Knowing what content will inspire & engage your audience so you can build a high performing content marketing strategy can be tricky.
If you play a guessing game and get it wrong, they’ll hit the back button and you’ll lose them. Get it right and you’ll build a loyal base of raving fans and this is where Buzzsumo comes in.
Watch this short extract video from a recent presentation I did at MIT for MIT Startups to see how.
Video Transcript
One of the problems I’ve always found if I’m entering a new niche or even in my existing niche is to see what’s working for other people in terms of content engagement. So what’s getting the most shares? What’s getting the most likes, et cetera? Because if I know that, then I don’t need to waste my time providing content that they don’t want and they’re not going to get engaged with.
Generally the more engagement I get, the more profits I make. Fortunately enough for us, there’s a tool that is free to use out there and it’s called BuzzSumo. When I was fortunate enough to get invited to MIT to talk to MIT tech start-ups recently, I decided to showcase BuzzSumo as part of my presentation because I just absolutely love this tool. So I’m going to share some of that presentation with you now.
We’re going to look at how you can spy on your competitors to discover how to move your market emotionally. To do this, we need to understand the three hot buttons that cause your prospects to take action.
1. Pain is the biggest hot button that gets people to take action. So it’s very important that we understand your audience’s pains. What are their biggest problems? If you look at the stock market for example, stocks go up in a very gradual way. But if there’s any kind of bad news on that stock, it will drop dramatically and that’s because people are in fear. They’re scared of losing out. That’s why pain is the biggest motivator.
2. The opposite of that is pleasure. What are people’s desires? What do they want to get from life?
3. Then the third one is curiosity and curiosity is the emotional hot button that will get people to see you. It will grab their attention. I’m going to be showing you later on in the presentation some examples of this, some examples of headlines that pique people’s curiosity.
So let’s show you this ninja tool to see what your prospects want and need, so that you can find the hooks, because you need hooks to grab attention. You need hooks so that you can understand what to use in your marketing to really be so ‘on message’ with your target audience. So that every time you communicate with them, the hairs on the back of the neck just stand on end, and it’s not just with your marketing. It’s designing your products as well. This will really help you design your products properly.
There are lots of tools you can use. But I like this tool because it’s free and there’s a premium version as well. It’s called BuzzSumo.com. By the way, we’re going to give you a way of getting the slides the end of today. So don’t worry too much about taking those.
So it’s called BuzzSumo.com and as you can see, they say it has been designed to “analyse what content performs best for any topic or competitor”. So you can actually put in a keyword or you can put in a competitor (or URL of a website that you know shares the same audience as you).
So in this example today, we’re going to put in Entrepreneur.com, the home of Entrepreneur Magazine and what happens is when you put this in, what it does is it goes to Entrepreneur.com and it analyses all of their articles. On Entrepreneur.com, there are hundreds of thousands of articles. What it does is it pulls out the top performing ones.
So with the free version here, you can get up to five URLs. So they’re the top five and what it does is it analyses how much engagement there has been. So how many shares on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, et cetera?
So as you can see there, the top one has had just about 130,000 shares. This is of interest to me. If Entrepreneur.com was my competitor, I would want to know what is engaging their audience.
So when you click on this top article titled “Forget setting goals. Focus on this instead”. You can see that it’s – forget setting goals. Focus on systems instead. So for me, I can see a possible pain in there. I can see a possible desire in there as well.
The pain I can see is they’re possibly overwhelmed with goals and the desire is to be more productive. So what I’m looking out for now is a little bit of confirmation of that. So we go over to this slide again. Go down to this one here. So that’s two out of the top four there are based around productivity.
“Let go, keep it simple, move quickly: Secret to being a productive entrepreneur.”
So there’s a hook straight away for productivity. This audience wants to be productive.
So we go to this one here, how to become a millionaire by age 30.
Can anyone see any hooks here? Raise your hand if you can see any hooks. What hook can you see there? Yeah, absolutely. So they’re looking to be rich.
So I’m looking for confirmation and lo and behold, two out of the top five there.
“Nine things rich people do differently every day.”
So I’m assuming here that they’re probably a bit dissatisfied financially.
Let’s go back to this one:
There’s another hook in there. Can anyone see another hook?
Yes, sir there’s definitely curiosity in there for sure.
There’s also another hook. There’s an age-related hook here, so how to become a millionaire by age 30. So there might be some age sensitivity going on here with this audience.
So let’s look for confirmation. Two out of the top five there.
Think you’re too old to be an entrepreneur? Think again. So that gives me confirmation that there’s definitely is some age sensitivity in here. So there are a couple of hooks there.
So let’s just go through those hooks, the pain that we can see just by analysing the top five. I mean you can get a premium account, analyse the top 100, top 200 and go really deep. But just through analysing the top five, we’ve got some good hooks there:
Pain: unsatisfied financially, and also the age sensitivity thing there. I’m too old. And also possibly overwhelmed with goals.
Desire (pleasure): they want to be productive and get financial freedom whilst they’re still young enough to do it.
Then let’s have a look at some of the curiosity points.
So if we look at the first one:
Forget, fill in the blank… Focus on this instead.
So if you were targeting this audience and you were doing a marketing campaign towards this audience, which you can do via Facebook for example, then you might want to borrow parts of these super powerful headlines that they’ve used, for your marketing campaigns.
Forget, fill in the blank… Focus on this instead.
How to, fill in the blank….
Nine things, fill in the blank…. or 10 things, 21 things, 21 ways, fill in the blank…
Secrets to being, fill in the blank….
Think you’re, fill in the blank…. Think again.
And also we notice two out of the top five there are info graphics as well.
So if you market into this audience, you might want to use info graphics as well.
So there are the hooks there just by analysing the top five.
Imagine how deep you can go if you analyse the top hundred articles of your competitor’s website.
So I hope you enjoyed that extract there from my recent presentation for MIT alumni. If you would like to get full access to the presentation, then just click the button below or if you’re listening on audio, go to FindTheEdge.com/MIT. That’s FindTheEdge.com/MIT. This is Kenny Goodman signing off from FindTheEdge.com.
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