How To Create Engaging Content Using Social and Search Data
Matt Bell-Watson • 21 August 2020
How do you create content that engages and motivates buyers? Diageo uses social and search data. Recently, the drinks giant revealed it analyses online conversations and search patterns to inform its brands’ content marketing. Put simply, understanding what your priority audiences are talking about or searching for online can provide great ideas for content and help to drive sales.
Earlier this year, Diageo noticed an increase in people searching for luxurious dessert recipes in the UK. It responded by producing several online recipe ideas for Booze-infused puddings. Taking this a step further, partnering with retailers to add a click to buy button made it easy for consumers to get their hands on all the ingredients and alcohol they needed to get things underway in the kitchen.
But it’s not just consumer brands that can benefit from analysing social conversations and online search behaviour. Businesses that sell to businesses can create content to engage audiences by getting insights into purchase drivers and barriers, and other important decision-making factors.
Listen and Learn: Create Great Content with Social Data
Analysing online conversation can tell you a lot about what your audiences are thinking. Detailed conversation analysis can inform creative activation, campaign strategy and messaging, as well as provide insights into how specific audience groups are responding to your communications.
It’s a smart idea to start by isolating conversation relevant to each of your target audiences. You can do this by creating a panel for each audience. For instance, CIOs or DIY enthusiasts. At a high-level, this can give you some insight into the most talked about topics. Often this relates to general themes such as news, politics or sport, so more detailed analysis is usually required.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat and social listening is no different. These are just three of the ways we recommend approaching conversation analysis to inform content:
Personal Interests
For consumer audiences, analysing conversations relating to hobbies or interests relevant to your business is a good way to go. If you sell swimwear, conversations relating to swimming and beach holidays could be illuminating.
For instance, if you find discussion by concerned mums and dads about girls not wanting to wear swimsuits, it might present an opportunity to create a useful guide for parents about talking to your children about body image issues.
Product or Service Category
Whether you’re selling home security cameras or web hosting for small businesses, people are talking about your product or service category online. They may be in niche forums or review sites, but the conversations are happening and they can give you an insight into your target audience.
You might find that buyers have concerns relating to a must-have feature, specific issue or soon-to-be-introduced piece of legislation. Knowing what matters and where the conversation is happening can help you to create helpful content and promote it in the right places.
A podcast explaining what the EU’s new VAT e-commerce rules mean for online jewellery retailers might not have been something you had thought of, but it could be exactly what your buyers are looking for more information about.
Purchase Barriers or Drivers
Analysing conversation throughout the customer journey is a clever way to pinpoint what prospects want to know at key stages. Understanding the motivations or hesitations your customers have when researching your product or service, could help to create content that provides reassurance and builds preference for your brand.
For instance, if you sell printers, you might find that buyers are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of plastic ink cartridges. A video showing how cartridges are made with waste plastic and where they can be recycled could help your brand stand out online.
Searching for Content Ideas? Try Asking Google
Identifying popular and trending questions is another great tactic. Tools like Google Trends, Answer The Public and SEM Rush can provide you with valuable insights into what people are looking for. Likewise, seeing what people are searching for on your website can be a gold mine of information.
Trending Searches
As with social listening, monitoring search trends relating to personal interest or product or service categories can pay off. By identifying emerging trends, you can steal a march on competitors by creating SEO optimised content that increases your visibility in increasingly important searches.
For example, an increase in searches for ethical investment funds could inspire a new content series, featuring socially responsible businesses that have benefited from investment.
Popular Questions
Identifying questions your audience is searching for relating to your brand, product or service is invaluable. It can provide insight into what customers think about your business (e.g. is Skyscanner legit?), as well as what they are looking for when researching products or services similar to yours.
For example, these are some of the questions that people ask every day about content marketing.
- What is a content marketing strategy?
- How does content marketing drive sales?
- Why is content marketing important for SEO?
Creating content that answers some of these common queries can help you to engage audiences.
