Content Discovery – Discover The Content Your Audience Craves

What exactly is Content Discovery?

This article is letter (D) of our “Discover Content" series where we write an article for each letter of the phrase. “Discover Content" uncovers how online content is discovered, circulated, and shared. Find links to more articles in the series below.

Online, it’s the wild west out there. Discovering great content can be like going on a wild content treasure hunt. But what exactly is content discovery? And how can it help bring value to your audience and YOU? One strategy is to find, curate, expand reach & measure results. This is a good way to analyze and understand what you content is doing, what impact it has, and how you can optimize in terms of ROI and value you can expect back from your content.

What Is Content Discovery?

Content Discovery is the process of finding great content that inspires, can make you a better writer, a better marketer, and a better curator. It’s an important process for bloggers and marketers for providing their audience with content they want.

Curation is a key process for finding the best content for your blog, site or social media sites to create awareness of your brand, product or service. It needs to be compelling videos, articles, infographics, etc. The more dynamic the better such as Video Embed. Use the most effective content to get it in front of your audience.

If you already have content then repurpose. Track which content is working well, curate that type of content and rework for other platforms. Take your text content and make it into an active image or animated gif and share on Instagram or turn your content into a video on a YouTube channel. Think outside of the box and what is new and working in the digital media ecosystem.
Another way to get your content discovered is to mention a social media Influencer in your posts. They may find interest in your content and share it with their followers. This will amplify your reach and help define the best content to focus on, create and publish.

Another strategy is reaching out to fellow bloggers in your niche. Check their content and if it is high quality and they have a good quality audience then send them examples of your content and how you feel you both can benefit from sharing.

You should also consider personas. In many cases there can be multiple people involved in buying decisions so you need to create content that speaks to each persona. Understand the pain points or business objectives of your audience and each persona and create content that speaks to them to assist in the branding and decision making process.

What Does Your Audience Want?

Most of the time, your audience won’t straight out tell you what they want. That’s where you use your handy-dandy analytics. Check out your best performing posts and re-create them. Along with using your analytics you can:

Ask your audience
Learn from your industry peers
Use Buzzsumo
Create Marketing Personas
Follow Trends

Analytics is a key to understanding how and which type of content is performing for which audience or persona. There are many good tools including Google Analytics is useful for traffic data or if you wish to have more control of your data you could use Bitly.com with simple short URL at a low cost around $35 a month for basic tracking similar to GoogleAnalytics or Contently with a $3,000 to $25,000 a month cost for a complete system including scheduling. With these disparities in monthly costs it is important to do your research and testing before deciding on a platform.

Look into your social media data and find out what content has been shared the most. This data can be pulled from most social media platforms. Take advantage of this feature and analyze which content is being shared and through which channels.
Whatever platform you choose it needs to clearly show which channels are actively engaging and use this to trigger scoring within your CRM or Automated Marketing to nurture leads and visitors further towards your goals.

There are many factors but you need to understand which content is working and how so you maximize your resources ROI including employees. Doing all this will help you determine which content is worth creating and which content your audience desires.

Tools To Discover And Focus Content

There are many ways to refine your content and it all has to do with engagement. Once you understand what content your audience is interested in engaging with you can then go on to the discovery stage to find the best content for your site, blog or social media posts.

One way to analyze content are to dig into comments on your content or posts, see which content is shared, track pageviews and organic traffic. Organic traffic is created through search engines and social media platforms. This type of traffic can tell you more about your contents reach then paid. They are both important and have a purpose. Organic has a strong impact on your success and the reach and ROI.

Here are some highly recommended content discovery tools.

You also need to be competitive with other companies in the same industry. You want online users to look to your content as the authority. Discovering your content first means need to amplify your reach. Measuring the results and adjusting to success helps you stay ahead of your competition.