If you want your content to be read by other people (and, let’s be honest, why else would you create it?), you need to do a significant amount of research.

There are no shortcuts when it comes to researching topics for blog posts. Even if inspiration strikes quickly and you feel you’ve got the perfect post already bursting to get out, it’s vital that you take the time to plan exactly how you’re going to write it, the audience at which you’ll pitch it and the form it’ll take.

When researching blog topics, you can use autocomplete to find out what questions people are commonly asking in your niche. If you type in an idea you’ve had for a topic but no results appear, there’s a good chance you’ll struggle to find readers (because, clearly, very few people are searching for the topic in question!).

One of those essential elements is keyword research, as choosing the right keywords to focus on is one of the main ways to increase the number of views that your blog will get. A lot of new bloggers don’t even consider doing keyword research, and because of this, they struggle to get visitors on their blog, no matter how hard they try. The world is not waiting for another medium-quality blog post. Publish something truly original. Make a contribution to your field. Find the truth and share it with the world. Note: This article is part one in a two-part series about original research in content marketing. Next read: 29 Ways to Promote Your Original Research. Or take a look at.

• There’s also Photopin, a site that makes it easy to find free-to-use photos on Flickr. Like Compfight, you plug in your search terms and use the minimal filters at the side to find the images you want, making sure to avoid the stock images at the top of the window. Click on an image to get access to sizes and HTML you can use for attribution.
• Learn how to find post ideas with a strategic and data-led approach that will drive organic traffic to your business blog. From creating topic lists with clusters and performing keyword research for individual article ideas, you will learn how to craft an effective content plan for your blog in this guide.

Great content has become increasingly important in the digital age, and it’s one of the main ranking factors (alongside links) when it comes to achieving a prominent position on Google.

However, as content marketing has evolved and become a more common marketing tactic, many have simply jumped on the bandwagon and started creating content for the sake of creating content.

It’s why, when we ask businesses why they’ve started a blog, they’ll often shrug their shoulders and say something along the lines of “well, we just thought we should”.

This kind of approach is highly unlikely to work. There needs to be thought, reason and strategy behind the stuff you create for the web if it’s to stand a chance of being effective. After all, if it never gets to be seen, the content you create on a whim will be of little use to your search engine optimisation (SEO) or sales efforts.

For content to be seen, it needs to rank organically on Google for specific keywords for which people are searching and attract shares on social media in order to drive more traffic from those platforms.

In this post, we’re going to consider how anyone with access to a laptop or tablet and an internet connection can research blog content that will rank well organically for keywords and be good enough to attract social shares.

1) Brainstorm

Sometimes, the oldest tactics work the best, and brainstorming is a technique marketing departments have relied on for many years to come up with ideas for getting their products in front of as many eyes as possible.

You can do the same during your content planning. All you need is a big scrap of paper and pen (or something of the digital variety, if you prefer), a quiet room and a helping hand if you don’t fancy doing it alone.

Go wild and write down as many ideas as you can think of – even those which at first appear to be somewhat left field or downright bonkers.

Unload your brain; a gem will soon fall from it.

2) Use Google’s autocomplete

Google is far more than just a search engine. Canny content marketers have been using the internet behemoth for far more strategic tasks than simply searching for an answer.

In 2008, Google introduced autocomplete (which was later expanded to Google Instant in 2010). The premise was simple; users would start typing a search term as usual but be met with suggestions for how it might be completed.

The feature was so popular that we all now intrinsically use it when searching the web.

Autocomplete does two things:

• It speeds up searching on Google by reducing the amount of typing required.
• It makes suggestions based on what other people are searching for.

As a content marketer, you should be interested in the latter. Autocomplete uses a prediction algorithm to suggest search terms based on factors such as the popularity of keywords and the ‘freshness’ of search terms.

When researching blog topics, you can use autocomplete to find out what questions people are commonly asking in your niche. If you type in an idea you’ve had for a topic but no results appear, there’s a good chance you’ll struggle to find readers (because, clearly, very few people are searching for the topic in question!).

3) Related searches

Whenever you conduct a search on Google, you’ll be met with ‘related searches’ at the bottom of the listings.

Just like autocomplete, this is intended to help users delve further into the topic of which they’re searching, but it’s also a goldmine of information for content marketers.

If you’ve discovered a search term which looks promising, a quick glance at the related searches section will provide further insight into additional searches people are performing. It’s a great source of inspiration for new posts.

4) Competitor research

What are your competitors writing about?

