3 Major Steps of Content Gap Analysis for Marketing and Sales Boost

If you’re not familiar with the phrase Content Gap Analysis, this post is going to dramatically improve your marketing strategy.

When you are in business, it’s not likely that you are creating content for just for the fun of it.

You want the material that you provide, whether it’s a landing page, blog post, white paper, or social media post, to bring relevancy to your brand and value to your current and potential customers. You want targeted content that meets the needs of your buyer, and their needs will help your marketing and sales team turn prospects into sales. 

One of the most effective ways to do this is through content gap analysis.

If your website is not delivering the number of visitors or click-throughs or leads that you’re hoping for, then it’s probably a good idea to do a content gap analysis to find out why.

A content gap analysis will help you determine:

• Whether your content makes use of keywords and phrases to increase your SEO rankings.
• Your target audience and whether you are taking into account customer needs and buyer personas.
• If your content is personalized enough to meet the needs of your customer.
• What gaps your competition is providing to visitors you aren’t.
•  If there needs to be a more focused alignment between marketing and sales.

Content gaps are keywords and information important to your audience you’re not providing, but Google thinks you should be and/or your competition offers. If you have a gap and potential customers are seeking an answer, they will miss your site and could go to a competitor instead.

Here are some ways to fill the gaps.

1. Email Automation

Ask any potential prospect about what they look for, and they will probably tell you they want to be engaged, custom content that gives that to them. By using a follow-up tool, you can send targeted messages to different market segments that are fully personalized to each contact and their specific needs.   

Today, it isn’t enough to just address a customer by their name in an email and consider it personalized. When a potential customer gives you their email address to receive a specific white paper, an ebook, report or any other content that you are offering, that customer wants to see a follow-up email that least appears genuine rather than a canned response. By sending an email that isn’t personalized, you risk them ignoring any future emails, or worse, hitting unsubscribe. 

Often, your email campaigns can show you some missing puzzle pieces of your content marketing strategy. Look at your best-performing emails in your follow-up sequences. Do you have content on your site that has the same information? The same goes for the other way. Are you ensuring that people on your email list are seeing your best-performing articles?

With today’s follow up tools, you can guide a subscriber closer to a buying decision through targeted personalization. Modern follow up tools can help the subscriber set specific preferences in their welcome email that shows what their particular needs and interests are.  This will provide your sales team with the valuable information needed to craft further emails. 

Personalization and custom content specific to individual subscribers makes it far more likely that they will directly engage with your sales team and lead them toward a sale. Personalization will also help you discover which kinds of content you need to double down on and which you should avoid.

Follow up emails after the sale linked to your content will also create the impression that you are an expert in your field so they come to you for additional information or solutions for what they need or share it with others.  

2. How to Make Your Content SEO Friendly

Take a good hard look at the content you have already placed on your website. Whether it’s a blog post, video, audio, infographics, or anything else, check to see that the information is accurate.

Google rewards content that is logical to queries and shared often with others, whether through backlinks, social sharing, or some other measure of authority. By creating content that positions you as an expert, Google is more likely to view the product or service you provide as being the right solution that will fulfill the needs of searchers. 

Once you find the gaps in your content, you will need to fill them. One great way to accomplish this is to find out who your customer is, what they are looking for, and what needs they have that your content should be addressed.  

Industry experts have found that interactive content contains over 90% of successful, focused content that informs potential buyers and helps generate quality leads.

3. Cater to Customer Experience to Generate Qualified Leads That Turn into Sales

Think about what the perfect customer experience to be on your website by taking them from being a prospect and through the sales funnel to becoming a customer.  

The most common roadblock to this is that there can be a real disconnect between marketing and sales, particularly in communication, causing misalignment between the two.  Studies have shown that companies with sales and marketing teams are in close alignment enjoy a higher percentage of sales and increased profit.

To get your marketing and sales teams to work together to determine the goals of each group. Both teams can brainstorm on who your target audience is and then help each other in honing in on the products and initiatives that your business wants to promote.  If one side is addressing issues that the other side isn’t, that’s also a content gap.

Once you have determined these factors, it becomes easier for marketing to fill any content gaps so that sales reps will have the collateral content that they need to help lead the customer through the sales funnel. 

Make it easy for a potential customer to find what they are looking for in the content you provide and your sales team will have more and better leads. This will give you a higher conversion rate.  

As you fill in gaps, people will start to see more and more of your site. Google will notice your comprehensive coverage and raise your level of topical authority. By filling in the gaps, you can push yourself up from the bottom of the first page to a much more visible location. This creates a virtuous circle that, in time, will bring you the traffic you desire.