Any digital marketer knows all too well that these days, it’s not enough to simply build a website and wait for visitors to come to you. In order to successfully attract the attention of your audience and bring in new customers, you must first offer them valuable, engaging content.
However, even the most creative copywriters sometimes overlook certain aspects of their content strategy. This is known as the Content Gap – in other words, it refers to what’s missing from your online presence. Naturally, it’s a big bane for marketers, as it can limit the success of your digital marketing campaign.
Fortunately, there’s an effective way to fill in this gap. A content gap analysis is a handy process that helps marketers to identify and close gaps in their content strategy. If you’re not sure where to get started, in this blog we’ll provide you with some tips on how to successfully perform a content gap analysis in order to outperform your competitors.
What is a Content Gap?
A content gap refers to a ‘lack’ in your content, which means that there is a discrepancy between what users are looking for and what your website actually offers. For example, you may provide a specific product or service that users are searching for, but a lack of optimised content on your site means that they aren’t finding you online.
Content gaps can negatively impact your campaign for a number of reasons, including your website’s position on organic search results, the quality of your user experience, brand awareness and your image. For this reason, identifying and filling the content gap is essential to making sure your website is appealing to users, as well as increasing the volume of traffic from search engines.
What Causes Content Gaps?
Content gaps can crop up due to several factors.
Lack of Coherent Marketing Strategy
Companies that have identified a content gap problem may simply not have a content strategy that simultaneously addresses the needs of its target audience and achieves their sales goals.
A lack of aligned strategy may also imply that proper market research and competitor analysis hasn’t yet been carried out to create an effective long-term content plan. This is an easy way to encounter critical content gaps.
Misunderstanding the Target Audience
Leading on from the last point, misunderstanding who your target audience is and what their needs are means that it’s difficult to create content that meets those needs.
Low Frequency of Content
Even if a company has a meaningful content strategy, their content velocity – or the rate at which you create and share new content to your channels – is too low. This might mean that every need of the target audience isn’t being met, which can also lead to gaps.
No Content Optimisation
Companies often also don’t give due importance to updating and keeping content in an ‘evergreen’ state, which can lead to outdated and incorrect information being left up. Keeping content fresh is crucial to avoid falling short of the competition, especially in industries that are subject to swift, frequent changes.
Why is a Content Gap Analysis Important?
Upon completion of a content gap analysis, you’ll be able to create new content that fills in gaps and provides your audience with the insights they’re looking for. This helps to improve the quality and relevancy of your content, which leads to better engagement and more satisfied users.
Some other big advantages of content gap analysis include:
- Staying ahead of the competition: By identifying gaps, you can create new content that sets you apart from the competition and positions you as an industry leader.
- Saves time and resources: Content gap analysis can help you prioritise your content creation efforts and hone in on topics and questions most important to your audience. This can help save time and resources by avoiding content that may not be relevant.
- Measuring performance: Measuring the effectiveness of your content is also essential for meeting users’ needs. Content gap analysis can help your company make data-driven decisions about how to achieve better results.
How to Perform a Content Gap Analysis
1. Define Your Goals
The first step is to define your brand’s content goals and objectives, as this will help you pick out topics and questions that are most important to your target audience.
When outlining your goals, consider the SMART method.
Answering these questions is a great starting point in any content gap analysis which will help you establish realistic goals for your content strategy.
1. Understand Your Audience
Next, you’ll need to understand your users’ interests, needs and pain points. This will help you to create content that resonates with your audience and provides them with information that speaks to their interests and resolves their problems.
Create buyer personas to gain a better understanding of your audience, and research their online behaviours to find out more about what they’re looking for on search engines and social media.
2. Audit Your Existing Content
Once you clearly understand your objectives and target audience, you can perform an audit of your existing content by:
- Gathering data on its performance
- Analysing your audience’s behaviour on your website and other digital channels
- Comparing your content to your competitors’ content – known as a competitor analysis.
- Performing keyword research
This will help you better understand the areas of your content strategy that need some work.
3. Identify Content Gaps
Based on your analysis of your existing content, you can now identify gaps and areas that need improvement. This might include topics or questions that your audience is searching for, but simply aren’t finding answers to in your existing content offerings.
Identifying your content gaps will help you find new opportunities based on your audience’s interests and pain points. You can then prioritise these gaps based on their relevance to your business goals and audience’s needs.
4. Create New Content
Using your new insights, you can begin creating new content that effectively fills in the gaps that you’ve identified. This can be any form of content that provides your users with the information that they’ve been searching for.
5. Measure the Results
Finally, it’s time to measure the effectiveness of your new content offerings; analyse the performance of your new content by tracking engagement metrics. Leveraging this data will give you a better idea of how your audience engages with your content and identify areas where you might need further improvements. In this instance, you’ll simply need to tweak your content strategy again.
Start Creating Impactful Content Today
Need help filling in your content gaps? At Bigg, our digital marketing specialists can deliver copy that is not only tailored to your business’s tone and voice but also inspires action.
We work with our clients to understand which formats they require well-written, SEO-optimised content for, whether that’s long-form blogs, product descriptions, emails, advertisements or landing pages. You name it, our team can deliver it.
Want to find out more about our content writing services, along with our other digital marketing efforts? Get in touch with our friendly team today.
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