Content Gap Analysis: What is it and How to do it?

As a long-term digital marketing strategy, content marketing helps businesses drive lead generation and conversion activities through the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content. However, a business can boost digital marketing campaigns only by creating and publishing content that potential and existing customers are seeking out on the web.

What is Content Gap Analysis?

Digital marketers use content gap analysis as a strategic method to identify the gap between the content published by an organization and the content desired by the audience. In addition to identifying new keyword opportunities, content gap analysis focuses on mapping digital content to various stages in a buyer’s journey – awareness, consideration, and decision.

According to SpyFu.com, “Content gap analysis is the process of anticipating what content your audience needs, determining how well your own content currently meets those needs and then working to fill in any gaps that exist between those two realities.”

While analyzing the content gap, digital marketers evaluate the performance of a variety of existing content – web pages, landing pages, articles, blogs, ebooks, and social media posts. Also, they bridge the gap by creating fresh content as well as optimizing existing content. Digital marketers identify and analyze content gaps using multiple techniques:

How Do Digital Marketers Conduct Content Gap Analysis?

While conducting content gap analysis, digital marketers focus on evaluating the freshness, readability, understandability, thoroughness, and impressiveness of the content. However, they evaluate and analyze the existing content through a series of steps.

6 Important Steps in In-Depth Content Gap Analysis

1. Define the Target Audience Precisely

Digital marketers conduct a content gap analysis to achieve a variety of goals – increasing website traffic, generating more leads, or boosting the website’s search visibility. They must clearly define the objectives to boost digital marketing strategies by identifying the content gap accurately. Also, they need to define the target audience precisely to understand the customer’s lifecycle.

Digital marketers often define target audiences using existing buyer personas. As a semi-fictional representation of ideal customers, buyer personas depict important aspects of the target audience – interests, needs, behavior, pain points, challenges, and demographics. Digital marketers can define the target audience precisely by mapping out buyer personas.

2. Map the Buyer’s Journey

Most organizations these days generate and nurture leads by aligning digital content to three important stages in a buyer’s journey. They publish content to provide relevant information to the customer during the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. For instance, they influence the lead during the awareness stage through the awareness stage using informative blogs, ebooks, emails, and social media posts.

However, they share product reviews, pricing information, comparison guides, and demonstrations to influence the lead during the decision stage. That is why; digital marketers need to map out the buyer’s journey clearly, after defining the goals and target audience. The mapping will help them to understand the content desired by a lead at each stage in their buyer’s journey while conducting content gap analysis.

3. Conduct Market Research

Digital marketers identify the content desired by the target audience by conducting market research. While conducting market research, they gather feedback and suggestions from industry experts as well as existing and potential customers. They interview some of these industry experts and customers directly while gathering feedback from others by conducting online surveys.

Digital marketers can understand needs and expectations only by gathering information from leads at various stages in the buyer’s journey. They divide the customers and leads into various segments according to their current position on the buyer’s journey. Also, they frame and align the interview questions to each segment of customers.

The information collected helps digital marketers understand how the target audience searches for information, what kind of digital content they prefer, and what information they need. Digital marketers leverage the information to assess the content published by the organization as well as get fresh content ideas.

4. Analyze Existing Content

Digital marketers evaluate the performance of existing or published digital content by conducting content audits regularly. They can make content audit an important step in content gap analysis to identify the content gap. Digital marketers often start content audits by evaluating and comparing the performance of website content.

However, they must map the website content to the buyer’s journey to evaluate their performance accurately. They can evaluate the performance of each piece of content using multiple KPIs – search engine position, monthly traffic, click-through rate, and the number of leads generated.

Based on the content audit results, the website content can be divided into three broad categories – keep, remove, and optimize. They must keep the high-performing content and remove the low-quality or outdated content. At the same time, they must focus on bridging the content gap by updating, revising, or optimizing the average-performing content. 

5. Analyze Competitor Content

After analyzing and categorizing the content published by the business, digital marketers need to analyze the content created and published by competitors. The analysis will help them identify opportunities to outperform competitors by publishing better content. Also, the results will help them to understand what type of content competitors publish and how they move leads to the next stage in the buyer’s journey.

