Selecting topics that improve your share of voice (SOV) and share of conversation (SoQSO) is one of the most important details in content marketing. When marketing to a technically-savvy audience, topic selection itself can become a particularly daunting problem because it requires a certain amount of subject matter expertise to get right. If you need your topic strategy to increase your SOV and SoQSO, you have even more of a challenge ahead.
One of the unsung virtues of disciplined and effective content marketers is the ability to plan. Therefore, creating a well-planned topic strategy to increase your SOV can be just the trick to untangling your topic selection knot. Read on for Fixate’s take on how to unleash your planning superpower by creating a topic strategy.
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Start with Your Customers’ Problems
It’s likely that your product solves a specific problem. After all, problems are like bunnies—they reproduce like crazy. Take some time to understand how one problem might be part of a whole problem ecosystem in your customers’ worlds. From this exercise, you will learn:
- How problems relate to each other and to your customer.
- Which critical problems are true roadblocks.
- Root causes of problems.
Separate what you learn into two categories: known and new. Frame your topic strategy around what will be new to your customer, not around repeating what is known.
Increase SOV by Collecting Data
If you discover something that no one is talking about, it can be unclear how to use language effectively so your customer can find this new knowledge. It’s great to be cutting-edge, but coining new terms can result in creating content that your audience can’t find. While great content is key, it is important to relate the new to the known so that anyone who is searching for content can find it. This means doing some keyword research.
Keyword Research
Do a little writing of your own. How does what is new fit into what is known in your product’s problem and solution space? Now, take a look at the words you chose to describe those relationships.
From there, select both familiar and new keywords, then do a little research. These keywords should be ones for which you wish to increase your SOV. If you are in a very niche area, the search volumes may be low enough that SEO and PR tools don’t elicit data. So use a search engine to ensure the terms you select put you in the same space as similar information.
Calculate Current SOV and SoQSO
For another gut check, try going deeper than share of voice – to share of conversation (SoQSO). Tools like Meltwater and Cision can get you information about share of voice. But to go even further, do your own calculations to accurately gauge where relevant conversations are taking place. Mapping the new vs. known exercise into important conversations in your industry gives you an important lens to apply as you create your topic strategy.
Topic Mapping
Connect to Conversations
Once you are satisfied that you know what words describe your topics, it’s time to do a little mapping. Having discovered the conversations you need to own, map topics to conversations. Topics may fit into more than one conversation. Overlapping impact in multiple conversations is a strength. These are your high-priority topics to focus your efforts.
Increase SOV by Relating to Your Buyer’s Journey
Take a step back to examine your customers again. The buyer’s journey typically consists of three stages: awareness, education, and decision. Content is usually mapped in respective stages: thought leadership (problem awareness), education (information about the characteristics of a solution), and product (product specific details).
Start with your high-priority topics and associate searchable and new keywords. Also choose terms that map your high-priority topics to each stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Awareness — Match topic words with words like “issues, problems, challenges, overlooked,” and “difficulties.”
- Education — Words and phrases like “best practices, help, solutions,” and “benchmarks” can be paired with topics related to solution pieces.
- Decision — Topics that include terms like “comparison, demonstration, example, specification, features, demonstration, application,” and “evaluation” signal the discussion of a specific product.
Bear in mind that you can create different types of content about the same topic and map them into each phase of the buyer’s journey. By identifying the high-level topics, you can brainstorm specific topics (and titles) for each stage.
If using influencer content marketing, you are in an even better position. This is because you can allow influencers (or influential practitioners) to create content they care about and decide where to make it available to buyers in each stage of their journey.
Test Your Topic Hypothesis
Once you have determined your plan, it’s time to put it to the test. Pick a conversation you would like to dominate, take that initial SoQSO measurement, create content for relating topics, then measure again. You should see your SoQSO (and other relevant metrics) increasing. If not, repeat the process.
The Takeaway
Having a topic strategy that increases SOV is an essential part of creating effective content to achieve your business goals. By beginning with your customers’ worlds in mind, it is possible to discover the topics that are most tantalizing to them. Taking the additional steps to gather a manageable dataset that checks searchability, share of voice, and share of conversation is a good reality check before spending the time mapping topics to conversations and buyer stages.
Creating a topic strategy helps you select the best topics and conserve resources. It also cascades into selecting the best influencers who can generate that content. Comparing metrics to your baseline data (collected before you began your campaign) lets you test your assumptions about the market and adjust so that you can create campaigns that succeed.
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This post was originally published in August 2017 and updated in October 2022.