Most frequently, the content we create at Distilled is designed to attract press coverage, social shares, and exposure (and links) on sites our clients' target audience reads. That's a tall order.

Over the years we've had our hits and misses, and through this we've recognised the value of learning about what makes a piece of content successful. Coming up with a great idea is difficult, and it can be tough to figure out where to begin. Today, rather than leaping headlong into brainstorming sessions, we start with creative content research.

What is creative content research?

Creative content research enables you to answer the questions:

"What are websites publishing, and what are people sharing?"

From this, you'll then have a clearer view on what might be successful for your client.

A few years ago this required quite an amount of work to figure out. Today, happily, it's much quicker and easier. In this post I'll share the process and tools we use.

Whoa there... Why do I need to do this?

I think that the value in this sort of activity lies in a couple of directions:

a) You can learn a lot by deconstructing the success of others...

I've been taking stuff apart to try to figure out how it works for about as long as I can remember, so applying this process to content research felt pretty natural to me. Perhaps more importantly though, I think that deconstructing content is actually easier when it isn't your own. You're not involved, invested, or in love with the piece so viewing it objectively and learning from it is much easier.

b) Your research will give you a clear overview of the competitive landscape...

As soon as a company elects to start creating content, they gain a whole raft of new competitors. In addition to their commercial competitors (i.e. those who offer similar products or services), the company also gains content competitors. For example, if you're a sports betting company and plan to create content related to the sports events that you're offering betting markets on; then you're competing not just with other betting companies, but every other publisher who creates content about these events. That means major news outlets, sports news site, fan sites, etc. To make matters even more complicated, it's likely that you'll actually be seeking coverage from those same content competitors. As such, you need to understand what's already being created in the space before creating content of your own.

c) You're giving yourself the data to create a more compelling pitch...

At some point you're going to need to pitch your ideas to your client (or your boss if you're working in-house). At Distilled, we've found that getting ideas signed off can be really tough. Ultimately, a great idea is worthless if we can't persuade our client to give us the green light. This research can be used to make a more compelling case to your client and get those ideas signed off. (Incidentally, if getting ideas signed off is proving to be an issue you might find this framework for pitching creative ideas useful).

Where to start

Good ideas start with a good brief, however it can be tough to pin clients down to get answers to a long list of questions.

As a minimum you'll need to know the following:

  • Who are they looking to target?
    • Age, sex, demographic
    • What's their core focus? What do they care about? What problems are they looking to solve?
    • Who influences them?
    • What else are they interested in?
    • Where do they shop and which brands do they buy?
    • What do they read?
    • What do they watch on TV?
    • Where do they spend their time online?
  • Where do they want to get coverage?
    • We typically ask our clients to give us a wishlist of 10 or so sites they'd love to get coverage on
  • Which topics are they comfortable covering?
    • This question is often the toughest, particularly if a client hasn't created content specifically for links and shares before. Often clients are uncomfortable about drifting too far away from their core business—for example, if they sell insurance, they'll typically say that they really want to create a piece of content about insurance. Whilst this is understandable from the clients' perspective it can severely limit their chances of success. It's definitely worth offering up a gentle challenge at this stage—I'll often cite Red Bull, who are a great example of a company who create content based on what their consumers love, not what they sell (i.e. Red Bull sell soft drinks, but create content about extreme sports because that's the sort of content their audience love to consume). It's worth planting this idea early, but don't get dragged into a fierce debate at this stage—you'll be able to make a far more compelling argument once you've done your research and are pitching concrete ideas.

Processes, useful tools and sites

Now you have your brief, it's time to begin your research.

Given that we're looking to uncover "what websites are publishing and what's being shared," It won't surprise you to learn that I pay particular attention to pieces of content and the coverage they receive. For each piece that I think is interesting I'll note down the following:

  • The title/headline
  • A link to the coverage (and to the original piece if applicable)
  • How many social shares the coverage earned (and the original piece earned)
  • The number of linking root domains the original piece earned
  • Some notes about the piece itself: why it's interesting, why I think it got shares/coverage
  • Any gaps in the content, whether or not it's been executed well
  • How we might do something similar (if applicable)

Whilst I'm doing this I'll also make a note of specific sites I see being frequently shared (I tend to check these out separately later on), any interesting bits of research (particularly if I think there might be an opportunity to do something different with the data), interesting threads on forums etc.

When it comes to kicking off your research, you can start wherever you like, but I'd recommend that you cover off each of the areas below:

What does your target audience share?

Whilst this activity might not uncover specific pieces of successful content, it's a great way of getting a clearer understanding of your target audience, and getting a handle on the sites they read and the topics which interest them.

  • Review social profiles / feeds
    • If the company you're working for has a Facebook page, it shouldn't be too difficult to find some people who've liked the company page and have a public profile. It's even easier on Twitter where most profiles are public. Whilst this won't give you quantitative data, it does put a human face to your audience data and gives you a feel for what these people care about and share. In addition to uncovering specific pieces of content, this can also provide inspiration in terms of other sites you might want to investigate further and ideas for topics you might want to explore.
  • Demographics Pro
    • This service infers demographic data from your clients' Twitter followers. I find it particularly useful if the client doesn't know too much about their audience. In addition to demographic data, you get a breakdown of professions, interests, brand affiliations, and the other Twitter accounts they follow and who they're most influenced by. This is a paid-for service, but there are pay-as-you-go options in addition to pay monthly plans.

