Best tools to find content topics your customers care about

It’s not easy knowing how to write content that your customers will *actually* want to read. People are time-poor, and there are billions of other things competing for their attention. The truth is most content fails to find an audience at all.

Part of the secret to success is understanding who your ideal customers are and how your content will offer value. But researching and picking the right topics is an important task many businesses and marketers don’t allocate enough time to.

Really great content feeds your ideal customer’s curiosity, clarifies something they’re uncertain about, or solves problems that are preventing them from getting what they want.   

To identify topics that have any chance of achieving this, you need to dig deep and do your research.

Here are 5 handy tools to help.

1. Google Trends

Many of the blogs that get published are heavily dissected ‘old news’. This is where Google Trends comes in, because it tells you what topics or queries people are searching for down to the last hour.  

You can see the top daily search trends across Business, Entertainment, Health, Tech, Sports and Top Stories. Or discover trending keywords within set time periods such as the past hour, four hours, day, or week.

It’s a useful tool for sourcing current, in-demand topics that will put you at the forefront of your industry and one step ahead of your competition.

2. People Also Ask (PAA)

Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) is a handy way of seeing what other questions people ask relative to a search query. It’s another way Google aims to be super customer-centric by satisfying a user’s search journey on the spot.

It’s also an awesome tool for topic inspiration.

With billions of user queries in its database and a bank of stats to pull from, Google is hand-delivering you highly relevant, in-demand topics (and the PAAs make great sub-headers!). It’s a double win – you not only identify valuable topic ideas, you also ramp up your SEO (especially if Google uses your content as an answer for a PAA which then links back to your site!).

3. Social Groups

Reddit, Medium, LinkedIn and Facebook all have communities grouped by interests, demographics, and goals. Find your ideal customers within these communities and you can see what trends they’re following, the opinions they share and, most importantly, the problems they need solving.

When you discover common issues your customers are facing, you can address these things in your content and offer solutions – they get the answers and resolutions they’ve been looking for and your brand becomes the hero. Another double win!

4. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is handy for many things, but one of its best-kept secrets is how it calculates content based on an Evergreen Score (its internal ranking system). The Evergreen Score measures the growth in engagements and links an article continues to receive 30 days after it’s published. The more engagements and likes received, the higher the score.

Image source: https://help.buzzsumo.com/en/articles/1633304-what-is-an-evergreen-score

Even better, you can sort headlines by their Evergreen Score to discover which topics stand the test of time. And the Content Analyzer displays headlines in order of engagement, so you can see which words and topics are captivating and holding people’s attention.

The other handy thing about Buzzsumo, is that it not only reveals the most popular topics relative to a keyword or domain, but also the subject areas that are lacking in content. It’s basically gold for revealing unique topics that are in demand, but not yet overloaded.

Enter a keyword into the Buzzsumo Topic Explorer and it will generate a keyword cloud – the smaller words being the less explored ones. Use the Keyword tool to learn whether any of these have high search volumes (and therefore high demand). If the answer’s yes, you’ve found a topic gap!

5. Quora

People use Quora to crowdsource answers to a specific query. Anyone can post a question, and anyone can provide an answer.

This information is gold because it gives you insights straight from the source.  You not only learn what questions people are asking about a topic or event and what concerns they’re facing; you also get to draw insights from the experiences and recommendations people provide in their answers.

Simply enter a topic or keyword into Quora’s search box and filter results by question or answer.

Then it’s a matter of searching through the results to find trending issues that are screaming out for solutions, and misconceptions that need addressing.

Final thoughts…

Ideally, you want to build a bank of content that includes trending topics, less explored topics and topics that will resonate for the long run. Think of it as an investment portfolio; your content library is an asset that needs to stand the test of time, generating traffic, leads and engagement through every climate.

But remember, identifying content topic ideas is a just small part of your content marketing strategy that should align with your broader marketing goals.