The Search For Blog Ideas Starts With Customer Research

If you think you’re the only one who struggles to find SaaS content ideas, here’s an interesting research finding for you.

63% of B2B tech marketers attribute the failure of their content marketing strategies to content creation challenges. 

Source

A significant part of these challenges is coming up with new content ideas every month. This is why most SaaS blogs publish irregularly or limit their blogs to company news only to keep them alive.

So how do you find content ideas worth covering on your company’s blog? In my experience, it comes down to two factors.

• Researching your audience and understanding their needs.
• Approaching the same topics from multiple angles to create unique value.

I discuss the second point throughout a different article and share examples to demonstrate how different SaaS companies come up with unique blog ideas using new angles. 

But you can’t reach that stage without extensive audience research.

The goal of content marketing is to address your target audience’s needs, wants, fears, and desires relevant to your product. This strongly connects them with your brand and positions your product as the natural choice for their purchase decision.

To find relevant content ideas that your audience would enjoy reading about, you need to dig deep and find their most common questions. 

Here are a few methods to help you get a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs and find new content ideas.

Method 1- Google Search

Google Search should always be the first place to look for new content ideas because it has several features that help you understand your audience’s questions.

Let’s say you’re looking for content ideas for your project management application.

Start your research with a simple Google search of your topic, “project management.”

Go straight to the People Also Ask section in the search results to find your audience’s most commonly searched questions.

Click on any question to see more related questions at the bottom of the list.

This feature alone can give you enough ideas to fill your content calendar.

But don’t stop there. Instead, scroll down to the Related Searches section to find more ideas.

Click on any of these searches to find more related searches and new questions in the People Also Ask section.

Then finally, take a good look at the top-ranking pages for your topic to analyze your top competitors and their content. 

List down any ideas that seem relevant and move to the next method.

Method 2- Quora

Quora is an audience research goldmine with millions of discussion threads on all kinds of topics.

Each thread contains dozens of responses from real users that have priceless insights on your topic.

You’ll learn so much just by going through the most popular threads on your topic and understanding your audience’s genuine pains and problems.

Method 3- Customer Reviews

There aren’t many better ways to understand customer needs than review mining. Just head over to any popular SaaS review site like G2, Capterra, TrustPilot, etc., to see what people say about your product.

Pay special attention to negative reviews like this one.

Source

Reviews help you understand what customers feel about your product and where they think you’ve let them down. 

Method 4- Customer Surveys

The most obvious way to find what your customers want? Just ask them.

When you’re short of ideas and want to understand what’s bothering your customers the most, send them a quick email with easy-to-answer questions.

This email by MeetEdgar is a good example.

You can make their lives easier by giving them a few options.

As you can see, this content creator not only asked her audience about their problems but also followed up by creating an article on the top-voted topic.

Method 5- Keyword Research

Keyword research is crucial for two reasons.

• It helps you uncover new content ideas.
• It allows you to evaluate the search potential of a topic.

Both these points are essential because your content ideas also need to have search demand. Otherwise, no one will read your blog.

For example, here’s a list of keywords and their search volume I found using SEMRush for the topic “project management software.”

You can use these keywords to come up with numerous blogging ideas.

But, as you can see, there’s a significant demand difference between them. Therefore, you’d ideally want to target the ones with a sizable monthly search volume and relatively lower competition.

In short, make sure you evaluate all your content ideas from a search perspective before writing about them.