How to create content people actually care about

It’s no good creating content for the sake of it. Pouring hours of your life into writing and recording each week isn’t going to get you anywhere if you’re not creating content people actually care about. Getting people to care matters because that’s what encourages engagement and ultimately drives them to buy from you. Here are our favourite ways to figure out what your audience wants.

Ask them!
As obvious as it sounds, this is one people often forget about! A great way to start creating content your audience cares about is to ask them what they want. Now, we’re going to caveat this and say it’s not a good idea to go for an open-ended question as it can be super overwhelming for people to answer (and you know we’re all about reducing the overwhelm). Instead, we suggest giving them options – use the poll feature on your selected platform to make it easy for people to answer.

If you don’t have an existing audience or you just want to get a different perspective, join a Facebook group where your ideal client is hanging out. Ask what they’re struggling with, they wish they could see more of, or need help with and use that to create content. Of course, you need to be respectful of the rules so make sure these types of posts are allowed before you go getting yourself banned.

Use a tool
There are lots of great tools out there but our favourites are alsoasked.com and answerthepublic.com. They do slightly different things so are best used alongside each other. Both offer a limited number of free searches and scaled pricing.

AlsoAsked provides live “People Also Ask” data, which means it gives results for more longtail searches and shows the relationships between these topics and questions. It’s awesome for doing research into a particular topic and getting loads of ideas in one go, highlighting the questions you could be answering.

AnswerThePublic listens to autocomplete data from search engines and then uses this to provide you with suggestions. It’s perfect for identifying specific searches and helping you come up with lots of potential content ideas.

Check out the competition
While we absolutely do not condone copycats, identifying competitors and looking at what their audience is reacting well to is sensible. Of course, your audience is slightly different from theirs so you need to be able to adapt it to serve them properly. Use what you see as inspiration to create your own content.

To be clear, we’re not saying to directly copy your competitors. That is a huge no-no and definitely not something we want to encourage. What we are saying is to look at what’s working for others and use it to inform what you do with your own content. Treat it the same as you would market research. Which brings us to…

Market research
Getting your hands on market research can be expensive and tricky, but there are a few places you can get it for nothing or at a very low cost.

The Office for National Statistics has lots of generalist reports available to view for free and is a great starting point for research. Salience also has a number of free industry reports available, covering a range of industries from fashion to tech and everything in between. Think with Google has some great consumer insights, info on marketing strategies, and tools available to help you craft awesome content.

Test it!
You can do all the research in the world but there’s no point if you never actually do anything with it. So once you’ve got all the info and have created a content schedule, it’s time to start testing. Try out different formats, timings, and platforms to see what works best for your audience. We recommend giving it a minimum of three weeks to truly see what’s working and what needs to be tweaked. This gives your audience enough time to get used to the new content and start reacting to it.

If you’re still struggling to get your audience engaged, we can help! We offer audience sessions and Instagram audits to help you get people reacting. Book a free call to find out more.

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Thanks to Drew Beamer for the photo.