5 ways to know what content your audience wants to consume
Creating and repurposing content is only rewardable if your audience loves them. If they don’t, you’ll waste all your time and effort investment.
You don’t want, do you?
So, to help you, here are the five ways to know what content your audience wants. You can then create accordingly.
1. Check analytics
One of the best ways to know your audience’s preferences is to use your analytics to find what previously worked and what didn’t. Specifically, look for content with the most views, comments, likes, and shares. Then, duplicate the same strategy you used for creating such content.
Start with checking your Google Analytics to view the top-performing blog posts. Similarly, browse your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube analytics to find the most popular content.
2. Talk to your sales/customer service rep
Your sales and customer service people are constantly in touch with your customers. Due to frequent communication with them, they know their most pressing problems, what’s working for them, and what product features will convert them into paid customers.
Your job is to pull this data from your sales team and create a content marketing strategy to create content around those topics. For example, ask your sales/customer service team the top five problems your customers want to solve urgently and start creating content (how-to guides, YouTube tutorials, social media posts, podcasts) around them.
Plus, create more case studies (post customer testimonials) around the topics to persuade people to try your product/service.
3. Ask your audience
The sure-shot way to know what your audience prefers is to ask them. Post an open-ended question like “What content do you want to read more of?” on social media. Then, engage with the replies to find your future content topics.
For example, if someone replies, “I want to read how to grow blog visitors.” It’s a vague reply. So, you can follow up, saying, “What are your current problems that are not allowing you to grow?” They will reply with their issues, and you’ll uncover the specific topic upon further probing.
Another way is to poll your audience. Provide 3-4 options and see what your audience wants. Here’s an example of Buffer doing the same.
Alternatively, you can even survey your audience. A simple question like “Which topics do you want to read/view more content from [your company name]?” with 5-6 options would do. Ask your website visitors, email subscribers, and social media audience to participate in the survey and answer their content preferences.
4. Learn from your competitors
Note your competitors and see which of their content (on different platforms) performs the best. If you have a similar audience, what worked for them, chances are it will work for you, too.
You’ll know what content their audience prefers (see the content with more views, likes, and comments) — so you can create similar ones.
For Twitter, use can use Twemex to find the best tweets/threads of anyone.
Similarly, use BuzzSumo to find the most popular content on any keyword. For example, type “content marketing,” and you’ll see the content with the most shares.
You can even type in your competitor’s URL and filter results by “top engagement,” “number of links,” or “Facebook shares” to see which content of their receives maximum engagement.
For example, I typed in ahrefs(dot)com, and here are the results.
Likewise, use Ahref’s Content Explorer to find “top-performing content” in your niche. Create content accordingly.
5. Browse social media groups
Facebook, Slack, LinkedIn, and other online groups and subreddits are the perfect places to find content ideas.
All you have to do is to join your niche group and interact with members to discover what content they would like to read. You can even monitor the hot topic discussions to create content around them.
That was it! Now you know how to find your audience’s content preferences. After you know what they are, note down the frequent requests and start creating content.