While conducting competitor content analysis, digital marketers often evaluate the performance of content appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). They further evaluate the content’s search performance using both topic and keywords as key metrics. Also, digital marketers use a slew of keyword research tools to find and evaluate content based on keywords relevant to the business.

6. Bridge the Content Gap

Finally, digital marketers bridge the content gap by revamping the existing digital marketing strategies. They share the content gap analysis results through various stakeholders in various forms – documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. In addition to highlighting the performance of different types of digital content published by the business, the results suggest opportunities to boost content performance.

Conclusion

As a multistep process, content gap analysis focuses on strengthening digital marketing campaigns through the creation and distribution of content desired by the target audience. Digital marketers can conduct content gap analysis using a variety of techniques. However, they must bridge the content gap early to meet the needs and expectations of the target audience and influence their purchase decisions.

The SEO content created and published by digital marketers can be broadly divided into two categories – time-sensitive and evergreen. Time-sensitive or seasonal content has a short lifespan and diverts traffic to a website for a short period. On the other hand, evergreen content remains fresh and relevant over a longer time.

Evergreen Content Definition

According to SimpliLearn.com, “Evergreen content is content that remains relevant over time – for months, perhaps years. Much like an evergreen tree never loses its leaves; evergreen content never loses its significance and never goes out-of-date.“

While creating evergreen content, the content creators do not focus on a current trend or hot topic. Instead, they remove the expiry date by creating content that readers will be interested in for many years. While planning SEO campaigns, copywriters these days create a variety of evergreen content. Also, they look for ideas to increase website traffic in the long run by creating evergreen content.

Evergreen Content Examples

Now that we have understood the evergreen content definition, let us look at some of the evergreen content examples.

Why Create Evergreen Content for SEO Campaigns?

Increase Website’s EAT Score

Google uses Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T) as key ranking factors for ranking websites. E-A-T guidelines emphasize on publication of high-quality content. Evergreen content creates opportunities for entrepreneurs to showcase their expertise in the industry.

For instance, an entrepreneur can showcase her expertise by writing insightful articles and blogs on topics related to her business.  The industry experts will make the evergreen content appear on the first page by increasing the E-A-T score.

Generate and Convert More Leads

No business can generate and convert more leads without increasing its website traffic regularly. The evergreen content focuses on questions frequently asked by the target audience. Hence, more readers will read the content to get their questions answered. Hence, it becomes easier for businesses to drive lead generation and conversion by increasing organic website traffic.

Keep Brand Relevant

The open and competitive nature of digital space makes it challenging for digital marketers to keep a brand popular and relevant in the longer rum. They need to implement SEO strategies that increase website traffic and decrease bounce rates consistently. Evergreen content helps them reduce bounce rates by keeping visitors engaged and making them spend more time on the website.

Control Digital Marketing Costs

A business cannot increase organic website traffic without posting time-sensitive content frequently. It needs to deploy additional copywriters to increase the number and frequency of trending and newsworthy content posted on its website. Evergreen content helps businesses to save time and resources.

Evergreen Content Strategy: How to Create Evergreen Content that Increases Website Traffic for Years?

Evaluate the Long-Term Relevance of Topics

Selection of the right topic is the most important prerequisite for evergreen content creation. No copywriter or digital marketer can extend the content’s lifespan without choosing a topic that stays relevant and useful for the target audience in the long run. A copywriter can choose the right topic in several ways.

Don’t Refer to Current Dates or Events

A piece of content becomes time-sensitive when copywriters mention specific events or include specific dates. They often reduce the content’s lifespan by referring to current events or dates. For instance, no copywriter can increase the lifespan of an article or blog by including the term COVID-19 in the topics. Likewise, they cannot create evergreen content by choosing titles like Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2022 that searchers will find outdated in 2023.

Write for Beginners

Many copywriters target experts while creating evergreen content. They should remember that experts do not need assistance or solutions like beginners. Hence, they can keep the content relevant for years only by writing for beginners. Also, they should not use any complicated or technical language that makes beginners abandon the website and look for simpler alternatives. 

