How to use first-person data to find high-impact content ideas

Like it or not, everyone is fishing in the same pond. As content marketers and SEO practitioners, we all have the same subscription to Semrush and other SEO tools, giving us access to the same data as our competitors.

If we all have the same tools, aren’t we just writing the same content?

There is a better way.

You may be sitting on a wealth of data about your target audience and your existing customers, and you may not even know it. This information is not visible to competitors, however it is not read, analyzed, and used by the marketing team.

The problem: Third-party tools can create an echo chamber for over-the-top content

While SEO tools are very important (and I will always use one, pretty much every day, throughout my career), it’s not a fail-safe way to ensure you’re creating the best content for your audience. These tools measure existing search demand with their own data, providing an excellent estimate of keyword traffic and search results.

However, if this is not viewed through the lens of your customers, the result can be an overflow of content in your market, beyond the reach of anyone looking for help or answers online.

If your content doesn’t match your current or target audience, your organization and its offerings may get lost in the sea of ​​SEOs and content strategists at your competitors, who are trying to follow the same practices and strategies.

It’s time to make better use of your data to create content campaigns that capture the interest of audiences that have already shown proven interest.

What exactly is first person data

For the purposes of this article and the creation of marketing content, first-party data is any data from current, potential, or past customers that is accessible only internally. The top 5 “gold bombs” where I found content and insight support cells are:

• Internal site search queries: What visitors couldn’t find on your site, but keep searching.
• Sales call scripts: Specific language and questions to ask before buying.
• CRM data: Spotting patterns in deal categories, countermeasures, and lost deals.
• Support tickets: Problems and questions your product or service often fails to answer, leading to frustrated customers.
• Email responses and metrics: What the audience responds to as opposed to what they ignore.

These five areas are a great place to start collecting and making full use of first-person data.

Dig deep: How to harness the power of SEO data collection

Why this data wins

This data is key to better, more targeted content marketing for three reasons.

It is proprietary

This data is confidential and available only to your internal team. Often, it is not even accessible to everyone and may require the grace of data analysts or web developers to pull it off. That’s what makes it so unique. Competitors can’t find it or replicate it, no matter what SEO tools they have.

It reflects the language of the real consumer

This is related to the “curse of knowledge” cognitive bias, where you know more about a topic than you think others do. One of my favorite examples is the “facial tissue” market. You may know facial tissues as “Kleenex,” although that is the brand name of a type of facial tissue.

Since many consumers use a competitor’s company name interchangeably, how do competitors refer to their brand? Because most people aren’t looking for “facial tissue” with the intent to buy, it’s up to manufacturers to determine the language their audience uses to find alternatives.

Or the employees of XYZ Tissue Co. they know the product is “facial tissue,” that doesn’t mean their customers know.

It shows your complete marketing funnel

While third-party keyword data tends to focus on the top of the funnel, first-party data captures the middle and bottom-of-funnel content gaps that drive conversions and brand loyalty, not just traffic.

How to get content ideas from first-person data: Details

We know these data sources are important. So, how do we use them? Let’s break it down.

Internal site search

Searching the site is one of my favorite sources of insight and inspiration. Active, continuous, real-time data that shows how your target audience is trying to engage and engage with you through on-site search. Regardless of what the data looks like, it can hold a wealth of information about what content your users expect to find on your website.

If you don’t have site search on your website, you can create one using Google’s customizable site search feature. Although it will provide internal site search data, it may also display advertisements or external results on user results pages.

To use site search effectively, send out monthly queries, clean the data to remove spam, and group by theme (such as product collections or service offerings). Finally, use it with keyword research tools to flag anything with high keyword volume and low competition that is missing from your site.

Bonus: For products or services that your customers are searching for that are not available, it may be helpful to send that data to the R&D department for new offers that may be considered.

Dig deep: Why on-site search can be your competitive edge in business SEO

Sales calls and CRM data

Use a service like Gong, Chorus, or manual transcriptions from sales calls and CRM data to track ongoing needs, questions, and objections across customers at every stage of the purchase funnel.

If, for example, you see continued resistance to your business’s SaaS analytics platform due to a long onboarding process, consider creating a time-bound, step-by-step guide that makes it painless for anyone to switch analytics platforms. This can be a good guarantee for the sales team to face popular objections.

In CRM, you can also filter lost deals by reason. For example, finding out that “went with a competitor” + general objection can lead to a comparison or segmentation article that highlights your features compared to competitors that you keep losing deals to.

Besides reviewing the data, ask the sales team directly on the phone or via email about their most common objections. Because they are constantly in contact with potential customers, they will likely quickly recognize the high resistance they regularly receive.

Support tickets

A support team can be an invaluable resource. In addition to asking the support team directly what problems they solve for customers on a daily basis, look in your customer support ticket line and dashboard for old and new tickets with emerging issues (your top 10 most common complaints are probably the content gaps you need to address immediately).

An explanatory blog post, knowledge base article, or PDF guide that tackles the problem from a practical angle will not only give you more content to promote, but also help the support team with materials to share with your customers.

Email responses and metrics

Depending on the industry, your email list’s feedback inboxes may be bursting with valuable customer data. At the supplement company I used to work for, we were constantly getting customer responses to our email marketing campaigns. They ask questions about products, offer suggestions, and even give enthusiastic reviews that we can post on our website.

You can also look at metrics.

• If your monthly newsletter is the most effective email, should you expand it to a bi-weekly newsletter?
• If your product features never get high conversions, is that because of the content, or are they more interested in more focused blog posts and videos?

Dive Deeper: How to Apply ‘They Ask, You Answer’ to SEO and AI visibility

First team benefit

Don’t take your first-party data for granted. Build automated pipelines for report generation, conversation tracking, and content creation from these sources to build momentum around the topics your audience most wants to hear about.

While competitors can copy your articles, they can’t copy your customer conversations. Try it this week: explore a first-person data source and see what content ideas you can find.