Just 7% of marketers think their content is exceptional. That’s crazy, right? If you want your business to succeed then your content needs to stand out. But in a digital world so deeply saturated with content, how can you stay on top of the game?
Creating an effective content marketing strategy isn’t an easy task, but there are some steps you can take to succeed and grow your business. You’ll need to be strategic in your approach. One of the best ways to ensure your publishing valuable content is to perform a content gap analysis.
In today’s article, we’ll discuss how to perform a content gap analysis and why it’s an important step in planning your content strategy.
We’ll guide you through the process of performing a content gap analysis with a simple and achievable approach. Let’s get started!
What is a content gap analysis and why is it important for your content strategy?
Performing a content gap analysis will help you to improve your content strategy and boost your business.
Content gap analysis allows you to identify holes in your strategy that prevent your customers from moving smoothly through the inbound marketing funnel.
It’s like finding the missing piece to a puzzle.
It allows you to:
- Analyze how your current content is performing
- Understand how it can be improved
- Pinpoint what your content is missing in comparison to your competitors
The process involves taking a good look at the existing media landscape and figuring out what’s missing. This allows you to find unsaturated sub-niches where your content can stand out and achieve high search engine rankings.
There are a couple of different kinds of content gaps that you might discover during your analysis. These include:
- Missing content along your customer journey
- Gaps where your content isn’t addressing various personas
- Gaps content about certain products or initiatives is missing
You can think of those gaps as people who aren’t getting what they need. If you can fill that gap then they’ll be getting truly valuable content.
Once you’ve identified the gaps, you can focus on developing the best content strategy to fill them.
Popular Content Gap Analysis Tools
Before you begin, check out these content gap analysis tools that’ll make your life so much easier!
- BuzzSumo: Looks at social engagement data and social shares for particular links
- SEMRush: Allows you to track keyword rankings, backlinks, and traffic and lead data.
- Moz: For SEO performance and to track data like page authority, domain authority, and much more.
Now you know what it is and why it’s important, let’s delve into how to perform a content gap analysis.
How to perform a content gap analysis in 5 easy steps
Content gap analysis isn’t just checking for keyword rankings – there’s a lot more to it than that! A full analysis takes into account all of your content including:
- Blog posts
- Landing pages
- E-books and whitepapers
- E-mails
- Social media posts
- Paid advertising content
Understanding how you’re using these content platforms and the results you’re achieving (or not achieving) allows you to find gaps and fill them with stand-out content.
Fortunately, there are 5 simple steps you can follow to perform an effective content gap analysis:
- Outline the buyer’s journey
- Do keyword research
- Review your published content
- Check out the competition
- Fill in the gaps!
Let’s take a deeper look at each of those steps.
1. Outline the buyer’s journey
Understanding your audience is the key to effective marketing.
It’s a fact that personalized content performs better, so it’s crucial that you know your buyer personas and how they’re moving through the funnel.
You need to know how they are searching and what they are searching for.
Go through your existing content and make sure you have content for all stages of the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
Offering your audience the right content at the right time is integral to great customer experience. It’s crucial to consider what your audience wants to consume, not just what the market is offering. It requires you to examine your audience’s principal questions, goals, and concerns throughout their buyer’s journey. After, you’ll need to measure your current content to see if it matches up to your audience’s expectations and desires. If something is missing – there you go! You’ve found a gap to fill.
2. Do keyword research
Ah yes, the part most people run away and hide from.
Search engine optimization isn’t just about including high-ranking keywords in your content. With 67% of marketers say that SEO was the most efficient tactic for creating successful content with high engagement rates, it’s an essential aspect of content marketing. Check out this article to find out more about how to use SEO to grow your business.
The next step in your content gap analysis is to do keyword research to connect the dots between your future content and what your audience is seeking out.
Keyword research is the process of identifying the phrases and combinations of words that people are searching for. It allows us to discover:
- How customers interact with a topic
- How competitive keywords are and how much you should invest in using them
Once you’ve got a great list of keywords you can assign them to topics that speak to each stage of the buyer’s journey.
You can also examine the ranking keywords in your current content. Are there keywords you haven’t included?
To do your keyword research we suggest you check out the tools mentioned in this article.
3. Review your published content
Perhaps you’ve previously published a piece of great content that just needs to be updated to achieve a higher engagement rate. Most of the time this old content is pushed to the back of the closet and never thought about again. But what if there’s still value in it?
Review your already published content and see if it’s aligned with a stage in the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. Don’t forget to use your keyword research to check for gaps in your previous content! Maybe there are topics with high search volume that you’ve missed or haven’t considered covering.
Take a look at how each page is performing as well, as this will allow you to see what content is valuable and what needs to be revamped.
By looking back at your published content you’ll be able to identify gaps that are ready to be filled with effective new content.
4. Check out the competition
In content marketing, you have to know your enemies.
Using a tool such as Buzzsumo, you can identify which content published by your competitors performs best. Check out the high-ranking keywords they’re using, and which pages are attracting the most traffic and securing the most backlinks.
This way you can identify what they’re doing well (and learn from them) as well as discover some gaps in their content that you can fill.
5. Fill in the gaps!
Now you’re ready to put it all together and begin filling in those content gaps!
Start by coming up with a list of topics that you think will be successful. These topics should fit nicely into the gaps you discovered during your analysis. Make sure you put your keyword research to good use to achieve higher search engine ranking and boost engagement. Always aim to stay on top of the game by analyzing your competitors and keeping a close eye out for gaps in content that you can fill.
Next steps in defining your content strategy
Now you’ve found plenty of gaps ready to be filled, you’re ready to fill them with great content. One of the best ways to organize and optimize your content is with an editorial calendar.
So, are you ready to fill your editorial calendar with new content ideas to engage your audience
and keep them moving through the funnel?
Download our editorial calendar template now!