You may feel that scouring the competition for content ideas is tantamount to plagiarism, but that’s not the case at all. Remember – you’re simply looking for inspiration that will lead you to write a completely unique, fresh take on a topic.

A word of warning, though. Don’t assume that the competition is getting it right with their content marketing campaigns, because they may have researched poorly themselves.

If you find a topic that sparks your interest on a competitor website, use the rest of the tips in this blog to see if they’re onto something. You can also check if their content was successful by asking the following questions:

• Is it ranking well on Google?
• Does it get likes and shares on Facebook and Twitter?
• Is it attracting links from other websites?

5) Good, old-fashioned keyword research

This is a no brainer, yet something many people forget to do when blogging for commercial purposes or to build a significant readership.

Just as you would do for the regular pages on your website, you need to perform thorough keyword research for your blog ideas. There are no special tricks involved, either – it’s just good, old-fashioned keyword research.

Thankfully, you can use your favourite keyword tools to do this, and while we won’t use this blog to go deep into keyword research, we’d recommend having a read through this post for some great advice.

6) Title- and topic-generating tools

We’ll start this tip with a caveat: there isn’t a single piece of software or website out there that will deliver the perfect blog post title for you with a single click of a button.

If that was possible, we’d all be doing it!

However, providing you’re willing to take the answers such tools give you with a pinch of salt and a healthy dose of common sense, they’re still worth taking a look at in order to fuel your inspiration.

Services such as Portent’s Content Idea Generator and Answer The Public will generate titles for you. They’re fun to play with and, occasionally, you’ll spot a gem of an idea among the more daft or irrelevant suggestions.

When you spot something that raises an eyebrow, delve in further by researching the suggested title. Use our other tips above to assess how popular the search term is on Google and whether or not the competition is talking about it.

Providing you discover that the idea is relevant to your target audience and appears to deliver decent search volumes, you may have hit on something.

The takeaway

Remember – if you fail to undertake the steps we’ve outlined above before creating blog content, you’ll risk the following:

• No one being able to find your content;
• People won’t be sufficiently engaged or interested enough to read, like or share your content.

Enjoy the content research process – it’s all part of the joy of content marketing!

Understanding your customers is the key to success for any startup. If you don’t have a deep understanding of who your customers are, you’ll have trouble developing products that truly fit their needs, and you’ll struggle to develop a successful marketing strategy.

This is where a market analysis comes in. It may sound like a daunting and complex process, but fortunately, it’s not.

How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts Instead

What is a market analysis?

A market analysis is a thorough assessment of the current market.

Once completed you’ll have a better understanding of the volume and value of the market, potential customer segments, and their buying patterns, the competition, barriers to entry, and industry regulations.

Why you should conduct a market analysis

Whether you are writing a Lean Plan or putting together a detailed business plan for a bank or other investor, a solid market analysis is expected. But, don’t just do a market analysis because you’re developing a plan. Do it because it will help you build a smarter strategy for growing your business.

Once you have in-depth knowledge of your market, you’ll be better positioned to develop products and services that your customers are going to love. And while diving into market research may seem like a daunting task it can be broken up into four simple elements:

• Industry overview: You’ll describe the current state of your industry and where it is headed.
• Target market: Who are your actual customers? You’ll detail how many of them are there, what their needs are, and describe their demographics.
• Competition: Describe your competitors’ positioning, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Pricing and forecast: Your pricing will help determine how you position your company in the market, and your forecast will show what portion of the market you hope to get.

How to conduct a market analysis

Now, let’s go into each step in more detail so you know exactly what you need for your market analysis.

1. Industry overview

In this step, you’ll describe your industry and discuss the direction that it’s headed. You’ll want to include key industry metrics such as size, trends, and projected growth.

Industry research and analysis is different than market research. When you’re researching your industry, you’re looking at all of the businesses like yours. This is different than market research, where you are learning about your customers.

Your industry overview shows investors that you understand the larger landscape that you are competing in. More importantly, it helps you understand if there’s going to be more demand for your products in the future and how competitive the industry is likely to be.

For example, if you are selling mobile phones, you’ll want to know if the demand for mobile phones is growing or shrinking. If you’re opening a restaurant, you’ll want to understand the larger trends of dining out. Are people eating at restaurants more and more over time? Or is the market potentially shrinking as consumers take advantage of grocery delivery services?

If you’re in the United States, the U.S. Census has excellent industry data available. I’ve also found Statista to be useful. You should also look up your industry association—they often have a wealth of information on the trends in your industry.

2. Define your target market

Your target market is the most important section of your industry analysis. This is where you explain who your ideal customer is.

