How to Use Content Discovery in Your Content Marketing Strategy

20 May 2021

In 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled "Content is King". The phrase has indeed turned into a bit of a marketing mantra, but the concept is still highly relevant – in 2018, 91% of B2B and 86% of B2C businesses relied on content marketing to reach their customers. In his essay, Gates predicted that "...the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate."

While many organisations have chosen to incorporate content in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts and other digital media into their marketing strategy, some have struggled to achieve greater consistency in content production and idea generation. After all, continuously coming up with new concepts and finding the time to turn them into digestible content is time-consuming. Not only that, but in order for your content strategy to be effective, the material has to offer value to your audience.

Inbound marketing best practice dictates that quality over quantity should always be a priority when it comes to content. If you're trying to become a thought leader or a reliable source of information in your industry, you may risk discrediting yourself with customers and quickly losing their interest if you only spam them with sub-par content.

With so much pressure to keep audiences engaged, it's therefore not surprising that 60% of individuals find it hard to produce content consistently. It can also be discouraging when you spend time and effort on writing fantastic blogs or editing excellent videos that never quite seems to get in front of the desired audience. This is where content discovery comes in.

What is content discovery?

When you search online, you're likely to come across two definitions for content discovery. Although they both describe a process of optimising your content and finding larger audiences for your business, they can mean two separate things.

1.Content discovery for target audiences

Content discovery refers to a high level of personalisation that can be achieved through the study of people's search habits. Search engines and content platforms will use predictive algorithms in order to make content recommendations to customers based on their interests and preferences.

For example, an individual's Facebook News Feed will primarily display content based on that person's past behaviours and preference settings. Since there is already so much data on the internet, content discovery makes it possible for businesses and organisations to target their message at specific audiences and help them to access the information they're looking for almost intuitively – normally, such posts can be boosted by means of paid advertising so that they can appear in front of the right audience at the right time.

2.Content discovery for marketing topic and content search

It's likely that you'll also come across a second definition of content discovery referring to the process of finding relevant and current topics in your niche that can be used as inspiration for your own content creation or to simply accumulate links to add to your content schedule and share with your audience. This eliminates the need for you to consistently come up with fresh content and instead puts you in the position of becoming an industry knowledge base for your leads and prospects, pointing them towards interesting and relevant information around the questions they're looking to have answered.

What tools do marketers need for content discovery?

If you don't want your incredible content to get lost in the downpour of daily digital publications, there are various platforms which you can use to gain insights into your audience's search habits and preferences – SEMRush, Google Trends and Answer The Public, for example. You can use this information to make sure you’re always creating content that speaks to your buyer’s pain points and interests.

As part of your content strategy, you should look at leveraging all the channels available to you in order to get your content and ideas out to the world. You can use scheduling tools like Hootsuite or HubSpot to automate the release of your content across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This will decrease admin time and help to ensure that your content is seen and heard by audiences as soon as it's been published.

If we're talking about content discovery tools to help you generate ideas, however, then we're looking at platforms such as Buzzsumo, Reddit and Feedly. These tools will allow you to browse the top stories around the topic that relates to your business or campaign. You can view analytics to see how these stories are performing so that you can deliver the most readworthy content to your audience.

If you're keen to ramp up your content efforts, it's essential to start with an effective content plan. Our team of experts can help you to develop an individual BEE. CONTENTPLAN, specifically tailored for your target audience, sales funnel, and business goals. We'll take the time to understand your company and the buyer personas you look to attract with your products and services.

From there, we will use all the relevant content discovery tools to help you identify the headlines and topics you should include in your strategy, as well as the third party publications that can fit around your strategy and help you drive even more traffic to your website. To start building your content plan with us today, just click here.