Four research tools to help supercharge your content marketing strategy

A successful content marketing strategy starts with research. Here are four effective research tools that can facilitate your content marketing creation.

A successful content marketing strategy starts with research. This is the stage in which marketers discover the best content types to match their goals. 

Although carrying out research into content marketing ideas and strategy might seem like a time-consuming process, there are many tools to facilitate it.

Here are four effective research tools that can facilitate your content marketing creation.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the most popular tools for content marketing. It’s simple, yet very powerful, and it can help significantly during the research stage. It allows you to find content inspiration by using search queries or categories. You can filter the results by time period, social network, content type, domain, or author.

For example, you can search for the most popular posts on Twitter the last 30 days in content marketing and explore their performance.

Moreover, you can search for the most popular content from a specific author – either one from your company or a competitor – to understand what your target audience enjoys reading. Another good idea is to compare the length and the types of content that are relevant to the ideas you have in mind.

All these parameters can be extremely helpful when trying to improve your content marketing strategy.

What makes it special is the fact that it can facilitate the research of content writers, content marketers, but also SEO professionals, making it a great tool for all departments.

SEMRush

SEMRush is another useful addition to the research stage of every content marketing strategy. It combines content and SEO, leading to interesting data that can improve your content.

Keyword analysis is not only helpful for SEO, but also for content marketing. This can give you an idea of which keywords can lead to more successful content, while you can also discover new ideas for your target audience.

Moreover, the Keyword Magic Tool offers new keyword ideas, while you can also organize them by topic to find the best results for each segment of your content strategy.

Another interesting feature is the SEO Content Template, which will analyze content on Google’s top 10 ranking pages for your specified keywords, and then give you recommendations on how to create SEO-friendly content. These include related words, backlinks and readability and they can all contribute to a powerful content marketing strategy.

If you’re still searching for more inspiration coming from specific keywords, you can also proceed to a competitor analysis and explore the most popular keywords, or the ones with less competition.

AnswerThePublic

If you’re looking for a useful and free tool for your content marketing research, then AnswerThePublic is a good choice.

It’s a tool that suggests the best questions to address, depending on the answers that your audience is looking for. What makes it even better is the fact that it delivers the results in a visual representation, offering numerous examples of content ideas you can use.

These auto-suggest results are provided by Google and Bing and they can give you a great understanding of what your audience is searching that is relevant to your content.

For example, if you search for “content marketing”, you are provided with 85 questions that can make your content marketing research easier. The fact that the questions come directly from users make the tool even more important, offering you a long list of ideas for your next topics.

Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool in the AdWords platform that analyses suggested keywords and how your team can use them.

Although it seems like a useful tool for display advertising, it can also be part of a content marketing strategy and the research process for new ideas.

It allows you to search for a keyword and access a list of suggested keywords and other relevant terms that could be useful for your campaign. The rank of their popularity and how others are using them can also be used for content marketing, as this helps you understand whether the topics have already been covered.

A keyword analysis can help you when researching for content ideas, as it offers a practical analysis of the most popular terms for your audience, along with other suggested ideas you may not have considered yet.

Overview

Content marketing heads to a stage of maturity and marketers are seeking for the best tools to ensure their strategy remains effective. It is a positive sign that according to Curata, 70% of content marketing leaders are increasing investment in marketing technology.

This is a proof that a growing number of marketers realize the importance of using the right tools for every stage of a content marketing strategy.

The research stage is the starting point that can determine the success of the next steps. Thus, it’s useful to dedicate a proper amount of time to discover the tools that can increase the chances of success for your strategy.

What we can learn from the suggested tools above is the fact that you don’t have to use only content marketing-specific tools, but you can also go beyond them. Even if a tool is primarily used for SEO or PPC, it can still be useful for researching your content marketing strategy.

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