining and whinging.
You can discover not only the problems that are keeping them up at night, but the inconsistencies and troubles with your competitor’s problems and services, too.
You can discover what’s not being done well in your industry — and how you can handle it better.
Discovering unsolved problems or dissatisfaction gives you the opportunity to satisfy needs no one else can, because you have the information they don’t have (or haven’t noticed yet).
So use social media eavesdropping and keyword research (as well as traditional market research tools like surveys, interviews and focus groups) to get people’s problems.
Then use the insight you gain to create content that speaks directly to your audience in a way no one else can. Your readers and customers want content that addresses their needs and desires, and talks to them in a way that resonates with who they are and how they look at the world.
When you do market research consistently and well, you will know exactly what kind of content your audience needs and wants. And that knowledge gives you a completely unfair (and completely awesome) advantage in your market.
5. Train consistently
Remember that market research (just like training workouts for athletes) is never a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process that you will need to finesse and tweak, revamp and redo — just like everything else about your content writing services.
So plan to do market research regularly. Make it a part of your weekly and monthly content marketing routines.
When you’re planning how to spend your workweek, structure your schedule to build in time for watching and learning. Make it a top priority. It’s one of the most important things you can do to set your business up for success.
6. Embrace the work
As content marketers, many of us consider marketing research as an afterthought —
something that we've to laboriously slog through to urge to our actual work of making products, online content, educational programs and sales pages.
But if we don’t do our market research, all our other work will befall flat. It’s critical that we discover everything we'll about the people we’re trying to reach, and hear what they’re trying to inform us. Market research is hard because it's messy. you've to travel through ungodly amounts of noise to urge to the useful nuggets of knowledge that help you understand your audience. Sifting through all that noise is annoying and tiresome. It’s hard.
But we've to embrace this work — albeit it’s hard. It’s specifically because it’s hard that it’s one of the only things for us to undertake to.
Because it’s difficult, it’s likely that our competitors aren’t doing it — or aren’t
doing it well. And that gives us a spectacular advantage on the competition field. So make sure to pull on those sneakers and acquire your butt to the gym. It’s probably the foremost important thing you’ll do all day.
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