You may find that through the course of your analysis, that you identify different types of customers. When you have more than one type of customer, you do what’s called market segmentation. This is where you group similar types of customers into segments and describe the attributes of each segment.

You’ll need to start broadly and refine your research by defining the following elements.

Market size

Unlike industry size, which is usually measured in dollars, your market size is how many potential customers there are for your product or service. We’ve got a great method for figuring out your market size that you can read about here.

Demographics

Describe your customer’s typical age, gender, education, income, and more. If you could paint a picture of your perfect customer, this is where you’ll describe what they look like.

Location

Where are your customers located? A specific country, region, state, city, county, you’ll want to describe that here. You may even find that your customer base is segmented based on location which can help you determine where you’ll be doing business.

Psychographics

It’s here that you need to get inside the mindset of your customers, know their needs, and how they’ll react. What are your customers’ likes and dislikes? How do they live? What’s their personality?

This piece can even help you better approach analyzing the competition.

Behaviors

This is essentially an extension of some of your psychographic information. Explain how your customers shop for and purchase products like yours.

Trends

Customer behavior is always changing. If there are trends that you’ve noticed with your target market, detail them here.

Competition

How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts For A

Your market analysis isn’t complete without thinking about your competition. Beyond knowing what other businesses you are competing with, a good competitive analysis will point out competitors’ weaknesses that you can take advantage of. With this knowledge, you can differentiate yourself by offering products and services that fill gaps that competitors have not addressed.

When you are analyzing the competition, you should take a look at the following areas.

Direct competition

These are companies that are offering very similar products and services. Your potential customers are probably currently buying from these companies.

Indirect competitors

Think of indirect competition as alternative solutions to the problem you are solving. This is particularly useful and important for companies that are inventing brand new products or services. For example, the first online task management software wasn’t competing with other online task managers—it was competing with paper planners, sticky notes, and other analog to-do lists.

How you’re different

You don’t want to be the same as the competition. Make sure to discuss how your company, product, or service is different than what the competition is offering. For a common business type, such as hair salons, your differentiation might be location, hours, types of services, ambiance, or price.

Barriers to entry

Describe what protections you have in place to prevent new companies from competing with you. Maybe you have a great location, or perhaps you have patents that help protect your business.

The best way to research your competition is to talk to your prospective customers and ask them who they are currently buying from and what alternate solutions they are using to solve the problem you are solving. Of course, spending some time on Google to figure out what else is out there is a great idea as well.

Step 4: Pricing and forecast

The final step in a market analysis is to figure out your pricing and create a sales forecast to better understand what portion of the market you think you can get.

First, think about your pricing. Of course, you should ensure that your price is more than what it costs you to make and deliver your product or service. But, beyond that, think about the message that your price sends to consumers.

Customers usually link high prices to quality. But, if you are pricing on the higher end of the spectrum, you need to make sure the rest of your marketing is also signaling that you are delivering a high-quality product or service. From what your business looks like to its logo and customer service experience, high-prices should come with a high-quality experience during the entire sales process.

On the other end of the spectrum, maybe you’re competing as a low-priced alternative to other products or businesses. If that’s the case, make sure your marketing and other messaging are also delivering that same, unified message.

How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts Post

Once you have an idea of your pricing, think about how much you expect to sell. Your industry research will come into play here as you think about how much of the overall market you expect to capture. For example, if you’re opening a new type of grocery store, you’ll want to know how much people spend on groceries in your area. Your forecast should reflect a realistic portion of that total spend. It’s probably not realistic to gain 50 percent of the market within your first year.

However, don’t make the mistake of assuming that you can easily get 1 percent of a very large market. 1 percent of a 3 billion dollar market is still $30 million and even though 1 percent seems like a small, attainable number, you need to understand and explain how you will actually acquire that volume of customers.

When you build your forecast, use it as a goal for your business and track your actual sales compared to what you had hoped you would sell. Tools like LivePlan can help you automatically compare your forecast to your accounting data, so it’s easy to do. But, even if you use a spreadsheet, tracking your progress will help you adjust your business strategy quickly so that you can do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t.

Prepare your business with a market analysis

Creating a good market analysis is a very worthwhile exercise. It will help you uncover your blind spots and prepare you to compete with other businesses. More importantly, it will help you understand your customers so you can deliver the best possible service to them.

Looking for some examples of market analysis? Take a look at our free sample business plans on Bplans. There are more than 500 of them across a wide range of industries, and each one of them has a market analysis section.

How To Find And Use Industry Research In Your Blog Posts Using

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