Finding successful pieces of content on specific sites

If you've a list of sites you know your target audience read, and/or you know your client wants to get coverage on, there are a bunch of ways you can uncover interesting content:

  • Using your link research tool of choice (e.g. Open Site Explorer, Majestic, ahrefs) you can run a domain level report to see which pages have attracted the most links. This can also be useful if you want to check out commercial competitors to see which pieces of content they've created have attracted the most links.
  • There are also tools which enable you to uncover the most shared content on individual sites. You can use Buzzsumo to run content analysis reports on individual domains which provide data on average social shares per post, social shares by network, and social shares by content type.
  • If you just want to see the most shared content for a given domain you can run a simple search on Buzzsumo using the domain; and there's also the option to refine by topic. For example a search like [guardian.com big data] will return the most shared content on the Guardian related to big data. You can also run similar reports using ahrefs' Content Explorer tool.

Both Buzzsumo and ahrefs are paid tools, but both offer free trials. If you need to explore the most shared content without using a paid tool, there are other alternatives. Check out Social Crawlytics which will crawl domains and return social share data, or alternatively, you can crawl a site (or section of a site) and then run the URLs through SharedCount's bulk upload feature.

Finding successful pieces of content by topic

When searching by topic, I find it best to begin with a broad search and then drill down into more specific areas. For example, if I had a client in the financial services space, I'd start out looking at a broad topic like "money" rather than shooting straight to topics like loans or credit cards.

As mentioned above, both Buzzsumo and ahrefs allow you to search for the most shared content by topic and both offer advanced search options.

Further inspiration

There are also several sites I like to look at for inspiration. Whilst these sites don't give you a great steer on whether or not a particular piece of content was actually successful, with a little digging you can quickly find the original source and pull link and social share data:

  • Visually has a community area where users can upload creative content. You can search by topic to uncover examples.
  • TrendHunter have a searchable archive of creative ideas, they feature products, creative campaigns, marketing campaigns, advertising and more. It's best to keep your searches broad if you're looking at this site.
  • Check out Niice (a moodboard app) which also has a searchable archive of handpicked design inspiration.
  • Searching Pinterest can allow you to unearth some interesting bits and pieces as can Google image searches and regular Google searches around particular topics.
  • Reviewing relevant sections of discussion sites like Quora can provide insight into what people are asking about particular topics which may spark a creative idea.

Moving from data to insight

By this point you've (hopefully) got a long list of content examples. Whilst this is a great start, effectively what you've got here is just data, now you need to convert this to insight.

Remember, we're trying to answer the questions: "What are websites publishing, and what are people sharing?"

Ordinarily as I go through the creative content research process, I start to see patterns or themes emerge. For example, across a variety of topics areas you'll see that the most shared content tends to be news. Whilst this is good to know, it's not necessarily something that's going to be particularly actionable. You'll need to dig a little deeper—what else (aside from news) is given coverage? Can you split those things into categories or themes?

This is tough to explain in the abstract, so let me give you an example. We'd identified a set of music sites (e.g. Rolling Stone, NME, CoS, Stereogum, Pitchfork) as target publishers for a client.

Here's a summary of what I concluded following my research:

The most-shared content on these music publications is news: album launches, new singles, videos of performances etc. As such, if we can work a news hook into whatever we create, this could positively influence our chances of gaining coverage.

Aside from news, the content which gains traction tends to fall into one of the following categories:

Earlier in this post I mentioned that it can be particularly tough to create content which attracts coverage and shares if clients feel strongly that they want to do something directly related to their product or service. The example I gave at the outset was a client who sold insurance and was really keen to create something about insurance. You're now in a great position to win an argument with data, as thanks to your research you'll be able to cite several pieces of insurance-related content which have struggled to gain traction. But it's not all bad news as you'll also be able to cite other topics which are relevant to the client's target audience and stand a better chance of gaining coverage and shares.

Avoiding the pitfalls

There are potential pitfalls when it comes to creative content research in that it's easy to leap to erroneous conclusions. Here's some things to watch out for:

Make sure you're identifying outliers...

When seeking out successful pieces of content you need to be certain that what you're looking at is actually an outlier. For example, the average post on BuzzFeed gets over 30k social shares. As such, that post you found with just 10k shares is not an outlier. It's done significantly worse than average. It's therefore not the best post to be holding up as a fabulous example of what to create to get shares.

Don't get distracted by formats...

Pay more attention to the idea than the format. For example, the folks at Mashable, kindly covered an infographic about Instagram which we created for a client. However, the takeaway here is not that Instagram infographics get coverage on Mashable. Mashable didn't cover this because we created an infographic. They covered the piece because it told a story in a compelling and unusual way.

You probably shouldn't create a listicle...

This point is related to the point above. In my experience, unless you're a publisher with a huge, engaged social following, that listicle of yours is unlikely to gain traction. Listicles on huge publisher sites get shares, listicles on client sites typically don't. This is doubly important if you're also seeking coverage, as listicles on clients sites don't typically get links or coverage on other sites.

How we use the research to inform our ideation process

At Distilled, we typically take a creative brief and complete creative content research and then move into the ideation process. A summary of the research is included within the creative brief, and this, along with a copy of the full creative content research is shared with the team.

The research acts as inspiration and direction and is particularly useful in terms of identifying potential topics to explore but doesn't mean team members don't still do further research of their own.

This process by no means acts as a silver bullet, but it definitely helps us come up with ideas.

Thanks for sticking with me to the end!

I'd love to hear more about your creative content research processes and any tips you have for finding inspirational content. Do let me know via the comments.

Image credits: Research, typing, audience, inspiration, kitteh.