How To Create Engaging Content Using Social and Search Data
Matt Bell-Watson • 21 August 2020
How do you create content that engages and motivates buyers? Diageo uses social and search data. Recently, the drinks giant revealed it analyses online conversations and search patterns to inform its brands’ content marketing. Put simply, understanding what your priority audiences are talking about or searching for online can provide great ideas for content and help to drive sales.
Earlier this year, Diageo noticed an increase in people searching for luxurious dessert recipes in the UK. It responded by producing several online recipe ideas for Booze-infused puddings. Taking this a step further, partnering with retailers to add a click to buy button made it easy for consumers to get their hands on all the ingredients and alcohol they needed to get things underway in the kitchen.
But it’s not just consumer brands that can benefit from analysing social conversations and online search behaviour. Businesses that sell to businesses can create content to engage audiences by getting insights into purchase drivers and barriers, and other important decision-making factors.
Listen and Learn: Create Great Content with Social Data
Analysing online conversation can tell you a lot about what your audiences are thinking. Detailed conversation analysis can inform creative activation, campaign strategy and messaging, as well as provide insights into how specific audience groups are responding to your communications.
It’s a smart idea to start by isolating conversation relevant to each of your target audiences. You can do this by creating a panel for each audience. For instance, CIOs or DIY enthusiasts. At a high-level, this can give you some insight into the most talked about topics. Often this relates to general themes such as news, politics or sport, so more detailed analysis is usually required.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat and social listening is no different. These are just three of the ways we recommend approaching conversation analysis to inform content:
Personal Interests
For consumer audiences, analysing conversations relating to hobbies or interests relevant to your business is a good way to go. If you sell swimwear, conversations relating to swimming and beach holidays could be illuminating.
For instance, if you find discussion by concerned mums and dads about girls not wanting to wear swimsuits, it might present an opportunity to create a useful guide for parents about talking to your children about body image issues.
Product or Service Category
Whether you’re selling home security cameras or web hosting for small businesses, people are talking about your product or service category online. They may be in niche forums or review sites, but the conversations are happening and they can give you an insight into your target audience.
You might find that buyers have concerns relating to a must-have feature, specific issue or soon-to-be-introduced piece of legislation. Knowing what matters and where the conversation is happening can help you to create helpful content and promote it in the right places.
A podcast explaining what the EU’s new VAT e-commerce rules mean for online jewellery retailers might not have been something you had thought of, but it could be exactly what your buyers are looking for more information about.
Purchase Barriers or Drivers
Analysing conversation throughout the customer journey is a clever way to pinpoint what prospects want to know at key stages. Understanding the motivations or hesitations your customers have when researching your product or service, could help to create content that provides reassurance and builds preference for your brand.
For instance, if you sell printers, you might find that buyers are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of plastic ink cartridges. A video showing how cartridges are made with waste plastic and where they can be recycled could help your brand stand out online.
Searching for Content Ideas? Try Asking Google
Identifying popular and trending questions is another great tactic. Tools like Google Trends, Answer The Public and SEM Rush can provide you with valuable insights into what people are looking for. Likewise, seeing what people are searching for on your website can be a gold mine of information.
Trending Searches
As with social listening, monitoring search trends relating to personal interest or product or service categories can pay off. By identifying emerging trends, you can steal a march on competitors by creating SEO optimised content that increases your visibility in increasingly important searches.
For example, an increase in searches for ethical investment funds could inspire a new content series, featuring socially responsible businesses that have benefited from investment.
Popular Questions
Identifying questions your audience is searching for relating to your brand, product or service is invaluable. It can provide insight into what customers think about your business (e.g. is Skyscanner legit?), as well as what they are looking for when researching products or services similar to yours.
For example, these are some of the questions that people ask every day about content marketing.
- What is a content marketing strategy?
- How does content marketing drive sales?
- Why is content marketing important for SEO?
Creating content that answers some of these common queries can help you to engage audiences.
[…] It’s also a smart way to identify seasonal spikes in demand or searches that are growing in importance. As we blogged about recently, trending search data can be used to inform and optimise content. […]