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How to Use BuzzSumo for Your Content Marketing Strategy

How-to-use-BuzzSumo-for-your-content-marketing-strat

A powerful content marketing campaign can touch your consumers on a deeper level. It can make your brand resonate with people, and ultimately, make them purchase your product. In today’s online consumer landscape, a successful content marketing strategy is all about understanding what your target audience wants, and then offering them exactly that.

You may have the entire marketing toolset but, to achieve real success with content marketing, you need to rely on compelling data. As a marketer, you will need powerful insight that can help you develop an effective content strategy and create brand messages that will stay with the consumer.

If you don’t want to waste your customer’s time, and your money, you will need to adopt a data-driven content creation process. With the right information on hand, you can learn more about your target audiences and their preferences. For instance, what do they like to see online, what topics are trending or which influencers do they love to engage with and follow?

Your Content Strategy Goals

The insight-driven approach is closely related to the actual goals of your content marketing strategy. You have to ask yourself if you’re using the right data to create your content. And do you create content with a specific purpose in mind (website traffic, better conversion rate, more sales)?

Once you define your content goals, you will need to assess if your strategy is aligned with your goals; and whether or not you have the right content that can help you achieve them. Depending on your customer’s buying stage and your sales funnel, you may need to use different types of content at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You’ll need to find the right type of content and analyze what worked for the successful ones.

Related: Creating Content That Your Audience Will Love and How DevriX Can Help

Why Buzzsumo Matters When It Comes to Content Strategy?

Social media and internet insight are extremely powerful weapons when it comes to a successful content marketing process. The best proof of its power is social sharing count. So, how can you discover the best-performing content in a given niche?

Entering BuzzSumo, a compelling online tool for marketers that can transform your content marketing process with information on popular topics in any niche and from any given domain. BuzzSumo can provide you with the content you need for your target audience. So, how powerful is BuzzSumo?

Well, without a tool like BuzzSumo, you can spend days searching the internet for brand and competitor mentions plus content. Just by entering your search preferences and criteria into the tool’s input, BuzzSumo analyzes the online content for you and finds the pieces that will work the best for your content marketing strategy.

Related: Content Marketing Strategy And The Potential Role Of Big Data

How Can BuzzSumo Help You in the Development of a Content Strategy?

Want to know what the consumers are talking about in a given niche? BuzzSumo has got you covered. It can show you the titles that received the most attention online. BuzzSumo analyzes the topic and online discussions, and as a result, the tool ranks the data starting from the one that got the most attention.

What about industry influencers? You know, the ones people read, watch and listen to the most. BuzzSumo can find them for you and rank them by their public attention. Furthermore, it can provide you with data on who to follow as a part of your campaign.

Everything else, from content alerts to competitor content strategy analysis, is a part of this impeccable marketing tool. And by knowing the value, the hours saved by using BuzzSumo for each stage is worth your time discovering the possibilities of BuzzSumo and how to use it properly for your content marketing strategy.

1. Developing Your Content Plan

BuzzSumo can provide you with important information that can improve your content research and planning process at any given stage:

  • Defining Content Goals – Make sure that you have the right target audience at hand, that you want to increase your website traffic, brand awareness, convert more leads, and spark brand engagement.
  • Creating a Content Plan – This is the phase where you review your content data and you plan future pieces. This is the moment when you decide what you want to produce to excite and engage customers, and whether or not it is curated content or your own.
  • Planning Content Distribution – Here you make the decision on the platforms that you will use to pitch and promote your content. This can be your own website (blog), guest posting on relevant sites, YouTube videos, Facebook, LinkedIn posts, etc.
  • Creating a Content Calendar – When you form your content strategy, you’ll have to set the frequency of new content, themes, and the publishing schedule.
  • Identifying Industry Influencers – These are the main people that you want to connect with. They can promote and share your content with their audience, which hopefully becomes your target audience too.
  • Set Content KPIs to Monitor – To measure and improve your content marketing campaign performance, you’ll need to track and analyze certain metrics such as downloads, shares, views, leads, and comments among others.

