You Ask, I Answer: Conducting Research for Content Marketing?

In today's episode, Joe asks, how do you conduct research for a new content marketing project? Where do you start? What steps do you take? And what systems do you use to organize your research and findings? Well it really depends on the project, right?

And how much depth I need to go into. If we're talking about a simple project like a uh narrative blog post uh in something that I have domain expertise in already, uh maybe you know, some basic facts, uh some SEO keyword research, that's about it, and the rest will kind of take care of itself. That's you know, uh about all that you would really need. On the other hand, if you're talking about, you know, a massive project of some kind of a complex piece of work like fiction, for example, um set in a period of time we don't know well. Uh you're gonna be doing weeks or months of research on everything from apparel of the time period to you know world events at the time, whatever it is that you need to make sense of something.

Uh for something like a webinar uh or a presentation, you're going to be framing it out using some kind of content framework. Uh there's many, many to choose from, uh, and then building the pieces like that. In fact, I'll bring up uh example here. This is the uh uh a mind map, right? I'm working on this for a webinar tomorrow, no Thursday.

Um a mind map of how do you outline uh how how to uh think about natural language processing and it's an outline, but it's an outline with movable pieces, and I have four major areas I need to fill out. I have the problem, uh statement, the impact of it, the general solution, uh, which is broken into sort of why what how, and then a specific solution or some examples and case studies. Having a framework of some kind for larger pieces of content is absolutely essential in order to uh to give yourself um I guess a checklist if you will of things to not forget. Right. So this particular framework is adapted from uh originally a sales framework by a guy named Dan Kennedy and uh you know problem agitation general solution the specific solution and the idea is for things like long sales letters or landing pages you would use this to essentially get somebody so worked up and and concerned and then uh you tell them how to fix their problem and of course the solution is you know buy your stuff that framework by itself is actually a really good narrative framework for uh a piece of content marketing a a more complex larger piece so from process perspective uh once you have the topic um you then start to frame out the the intellectual stuff that you're gonna need the materials the raw goods um tools like uh this is mind node for the Macintosh um but there are you know many many mind mapping apps some web based ones uh are a good place to to build out your outline and organize it um I like this for organization now once you've done the organization then it's time to start drafting it and so uh there are tools uh Evernote is one uh I use one called Joplin which is a markdown based tool and you can see here it's it you can keep your uh a notebook of stuff, and then you can keep uh individual pages of of content and graphics and stuff, clippings from uh the web, for example, all these would be things that you'd want to have available uh as you do your research, and then depending on the tool and depending on the output uh you're going after, uh, you may use a tool like Joplin to go straight to a blog post.

Um, or you may end up using a tool, um, Scrivener, for example, uh, if you're building something like a full-size ebook, um, so when you're thinking about conducting research for content marketing, it really comes down to what's the goal of the project, uh, and what is the expected deliverable, the expected outcome. If it's an infographic, you're going to also need to have things like brand style guides, um, colors, uh, acceptable and non-acceptable imagery. Um if you're working with a creative team, there's there will probably be a creative brief involved at some point, and you'll have to fill one of those out and make sure that you have everything you need documented for the creative team to be able to do their work. Um, the more detail you have for something like that, uh the better the project's going to go. So uh most of the time for the the best uh uh outputs I've had from from creative briefs have included things like me white sitting down and whiteboarding out kind of what I have in mind, and then obviously the creative person lending their actual talent as opposed to my you know horrific whiteboard cartoons to turning it into something interpretable, but also being willing to have them say, you know, that's a bad idea, and then proposing something else.

You have to be open to that as well. Um for things like video, storyboarding. One of the things you're gonna have to do is storyboard out what you want to have happen in the video before you shoot it. Um unless you're doing something like you know, the this style of video, we're just sitting down and talking. Uh, but for the most part, even on uh an episode of like this, there's still notes, there's still uh pieces that you gather up.

If you have no other framework for content marketing besides you know, like um a why what how uh you can also do you know six W's, who, what, where, when, why, and how. What what are the pieces that you need to gather in order to be able to answer all those questions? And the larger and more complex a piece of content is, the more you're gonna need a uh something like that in order to make sure you're not missing any pieces. Um the last thing on this is that domain expertise is probably one of the most important pieces to have and to know where you are when it comes to the topic. If you are making a piece of content that for which you have substantial domain expertise, um you will need to do research to essentially to validate, to verify, and to to cite uh facts that you make.

Um it always helps to have some third-party uh references and studies and things, and again, store that in a system like MindNode, for example. Um if you don't have domain expertise, you have to build that, and that is a much larger, bigger thing to do. Um that involves doing a whole bunch of Googling, reading uh papers, particularly on like Google Scholar, uh, getting up to speed on following experts in that field on Twitter, for example, and reading and ingesting their stuff and getting a sense for who are the credible folks within that field. Um and then as you build your content, you're gonna be synthesizing a lot of that information while maintaining all your citations and such. Um building domain expertise takes a long time.

Um if you don't know a field well, expect it to take a minimum, a minimum of 90 days to gather the basics and to start to understand what is important and what's not. When I started putting together a newsletter uh for the coronavirus, it took me a good thirty days just to even figure out who was who, and then following them and then sharing stuff and then reading a whole bunch, and then um finally by the time I was ready to to you know begin sharing on a more regular basis, I felt like okay, I had a good enough lay of the land and a good enough baseline of all the facts that uh I could put together a newsletter that would be still be a good roundup of the content with the disclaimer that I am not in any way, shape, or form an epidemiologist or virologist, any of these things, just a person who collects this information, curates it and and puts it together. But give yourself 90 days to build domain expertise. It takes that long. So good question.

Uh if you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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