Embed Relevant Keywords

While writing evergreen content, copywriters must focus on improving their search performance. They must optimize the content for websites by choosing and embedding the right keywords. However, they should focus on identifying both primary and related keywords. Also, they should include related keywords in the first paragraph and subheadings.

Link the Content to Existing Posts

Digital marketers can optimize the content for search engines by creating internal links. The internal links will make it easier for readers to access relevant and additional information by clicking on the internal links.

Digital marketers can easily create internal links by connecting the new article/blog to specific posts. Here are some good internal linking best practices for you. For instance, they can link an article on white hat SEO techniques to posts on widely used on-page SEO techniques.

Keep the Content Up-to-Date

In addition to publishing evergreen content, digital marketers must focus on keeping the content relevant in the long run. They can keep the article/blog fresh and increase its search visibility by updating the content in a variety of ways – adding more information, removing obsolete information, adding the latest statistics, and changing images. The update will refresh the content as well as change its publication date.

Consider Repurposing the Content

Digital marketers should make the evergreen content reach out to a larger audience by repurposing the article or blog in a variety of ways. For instance, they can share the content by creating an infographic or a video on the same topic. Similarly, they can make people read the content by reposting it on multiple social networking platforms.

Conclusion

Unlike time-sensitive or seasonal content, evergreen content increases organic traffic to a website in the long run. However, digital marketers must make the evergreen content more effective by applying on-page SEO techniques. In addition to picking the right topic, they should focus on embedding the right keywords, facilitating social media sharing, and creating internal links. 

This blog was republished in March 2024.

Many bloggers describe the content as the new oil. B2B and B2C marketers use the new oil to drive lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead conversions. A survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute suggests that 75% of companies already implemented content marketing strategies.

Also, companies have been increasing their investment in content assets and content marketing tools. Your company or startup can run content marketing campaigns to accomplish a variety of goals – create brand awareness, win customer trust, generate leads, and drive sales conversion.

But you should remember that content marketing has been evolving consistently. Marketers find it challenging to create content catering to various segments of target audiences. Likewise, they have to focus on optimizing the content for both search engines and searchers.

You can overcome major challenges by adopting content marketing best practices and monitoring content marketing trends. At the same time, you can make the strategy accomplish predefined goals only by focusing on 9 content marketing mistakes to avoid.

9 Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

  1. Not Understanding the Target Audience

Marketers often ignore the target audiences while selecting topics for content marketing strategies. They primarily focus on search keywords and industry trends. There are many instances when marketers damage brand images by ignoring the target audience.

You can avoid this content marketing mistake by creating realistic reader personas. The reader persona will help you publish relevant content by answering important questions like who will read the content, what information they look for, and how can the content provide the information required by them.

  1. Publishing Only Articles and Blogs

Most content marketing strategies focus on increasing organic traffic by publishing textual content like blogs regularly. But you should remember that readers these days prefer watching videos or listening to podcasts to reading long-form content.

Hence, your content marketing strategy must focus on the distribution and promotion of a variety of digital content – blogs, articles, short articles, checklists, how-to guides, infographics, podcasts, videos, graphics, and social media posts. The multiform content will help you cater to the varying preferences of target audiences.

  1. Ignoring Customer and Marketing Data

Most enterprises these days collect real-time customer data using CRM systems. Likewise, they invest in data analytics to convert website data into actionable insights. However, marketers often forget to plan data-driven content marketing campaigns.

You should remember that data, just like content, is described popularly as the new oil. When you review historical marketing data, it becomes easier for you to understand what did work and what didn’t work. Also, the data will help you increase the ROI by deciding what to publish, when to publish, and where to publish.

  1. Prioritizing Quantity over Quality

Many content marketers still believe that frequent content publication boosts a website’s search visibility. But search engines recommend webmasters publish high-quality content. Hence, no marketer can increase a website’s search engine ranking by publishing content that does not meet Google’s Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) guidelines.