BuzzSumo can help you through every stage of your content development process, including the beginning where you need to generate your content topics and ideas. This tool can also help you discover the best platforms to publish on, key industry influencers, and even the best time to post content on social media.

Basically, your plan will be determined by one key question: What are you going to talk about? Luckily, BuzzSumo is here to answer it for you.

Your target personas are the most important pieces of your content marketing puzzle. Your efforts will become much more aligned with your business and marketing goals if you know what your target audience wants, and what are their problems are. This will directly result in creating answers to your target persona’s questions and solving their problems along the way.

When you know who your target clients are and what their needs are, then it’s easy to discover what kind of content resonates with them. You just enter the topic keyword in BuzzSumo, and it will give you a list of results with the most popular data about the topic and about the authors of that content.

Related: Top 10 Facts for Better Content Strategy in 2018

2. Finding the Top Content in Your Niche

If you’re stuck during your content process, don’t worry. BuzzSumo is here to help you out. You can always start out by discovering what topics are most shared and resonates the best with your audience. Just open BuzzSumo and use the top search bar to find the most shared content about a topic.

For example, let’s take, “Entrepreneurship”. BuzzSumo will show you a list of the most shared content on the topic.

With BuzzSumo, you can also check what type performs the best on any given social network. For example, if you look up the same topic as above, you can see that on LinkedIn, the articles about entrepreneurship are more globally focused instead of being geared towards advice and personal development.

On BuzzSumo, you can also refine your search, to add and exclude words. You can add UK or USA to Entrepreneurship and as a result, you will get relevant articles from the UK or USA on the topic. This is one of the most powerful features of BuzzSumo, and it can be extremely helpful for your business because you can learn what resonates the best in any given area.

3. Researching Your Competitors

BuzzSumo allows you to easily keep track of your competitors and their content performance. For instance, you can see how their content performs when it comes to social sharing, what is shared the most what formats works the best for your competitors, and who are boosting their content online.

In BuzzSumo, you can also refine your search to see what is popular on authority sites such as Forbes, Inc or Entrepreneur. You just need to enter the domain name of the authority publication and the keyword that you want to search for. It’s that easy!

The most popular content on these authoritative sites should be your guideline to how to construct your own content. For example, you could research the banking industry and articles on authoritative sites such as “International Banker” to see the latest banking articles that resonate with audiences.

You can also set up a single search to find the most popular content across a number of industry sites using the OR operator.

As a business, you probably have a specific list of competitors that you want to investigate to make sure that you can learn from their approach and see whether your content resonates with the audience better.

4. Reviewing the Competitor’s Most Shared Content

Now it’s easier to review your competitors. Just type the domain name of your competitor into the BuzzSumo search bar and voila, BuzzSumo will find the most shared content across the internet for that specific domain.

You will also see the content headline, the type of content and where it gets the most traction. You can then sort it by the number of total shares and by the most shared content on social networks.

5. Filtering Competitor Content Search Results

With BuzzSumo, you can also filter your competitor’s content by most shares in a month, a day, or in the last 24 hours. This is where you discover if your competitors are following a specific industry trend.

You can also filter the search by content types such as article, infographic, and video in order to see the best formats where you can focus your creativity on.

6. Find out Who Shares Your Competitor’s Content

Every business owner dreams of stealing away their competitors’ customers and fans. Well, with BuzzSumo, you can actually see who these people are by clicking the “View Sharers” button after you perform a specific content search. This will give you a list of influencers that shared content. And guess what, they can possibly be your supporters too.

BuzzSumo merges perfectly with Twitter! You can sort the industry influencer list by the number of followers, retweets, share ratio and authority. After you complete your list, you’ll need to find the channels where you can communicate with these people. Don’t worry, BuzzSumo has got you covered for that too! BuzzSumo shows you whether or not you already follow these people on Twitter, and if you don’t, it gives you the option to follow them and add them to a specific Twitter list.

