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Get a Quote Today!Why is Original Research Great for Content Creation?
The brilliant thing about creating a content marketing strategy is that you have several great options for coming up with amazing content. You only have to look at the editorial calendar of a business heavily invested in content (if they’ll let you see it!) to understand the wide range of strategies available.
One of the best strategies available to businesses is to use original research to create content.
Why is original research so great?
You Own It
Any research that you complete, or that a research company undertakes on your behalf, is yours to do with as you wish. That might not sound like anything too significant, but it means you can use the results as you wish without having to cite the source or give anyone else credit for the research.
It is this point alone that helps to drive all of the content strategies you might want to look at for your website.
You Can Use the Research How You Want
While this might be an obvious point, it is important to recognise the different ways in which you can use the research you have in order to create high quality content. If you get this process correct and do some excellent planning prior to getting started, one piece of original research could become the basis for a whole portion of your content strategy.
This is why original research is great for content creation: you can create a variety of different content types to suit your content marketing strategies both on-site and elsewhere online.
Let us say you have conducted a piece of original research that contained 50 multiple-choice questions that you asked to your target audience. What are the different types of content you could create from this information?
Blog Articles
At the very least, you’re going to be able to create 50 blog posts for your own site, with one blog based on each question. Say you created a questionnaire and each question had a choice of five possible answers, you then have the option of making each piece of content a “Top 5” post. If you created charts or graphs when accumulating your research results, you can always use this within the post to demonstrate that your findings are evidence based and you’re not just writing about a random Top 5 – you’ve actually gone out and discovered how popular these options are.
Infographics
While infographics are perhaps not as popular now as they have been in recent years, they are still an attractive type of content that give you something exciting to put on your page as an alternative to masses and masses of text.
Your approach to infographics could be similar to your blog, but rather than create 50 infographics it is probably better to take the questions you asked and group them together in terms of relevancy to each other. This way, you can create 5 – 10 high quality infographics featuring a number of standout statistics. How often do you see an infographic that has the potential to go viral that features the answer to one question, or only one statistic?
That said, if you’re able to write about the five answers in a similar manner to how you would do within a blog article, you could always repurpose each blog into a “Top 5” infographic if you wanted to.
Case Studies & White Papers
Research naturally lends itself to the creation of content such as case studies and white papers. What’s more, these are both brilliant examples of content that you can feature for download on your website, or include within an email newsletter, for example.
As with the blogs and infographics, you can easily “cherry pick” the content you want to feature in your case study or white paper, and therefore have the potential to create more than one should you wish to do so. More likely, you will want to look to create a high quality piece of content featuring the most relevant pieces of information as tailored to your target audience.
Social Media Content
The last thing that many people might think of doing with a huge piece of research is turning it into brief social media updates. However, there is a great opportunity for you to create countdown posts over the course of the week, by sharing the fifth most popular answer on a Monday, for example, and then counting down to sharing the most popular overall on Friday. This is a great option for generating interest in your social media streams and you should also be able to drive people to your website with this, too.
You could also use your statistics to create “Did You Know?” posts that are always fun and well received on social media.
Content Creation Elsewhere
Original research is not just great for content creation on your own website. It is great for other websites, too, depending on the extent to which you want to share the research you have conducted.
It is easy to identify the top 1000 sites in your niche, for example, get their contact details and then reach out with your research. A simple email message where you introduce yourself, state that you have completed this piece of content, and are happy for it to be used so long as you are credited with a nofollow link, is all you need to do.
Another strategy if you’re looking to earn some links that will drive traffic to your website is to create all of the content suggested thus far, and then perform outreach to let people know that there are blogs, infographics, and other pieces of content on your site that you think they may be interested in.
Conclusions
The potential for content creation with original research is almost limitless. Think about the best way you can conduct original research and how you can then harness the results for amazing content both quality and quantity wise, and whether your content will provide added value elsewhere in terms of offering it to bloggers or authoritative individuals in your niche.
At Bough Digital, we can carry out high quality research within your industry niche and create a wide range of content based on the results. Contact us now to discuss your project requirements and to receive a FREE quote.