By Kiki Schirr
Content shock is real and in his book, The Content Code
Traditional gap analysis compares the performance of a company or service with its ideal state and attempts to identify the steps to achieve the ideal state. Content gap analysis compares the current content offerings with the desired offerings of the audience and attempts to identify what is necessary to fulfill those desires.
There are four key steps to content gap analysis
Figure out what people are searching for and not finding
The hardest thing to research as you’re doing a content gap analysis is to discover what people are searching for and not finding. Luckily, depending on your type of content there’s usually a tool to help you do this.
- For YouTube—Try finding high relevancy, low competition keywords with services like TubeBuddy ($9/month)
- For Amazon Kindle books—The best tool I’ve found for this is KDSpy (one-time fee $47) which allows you to click on books or keyword searches and see valuable information about purchases and demand.
- For blog posts—The go-to paid service for finding hot blog topics is BuzzSumo (starts at $99/month) that allows you to find out what people are searching for and which influencers have shared similar content in the past. However, some reconnaissance can be done on Google Trends for free, or by signing up for a Google AdWords account and searching keyword competitiveness.
Identify the best content in the market and read their reviews
By identifying the current leader in your market you can establish what people appreciate. Reading the comments carefully, especially the ones with fewer than 5-stars will give you a solid concept of where the current offerings are missing the mark.
Identify the worst content in the market and read their reviews
Reviewing content that’s not doing well will give you an idea of things to avoid doing. Whether its avoiding poor camerawork or unsubstantiated information in a blog post, reviewing the comments on poor content will give you a backward list of all the things you need to achieve in your own content.
Create the desired content
After you’ve identified which search terms or keywords are searched often and not served well and discovered what good content in the field requires, it’s time to set about creating that content.
Good luck with your content creation, I hope that this content gap analysis strategy will help you in the future! Let me know how it goes.
Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com