Related: 50 Best Tools for Successful Content Marketing

7. Analyzing the Content of Your Competitors

Want to fully inspect the performance of your competitor’s content? You can do it with BuzzSumo! With BuzzSumo’s Pro version, you can run a comprehensive content analysis and generate a detailed report.

By simply entering your competitor’s domain name, you will have a detailed report that shows the total number of articles published in a specific period, the average shares per post, and a breakdown by different content type.

8. Comparing Your Competitor’s Content Performance

With the BuzzSumo Pro version, you can also do a competitive content performance comparison where you can easily compare the content that is published on your domain and the content that is published on your competitor’s domain address. This report will give you comparison data such as:

  • Total number of articles and posts
  • The entire number of social shares
  • Average number of shares
  • Shares by social network
  • Shares by content type

This is one of the best ways for you to benchmark your content performance and learn more about your competitors in the process.

9. Creating Competitor Content Alerts

With BuzzSumo, you can set up alerts to track your competitor’s content and be informed of their latest content marketing pieces on time. There are 3 main alert types that you can use in BuzzSumo in order to track your competitors:

  1. Brand Alert – This type of alert uses your competitor’s brand name as a keyword. It will alert you to whenever the brand is mentioned online such as in an article or blog.
  2. Domain Alert – By using the Domain Alert you can be notified every time your competitor publishes content. This saves you time as you don’t have to visit your competitor’s site every day and inspect it for new content.
  3. Link Alert – Setting up a Link Alert will notify you every time a site publishes a link to your competitors. This will give you an overview of why they linked to your competitors and will open up new link building opportunities for you in the process.

By doing this, BuzzSumo will make you feel like a spy when tracking your competition, and lets you compare the performance of each competitor’s content. Furthermore, this is a very handy option that’s extremely helpful when it comes to benchmarking your content. The best content marketers in the world track and beat their competitors, by researching and amplifying the data to improve their content in the marketplace.

10. Find the Most Recent Trending Topics

It’s easy to find the most recent trending topics with BuzzSumo. For instance, you can look up the topic “car prices”. The results will show you the most popular articles for the last year. The list is huge. But you’ll want the most recent topics, so with BuzzSumo, you can set your search preferences for the last month, week, or even for the last 24 hours!

find-the-most-recent-trending-topics

You can also set your search for an exact date and see what type of content was the most popular at that moment. With this option, you can then decide whether it’s a good idea to share it or create a similar piece of content. BuzzSumo also allows you to export your data so you can have it on hand when you’re not in the office.

11. Developing Content Ideas

So, how can your BuzzSumo research help you with the development of your content ideas? Well, it can help you:

  • review the headlines that you’re working on.
  • take a popular topic and apply it to the development of your own content.
  • create an alternative or contrary viewpoint to a popular topic or headline.
  • find a popular topic and create a different format such as infographic or video.
  • identify opportunities for longer form posts.
  • find gaps and fill them with your own content.
  • see how content evolves in a niche and try to figure out topics that will work for the future.

12. Finding the Influencers That Can Share Your Content

Anyone can share your content, but not every content share is the same. For instance, imagine if you own a sports apparel shop, and you want an athlete or someone that trains regularly to wear your sports clothes. That person can then share a picture wearing the clothes on his or her Instagram account.

What if the athlete has only 300 followers? Would that increase your brand recognition? Increase your sales? We highly doubt it. But, if you reach out to a top athlete with more than 50,000 followers, you may increase your brand recognition overnight. That’s how influencer marketing works.

BuzzSumo is here to help you find the top influencers in a given niche. It makes it easy to identify and find the people that share content similar to yours, have the same interests, as well as a large number of followers and have industry authority.

There are four main filters that you can use to find industry influencers with BuzzSumo: Active Influencers, Ignore Broadcasts, Verified Influencers only and the ones that have an Instagram profile.

