Great content cannot drive business results unless it resonates with your audience. The foundation of such content lies in research.
However, all research is not made the same.
For creating content with an edge, research must dig deep into your audience’s mind in a timely and meaningful way.
In this article, we’ll introduce you to some terrific content research tools to dig deep into your audience’s minds and discover powerful content ideas.
What is content research?
Dictionaries define research as “systematic investigation.”
This is what content research is all about – a systematic investigation and analysis of online content to build new understandings and generate new ideas.
Content research encompasses all facets of content on the web:
- What users search for (keywords)
- What they consume (content created by others, online and beyond)
- What they have to say or how they feel about a thing (comments, reviews, ratings, etc.)
Examining all this information reveals insights into your audience’s desires, needs, and pain points. Plus how you can provide value to them.
Consequently, you get new content ideas more likely to resonate with your target audience and drive returns for your business.
Several tools can help expedite your content research process, tap into your audience’s mind, and find out what they want to read about.
Let’s look at some of the best ones out there.
Best tools for content research
1. AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is, as they call it, “a search listening tool” that gives you a peek into the market and customers.
By entering a topic, brand, or product name, you discover the phrases and questions people query in Google searches.
What makes it different from other tools is the format in which it presents the results, giving you the context of a search. It segregates the data into “Questions,” “Preposition,” “Comparisons,” “Alphabeticals,” and “Related” categories, helping you understand search intent.
It is an excellent tool for high-level content research. Its data segregation and presentation make it easy to analyze and accelerate content ideation.
Another great thing about this tool is that it eliminates the noise and provides more meaningful, content-focused insights, unlike other tools.
While you can perform limited searches daily for free on AnswerThePublic, it might be limiting for you if you have loads of keyword research to perform regularly.
Here’s a glimpse of the insights you get from this tool.
2. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo calls itself an “all-in-one content marketing tool.” Rightly so, because it lets you do content research, find influencers, track trends, and more.
It is one of the best content research tools because of the depth of data it provides for every query. It analyzes billions of online articles and social media posts and the engagement data for each.
Not only is its data based on real-time updates, but it also compares trends over the last 5 years for a particular keyword. Various filters help you gather insights into your audience’s preferences, such as the content format or publishing channels.
Moreover, it also has features to help you keep pace with your competitors. It helps you discover competitors’ top content and stay in the know of their content moves with instant alerts.
Using BuzzSumo Content Ideas Generator, you can quickly generate content ideas for your brand.
Overall, BuzzSumo is a comprehensive tool for approaching content research holistically. You can take advantage of its 30-day free trial to see how best it fits your content strategy.
Here’s what your content research may look like with this tool.
3. QuestionDB
One of the best ways to dig deep into your audience’s minds is to find out the questions they ask. QuestionDB helps you do just that.
With a simple keyword query, you can search for the questions people ask about that keyword. QuestionDB returns an exhaustive list of questions based on real-time online data.
These questions not only serve as a highly relevant research point but also help you discover your audience’s pain points, needs, and wants. Further, you can uncover content ideas that will resonate with them.
One of the most powerful aspects of this tool is its simplicity and ease of use. However, this tool is not the best answer if you’re looking for in-depth insights into engagement metrics or SEO.
Nevertheless, QuestionDB can be a valuable tool in your content arsenal to understand your audience, ideate, and create helpful content for them.
Its free plan limits the results to 50 per search. Based on your requirements, you may consider its paid plan to deep dive.
Here’s a glimpse of content research for “essential oil” on QuestionDB.
4. Exploding Topics
On our list of terrific content research tools, Exploding Topics is another remarkable one. It is a database of trending topics across the internet – much like Google Trends, yet different.
It analyzes searches, conversations, and mentions over the web to identify rapidly growing topics. You can search for topics by categories and see past trends of a topic, way back to 15 years or as latest as the past 1 month.
Along with discovering emerging topics in your industry, you can also analyze a specific topic’s volume and growth trend by querying its database.
What differentiates it from other content research tools is that it helps you spot not-so-obvious content opportunities. Its simplicity and ease of use are other plus points.
However, you may find it limiting if you expect an exhaustive list of related topics to show up.
Their weekly newsletter sends a curated list of trending topics with in-depth analysis. You might want to subscribe if you wish to go deeper into the what, how, and why of a trend.
If you feel the need, you can go for its Pro plan which gives access to the complete database, meta trends, premium trends, and more.
Check out an example of the data you get by querying a topic. Here, I searched for “essential oil.”
5. Google Trends
Google Trends has been one of the most popular content research tools. It still is quite a goldmine of Google search data.
While other tools on the list pretty much scour the entire internet, Google Trends is focused on the Google search engine and its other products like YouTube.
It analyzes search queries on Google Search to show the volume of searches across regions and languages. It also shows the comparison trend for a particular topic over time.
Since Google is almost synonymous with the web, using it for your content research is definitely worthwhile. A simple query presents the graph of interest of the audience over time for the search term.
It also shows a list of related popular topics. Furthermore, you can compare the data with another search term (check out the example in the image below).
And, the best part it is a completely free tool.
6. Social Listening
Digressing a little from software-based tools, the next on the list is hands-down one of the most powerful tools – social listening.
Social listening is the process of tracking conversations around your brand, industry, or audience on social media.
While some of the tools we discussed above do it for you, it is always a good idea to approach it firsthand. These tools may scrape huge amounts of data in seconds, but they often lag in providing a deeper context.
Whether it is Reddit, Quora, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, or LinkedIn, the posts and comment sections are a goldmine of insights.
Keeping an eye (literally, your ear for social listening) on the conversations of your target audience or potential customers helps you tap into their minds and dig out their needs, pain points, and much more.
Other than social media channels, you may also discover these data points from product or service review websites, reviews on e-commerce sites, forums, or any community media relevant to your business.
Riding on our example of “essential oil,” check out this Reddit post. You can make out a pain point (removing oil stains) and a content idea that the audience may find valuable.
To sum it all up…
Content research attuned to your audience is an essential part of your digital marketing strategy that you can’t afford to overlook. Content research tools can take you a long way in making this process simple and efficient.
There are plenty of such tools available, but picking the ones that work for you is the key. Using a mix of two to three tools can prove to be even better. I highly recommend keeping social listening in the mix.
I hope this handpicked list of tools gives you a jumpstart in the right direction. Stick around for more insights from the world of content.
