Content Gap Analysis

A content gap analysis is a strategic approach to evaluating and enhancing website content. It involves comparing current content performance against desired goals, identifying gaps, and defining actions to bridge these gaps. This analysis helps businesses uncover hidden potentials, optimize existing content, and create new content, leading to more efficient content marketing, increased ROI, and higher profits.

Existing Content

The initial step in content gap analysis involves setting strategic goals, such as boosting SEO visibility, increasing traffic, or enhancing user and social signals. In the e-commerce sector, the focus might be on improving conversion rates targeting specific audiences or sales funnel stages. An inventory of all content, including performance data, is conducted. Tools like Conductor Insights make performance measurement straightforward, identifying well-performing content and areas with untapped potential. Quick-win URLs on the second page for strong keywords are highlighted, and underperforming content becomes visible for further analysis. Content is categorized into keep, delete, and optimize groups.

New Content

The next phase of the analysis identifies content gaps: Does the existing content meet all target audience needs and cover relevant topics? Is there content for every sales funnel phase or customer type? Business goals are considered to determine what new content is needed to meet user requirements and interests. This involves comparing current content against company-defined targets, using personas to understand user needs and behaviors. Adding business goals ensures content includes effective calls to action. This matrix reveals unmet user requirements.

Resources Thanks to Market Research

In content marketing, addressing every customer individually is impractical, so identifying personas and user groups is crucial. Market research helps identify these personas and gather feedback on the website. Understanding who the buyers are, their interests, and what they seek on the website reveals missing elements and potential opportunities. If resources are limited, data-driven approaches offer insights. The Conductor Intelligence Platform aids in researching topics and creating high-quality content aligned with user interests. Promising topics can be identified to enhance search engine presence, analyzed for semantic relationships, rankings, seasonality, competitiveness, search intention, and sales funnel phases.

Various viewing options facilitate creating content that addresses previously neglected topics, enabling the creation of content that aligns with page purpose, meets user expectations, and considers purchase cycle phases. Publishing content at peak demand ensures relevance, as it's delivered at the right time to the right audience. Competitor analysis through the Searchmetrics Content Experience compares your content with benchmark domains, revealing performance gaps and opportunities to develop high-potential topics. Ultimately, strategic measures are defined to bridge differences and achieve desired conditions.

What is content?

Content marketing primarily uses online content, including text, images, or video. Typical content marketing elements include:

• E-books: This format is popular in content marketing. E-books allow for in-depth exploration of a topic. E-book content can be shared an unlimited number of times. Unlike traditional books, it allows for the addition of links for further integration with other relevant online content.
• Guides: This popular text format allows for precise targeting. The added value is already created. Distribution is typically achieved through search engine optimization.
• White Papers: A white paper approaches a topic similarly to an ebook, but typically explores an aspect in more detail and proposes a solution.
• Blog Posts: Whether on a corporate blog or as a guest post on another blog, blog articles provide an opportunity to present topics from a subjective perspective. Blog readers can also respond to the content through comments.
• Infographics: These graphically-oriented materials allow even complex concepts to be clearly presented. The advantage of infographics is that they are very easy to share via social media, with a higher likelihood of virality.
• Research: Whether individual case studies or extensive surveys, research is a very neutral and serious element of content marketing. Depending on the content, companies can achieve significant attention and build trust with the relevant target group.
• Newsletters: Email newsletters can be very effective for content marketing, as subscribers are already engaged. Target groups can also be very precisely segmented using newsletter marketing.

Goals in Content Marketing

Content marketing can serve a variety of purposes, although brand building is often the primary motivation. Goals depend on the corporate strategy and may be part of an online marketing strategy.

• Branding: With content marketing, companies can enhance their reputation, reach, and brand awareness.
• Increased Conversions: Content marketing can significantly increase website traffic, which in turn increases the likelihood of conversion to more desired actions (e.g., a purchase).
• Increased SERP Visibility: Content marketing can increase the number of incoming backlinks and thereby improve rankings for relevant keywords. This can significantly increase SEO visibility of websites in search results.
• Strengthening customer loyalty: Existing customers can be engaged with the company on a long-term basis through content marketing.
• Attracting new customers: Content marketing can expand the customer base.
• Search Engine Optimization: Since online marketing with relevant online content is ideally tailored to the target group, it also sends significantly better user signals than product pages. And these signals are an important ranking factor for SEO.

Implementation of Measures in Content Marketing

As with all online marketing measures, content marketing involves planning, strategy, and design. Typically, it is carried out in the following order:

1. Determining marketing goals
2. Creating target groups and personas
3. Determining the necessary content
4. Determining suitable distribution channels for distributing the content
5. Publishing content on blogs, social media, newsletters, or other websites
6. Evaluating the marketing campaign, for example, using Google Analytics or other tools
7. Optimizing and continuing the campaign

Marketers can either hire an agency for content marketing or plan and implement the activities themselves, depending on their own expertise and personal resources.

Classification of Content Marketing in Online Marketing

Content marketing is often described as a subset of inbound marketing, as it is a pull marketing method. At the same time, content marketing is influenced by many other areas of online marketing. This means that SEO considerations also play a significant role in content marketing.

In terms of content, content marketing is closely related to native advertising, in which advertising is presented as editorially designed content in an editorial environment. Content marketing also shares similarities with storytelling—or storytelling can be part of a content marketing strategy.

Ultimately, content marketing efforts can be combined with other marketing disciplines, such as affiliate marketing, email marketing, search advertising, or social media marketing.

Therefore, content marketing can be used in both the B2B and B2C sectors.