13. Finding Influencers in a Specific Topic Area

Start the search by going to the influencer tab. Then type your topic into the search bar and BuzzSumo will provide you with a list of influencers, starting with the most relevant one. You can then sort this list by the number of followers, retweet and share ratio, reply ratio, or page authority if they own their own blog and website.

You can also filter the influencer list by location if you’re looking for influencers from a specific geographic area. The location filter will appear on the left-hand side of BuzzSumo.

14. Searching for Employees of a Specific Company

Here you can enter a company’s Twitter ID into the search bar, and BuzzSumo will find all the people with the @Company in their Twitter bio. On this list, you will find the people that currently work at that specific company and the people that worked previously for the company, but still, have the company listed in their bio. If these people are still relevant and influential in their field, you got yourself an outreach list.

15. Searching for Influencers That Share Content from a Specific Domain

If you go to the BuzzSumo “Content Search” tab and type in a specific domain name, BuzzSumo will return a list of the most shared content. After that, you can click the “View Sharers” button to get the list of people that shared the article.

16. Finding Influencers That Share Competitor Content

Again, you can go to the content search tab and search for your competitor’s domain. BuzzSumo will give you a list of your competitor’s most shared content. You can then click the “View Sharers” button to get the top list of people that shared your competitor’s content. And if you have a similar piece of content, or even a better one, you can ask them to share yours too.

17. Engage with Influencers

You can follow the top influencers on social media or make a list of their contact information in Excel. As you find new popular content, add some new influencers to your list and connect with them regularly. You need to do this because you want to build a relationship with these people. To build a relationship with an industry influencer you need to:

  • Tweet and share their content.
  • Mention them when you share their content.
  • Ask them for an interview for your website or blog.
  • Ask them to write a guest post for your website.
  • Collaborate on a content piece.

engage-with-Influencers

Before you reach out to an influencer with your content, you will need to figure out what motivates them and what value you can provide so that they can agree to a collaboration with you. Working with influencers in an industry is not just about link building and improving your SEO. Influencers can also help you promote your content and add further value to your target audience. If your content has value, they will promote it and amplify your message in the process.

18. Benchmark Your Content

Start by taking the average shares from a competitor’s site to see what type of content works for them the most. With BuzzSumo, you can create a detailed analysis. For instance, you can find out how many shares you need in order to reach the top 50 articles list. This information is extremely useful when it comes to benchmarking your content goals, running your content reports, seeing how your content performs in comparison with your KPIs and tweaking where you need to improve.

19.Curate and Aggregate Content

Your content marketing strategy can also include sharing high-quality content, that is not your own but come from authoritative publications in your industry.

This will demonstrate your knowledge and expertise to your target audience and will establish you as a knowledgeable leader in the industry who shares quality and educative content.

With BuzzSumo, you can save your content in a separate list, organize the content by topic, by project, by client, and chronologically by the date of publishing.

20. Content Distribution

Before you decide what type of content you’re going to create, you also need to find the best channels to promote your content in advance. You need to figure out what are the best days to publish your content and how to connect with the top industry influencers on social media. This data is vital if you want to reach your target audience.

BuzzSumo can help you determine where to promote and share your content. With it, you can research the best social networks to use and what are the most optimal days and times of the day to post.

It is easy for BuzzSumo to find the top influencers in your niche and the places where your target audience is. But, the engagement part is entirely up to you! You’ll need to connect and engage with people online to make them notice your content and start sharing it with their audiences. You can opt to offer them a certain amount for sponsorship, but it’s much healthier for your brand if everything happens organically through a developed relationship.

Bottom Line

Using BuzzSumo is just the beginning of your content marketing strategy. It can help you boost your content marketing strategy by creating alerts that can notify you as soon as you or your competitors are mentioned in the industry. You can compare your data with your competitors to see if you’ve improved your content marketing strategy.

Also, your content marketing strategy doesn’t end after the initial analysis or with researching the best topics and channels where you can promote your content. Creating and developing a content marketing campaign is an ongoing process that you need to keep improving if you want to become a thought leader in your target market.