While making content marketing strategies, you should focus on publishing multiform digital content regularly. But you need to ensure that the content published by your organization is fresh, original, and engaging. Your content writers must improve content engagement by elaborate proofreading and plagiarism checking.

  1. Forgetting to Optimize Existing Content

Content marketing is not only about the regular publication of fresh and appealing content. The outcome of content marketing strategy depends on the creation of evergreen content. No organization can publish evergreen content without optimizing the published content.

In addition to publishing fresh content, you must revisit the older content from time to time. You can even conduct a content audit regularly to identify the published content that can be updated, expanded, or optimized based on fresh data and the latest statistics.

  1. Not Leveraging Content Syndication

Often marketers focus on optimizing and promoting content posted on the business’s official websites. This content marketing mistake makes it challenging for them to expand content reach and visibility. Smarter marketers boost content marketing campaigns by complementing content publication with content syndication.

You can increase content reach and visibility by republishing existing content on third-party websites or online platforms. The republication will help you earn backlinks, generate leads, and create brand awareness. But you can make the most out of content syndication by republishing the right digital content on the right website at the right time.

  1. Not Conducting Content Gap Analysis

While making content marketing strategies, marketers often focus on publishing fresh content frequently. But you cannot boost content marketing strategies without publishing content on topics wanted and preferred by your target audience.

When you conduct content gap analysis regularly, it becomes easier for you to measure the gap between the content published by your company and the content desired by the target audience. The analysis will bridge the content gap by publishing more relevant content.

  1. Ignoring Intelligence Technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have already started transforming content marketing. At present, most content writers save time and effort using AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard.

Likewise, providers have been optimizing content marketing tools using AI and ML algorithms. Hence, you commit a big mistake by ignoring intelligence technologies while planning and automating content marketing. Your content marketing strategy must focus on leveraging AI instead of avoiding them.

  1. Expecting a Quick ROI

Often small businesses and startups invest in content marketing with the aim to increase ROI in a short amount of time. But you should remember that content marketing is one of the long-term digital marketing strategies.

A blog or article published by your business will increase website traffic or boost lead generation after a few months. Hence, you can accomplish short-term marketing goals by complementing content marketing with search engine and social media advertising.

Conclusion

As a tried-and-tested strategy, content marketing helps your business generate, nurture, and convert leads effectively. But you can make the most out of content marketing only by overcoming challenges. You can overcome various challenges by improving the quality of content assets, investing in content marketing tools, and adopting content marketing trends. At the same time, you should not forget these 9 content marketing mistakes to avoid.

On-page and off-page SEO techniques help you divert organic traffic to your website or blog site regularly. But you cannot make the website visitors read the website content without increasing the content’s reach. As a multichannel promotional approach, content amplification enhances your content’s reach by distributing digital content through multiple online platforms and channels.

According to Content Marketing Institute,

“Content amplification is a multichannel approach that uses paid, owned, and earned media to promote and distribute content. The goal of amplification is to increase your brand’s reach while encouraging your audience to move seamlessly through your sales funnel.”

In addition to informing more customers about the content, content amplification helps you reduce bounce rate and increase average session duration. But you cannot promote each piece of digital content on a large number of online platforms and channels without investing in extra resources. The content amplification tools make it easier for you to increase content reach using multiple delivery channels.

You can use Content amplification tools to promote your content using shared media, earned media, owned media, and paid media without escalating digital marketing costs. They create opportunities for you to generate more leads and increase conversion rates by merging the right delivery channels. You also have the option to choose from a wide range of content amplification software solutions according to your content distribution strategies.

9 Content Amplification Tools for Increasing Website Traffic and Content Reach

1. Facebook Ads

2 hours and 24 minutes are the average time users spend on Facebook every day. You can leverage the massive popularity of the social network to increase content reach significantly. Facebook Ads allows you to promote content by targeting users based on their location, profile information, and demographic. The ads published on the Facebook platform appear on the newsfeed of users. But users can differentiate the ads from organic posts by seeing the label promoted or ad.

