Everything starts with your audience. You might be already familiar with quite a few things here.

We'll dive into two parts really:

• The first one will be your buyer personas or your audience segments (depending on your business model).
• The second part is about trend research.

Let's talk about these personas or segments. There are some tools and resources out there (also listed here) that help you come up with a great approach to segment your audience. Usually what is missing is one simple fact:

Quite a few of them also know each other outside the world of your brand.

This means that they're influencing each other , which will have a great effect on their content preferences and consumption. You might want to dig into this to find your real influencers who drive traffic through regularly sharing links with only a handful of people (probably via copy/pasting).

Think of Pareto. Is it really possible that 20% of your audience is responsible for 80% of your traffic? If you had the chance to send a message to that 20%, how would that message look?

Let's go on with this idea. Let's say we know that if this 20% picks something up, the rest of your audience will become active due to their influence and sharing, or you could say it is due to their advocacy. We'll cover this later, but for now, let's focus on understanding what this 20% wants.

You need to get two things right: value and timing.

For value, you can use tons of tools, and there are other great guides for research materials, such as keyword research or creating outstanding content based on SEO data. It's all about finding what keeps your audience engaged but implies that there's room for improvement.

Once you have a few ideas, you can prioritise them by timing (if it's hot, it's good; if the topic is not trending, see why). After that, you'll need to create a 10x better content. Sounds hard, but if you do your research right, at this point you'll already have tons of ideas on how to bridge the gap between what's needed and what's out there now.

I suggest you follow these steps:

1. Identify the most influential 20% of your audience, and treat them as the most important segment of your audience
2. Build a list of topics and sites they're most interested in . This is your basis for research.
3. Look for gaps out there in content quality. Use our list of resources below to get this right. At this point, you should have quite a few ideas on what to write about that would be a 10x better content .
4. Listen to chatters, noise, and signals on public social channels; once a topic is trending, that's your opportunity to create and publish your top content.

"Look for gaps and create 10x better content for your audience."

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Nothing different. Nothing new. Except for the fact that you're focusing only on a handful of visitors and leave sharing and driving engagement to them. Once you have it right, you should have a more focused, clear approach to drive engagement.

Of course, you might want to run a content campaign for a client, doing native advertising. Or you are in charge of a larger department of a certain topic. Your newsroom probably already has the best practices on what to write about. However, having these monitoring solutions set up for you to constantly alert what makes your audience tick gives you incredible leverage.

Take a look at the second half of this chapter to see how others are doing it.