Creating Content Marketing Goodness With Questions

'What do we write about?'

'A editorial calendar isn't important; we just need to write about our products.'

These are just some of the things I've heard from prospects and clients alike. It's a common theme and many companies still don't understand what topics attract readers to their content marketing efforts.

Many believe just pushing out loads of content about their products or services will suffice, but they soon realize that's not an effective strategy.

What works?

Building Content Marketing Around Questions

There are many ways to figure out what your prospects want, but I'm going to touch on just one in this blog post. It's simple, actually: look at the questions your prospects need answers to.

So for content marketing in the forms of email, blogging, press releases, white papers and other content, look at answering the questions of your clients and prospects.

Where to find these nuggets of inspiration?

1. Analytics ' I've talked about content marketing opportunities through analytics before. For instance, look at the keywords your visitors search to find your content. If your blog gets big hits on specific terms, start creating more content around that area.

For me, I've seen a lot of traffic from visitors around keyphrases, including:

'What are benefits of content marketing'

'How blogging benefits business'

'How content builds relationships'

2. Email metrics ' What if you wrote a newsletter on segmenting your email list? Did the open rate go high? What about the click-throughs? Effective lead generation through email requires you digging some and seeing what topics work for your email marketing content.

3. Social search ' Ever search your social networks on what people want? It's not that hard. For instance, try do a search for 'how content marketing benefits business' in Twitter search and see what you find. Now, take that info and go create some content around it, then share it with those looking for the answers in your search.

Do I smell some great lead generation opportunities? Why yes, I do!

Content Marketing With Questions

It may sound simple; wait, it is! Just look around and start putting together a calendar for your content marketing efforts with the questions you find. Then, start building the content and use it to start generating some leads!

What questions have you found in your content marketing search?

Photo credit: horiavarlan