2. Promoted Tweets

The daily average time spent by users on Twitter currently stands at 31 minutes. You can promote your content on the micro-blogging site by promoting tweets. Twitter allows you to include text, images, and videos in the Promoted Ads. Also, the Promoted Ads appear on users’ newsfeeds like regular tweets. The users can like, retweet, and reply to the ads. But Twitter distinguished promoted content by adding the label promoted.

3. Taboola

Taboola creates opportunities for you to promote content and increase website traffic by reaching 1.5 billion users across the world. You have the option to promote digital content by publishing content, video, and social ads. Also, the content amplification tool displays your ads in a non-intrusive format on reputable websites. The links appearing on third-party sites will increase traffic to your website or blog. But the links often appear as online ads. Hence, audiences can easily distinguish the links from organic content. 

4. Outbrain

The web recommendation platform promotes digital content on high-traffic and high-domain websites. Outbrain makes more people read your articles and blogs by recommending them to readers. The content amplification tool makes over 344 billion recommendations to readers across more than 55 countries. You can opt for Outbrain to increase content reach. But you lack the options to distribute and promote content by targeting specific readers. Also, Outbrain displays the links to your website or blog just like online ads.

5. Buffer

Unlike other content amplification options, Buffer helps you promote digital content on multiple social networking platforms. It makes it easier for you to publish content on social media by providing content publishing tools. You can use the content publishing tool to schedule and publish content on popular social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn using a single dashboard. At the same time, you can track and analyze the performance of content using social media analytics.

6. HootSuite

HootSuite helps you manage multiple social media profiles and publish content on multiple social networks using a dashboard. The social media dashboard supports many popular social networking platforms. Also, you have the option to integrate HootSuite with several social networks. In addition to scheduling and publishing content, you can use the tool to know which user is clicking on what type of content. You can further increase the number of social media followers by running contests or sweepstakes.

7. Storify

Storify drives content amplification by creating stories and timelines on popular social networking platforms and high-traffic websites. The users can find your content by initiating a search using Storify. Also, they can promote the content by dragging them to their timeline.

 The content creators can add context to the link to your website or blog by adding text. You can analyze the social media posts gathered in a single location to know what audiences are liking, sharing, and saying. But you must remember that Storify, unlike other content amplification tools, does not provide options to promote content.

8. Mailchimp

The widely-used digital email marketing platform increases content reach using emails. You can leverage this freemium marketing automation tool to amplify content by sending email newsletters. Mailchimp makes it easier for you to design email newsletters by providing ready-to-use email templates. Also, you can design customized newsletter templates using the email designer provided by the tool. But you can leverage this content amplification tool when after creating an extensive and engaging email list.

9. ShareThis

You can leverage the web tools provided by ShareThis to amplify content across the open web through the audience. These web tools make it easier for you to simplify content sharing by embedding share buttons, react buttons, follow buttons, image share buttons, and social media feeds in web pages and blogs. At the same time, the data analytics tools provided by ShareThis predict future trends and detect deeper insights. Hence, ShareThis creates opportunities for you to amplify content using multiple delivery channels.

Conclusion

The content amplification tools help you increase website traffic and content reach simultaneously. But you can leverage the content amplification software only by publishing high-quality digital content. Also, you must keep in mind the target audience and desired content promotion channels to choose the right content amplification software.

No writer can create content that drives engagement, conversion, and sales without keeping in mind the key differences between Business to Business (B2B) content marketing and Business to Consumer (B2C) content marketing. The B2C content marketing strategies aim to influence the purchase decisions of individual buyers by establishing and selling an emotional connection.

But B2B content marketing strategies aim to influence a team of decision-makers by showcasing knowledge and expertise. While writing content for B2B marketing campaigns, you must keep in mind three important aspects of B2B content marketing – creating brand identity, establishing value, and gaining trust.

The longer buying cycles in B2B marketing make it essential for you to emphasize selling the business or company instead of selling the products or services. Your content can influence a team of decision-makers only by presenting the business as an expert in the field and a trusted provider. You also need to consider some B2B content writing tips to drive sales conversion.

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