Global revenue from content marketing was $42.2 billion in 2018 and will reach an estimated $88.17 billion in 2023. The potential to capture your target audience’s attention is promising, but how do you know what topics to cover and if they will hit the mark?
With so much competition for the top spots on search engine results pages, you need to improve your SERP rankings by determining how to create great content that your audience is interested in.
A content gap analysis lets you do just that and helps you strengthen your content strategy. Let’s dig deep into the process and give you the edge you need over your competitors.
But before we dig in, note that DivvyHQ’s content operations platform provides the data and reporting you need to generate gap analysis reports with a few clicks, no matter the size of your operation. If you’d like to see this functionality in action, request a demo today!
What is a Content Gap Analysis?
A content gap analysis is the process of tracking specific attributes of your content output and analyzing whether your output has a shortage (or gap) in any specific attribute. The most common attributes to track are things like content types, publishing channels, buyer stages, the topics your content is covering, or the audience for which your content is produced.
For example, if you have three primary audiences you’re serving, and your goal is to produce an equal volume of content for each of those three audiences, a gap analysis helps you to determine if you are coming up short for any specific audience.
As far as topics, a gap analysis can help you see gaps where you aren’t adequately producing enough content on certain topics.
Why You Need To Conduct a Content Gap Analysis
With a content gap analysis, you’re identifying what is missing from your current content. If you’ve worked hard to develop and document a content strategy, you probably want to follow it, right? This is one of the primary purposes of a content gap analysis. It’s an analysis of your alignment with your strategy. And if you determine that you are not aligned, you now have a clear understanding of how to fix it.
This type of reporting is especially important when you think about your buyer’s journey. A smart strategy dictates the ratio of content that you should be producing for specific stages of their journey. Every company will be different regarding those ratios, but often, companies will produce a large portion of their content for the awareness stage (brand awareness).
Analyzing your current content against customers’ needs at each stage improves customers’ experiences, moves buyers through the sales funnel more quickly, and reduces the chance you’ll lose a customer to a competitor. It’ll also allow you to do the following:
- Discover new topics to cover
- Find out more about what makes your audience tick
- Boost your SEO performance
- Uncover unmet needs and new niches
Once you ascertain your gaps, you can leverage that insight to inform your content plans and strategies.
How To Conduct a Content Gap Analysis
Conducting an analysis is an investment worth the resources you put toward it. The more organized your content operations are, and the better tools you have at your disposal, the more efficient they will be.
1. Map Customer Personas and Journey
The first step in the process is to revisit your customer personas and journey. Mapping these out is necessary for ensuring you assess content from the perspective of your target audiences as they move from brand awareness to loyal customers for each persona you identify.
For each audience segment or customer persona, create a customer journey map that addresses the following:
- Touchpoints
- Actions
- Pain points
You may want to create a list of questions they might have before they begin their journey and identify what call to action might compel them to move to the next stage of the funnel.
2. Analyze Competitor Content
Assessing the competition during a content gap analysis lets you see how their content performs. Choose three to four of your closest competitors and examine their content.
Check out what they’re offering customers at each journey stage. Evaluate the type of content they provide and the quality of that content. Try to identify what they aren’t providing that your target audience wants to see, which presents you with new opportunities to fill a niche.
Another competitor analysis component is assessing the content that shows up on the SERP during a keyword search. The brands that appear during this research may not be the same as the ones you identified as your primary competition.
Find out what’s ranking on page one for target keywords and how the brands treat the topics. Determine where you can make improvements in both quality and treatment.
3. Conduct an Audit of Your Content
After getting a handle on the market and your competition, it’s time to conduct a content gap analysis on your brand’s library. A content audit allows you to determine what’s working and what isn’t.
You’ll want to compare your performance against what the market indicates your target audience needs and wants. Is your content addressing the pain points, interests, and needs revealed during market research? Next, evaluate where you stand compared to your competition and the top-ranking keyword search results.
As you conduct this part of the analysis, divide your content into three categories: what you’ll keep as is, what you’ll keep but rework, and what you’ll toss out altogether. DivvyHQ’s content audit template provides the framework you need to conduct a content gap analysis on your library.
4. Fill in the Gaps
At the end of your assessment, you should clearly see where the gaps exist in your content. It’s time to pull the content operations team together (virtually, if you have DivvyHQ) to collaborate on a new content strategy.
Your new content should provide a robust list of topics for your customer personas across their customer journeys. As you develop your new strategy, DivvyHQ’s out-of-the-box metadata management capabilities can help you organize your content from the start.
Simplify the Content Gap Analysis Process With DivvyHQ
A content gap analysis can seem overwhelming, especially if you negotiate a disjointed set of tools, forms, and applications.
Let DivvyHQ eliminate your content chaos. Our content operations platform streamlines your content planning, automates workflow tasks, tracks content and team performance, and allows your team to devote more time and energy to creating. Request a demo to discover how we can help you simplify!