There are a lot of epic posts about finding content gaps out there, and the last thing I want to do is write something that’s already been covered better elsewhere.
The idea behind this post came to my head after working on a client site that is well-established and doing quite well. I wanted to figure out how to get them to the next level…but how? They have a very solid base of content, good social media presence, and cover a large amount of the total information that their market cares about.
What could we possibly do for them that would boost us to the next level as far as traffic and leads were concerned?
Dominating a Content Subtopic
Within a particular niche, there are many subtopics that can be absolutely dominated if you are doing your content marketing the right way. Let’s take the topic “h1b visa”, which is a popular US immigration visa that a lot of immigration attorneys help people with every single year.
After studying the competition and seeing how they are addressing this topic for their market, you can typically flex your content marketing muscles and put something out that’s much better than the current offering. You’ll pull in traffic and leads and voila…this subtopic has been dominated.
However – this post in no way aims to teach you how to create content that’s useful, viral, or interesting to your audience. We’re assuming you’ve already done a great job of that!
Instead, what we’ll do is look across all of our traffic channels for topics we already dominate, then seek to completely own them across all channels.
The 6 Ways Content is Delivered
There are essentially 6 different ways that content can be delivered via the web:
- Text
- Static Images
- Animated GIFs
- Videos
- Standalone Audio
- Interactive Content
Here are some examples of channels that fit in these content types:
Text – Blogs, 3rd party hosted blogs, social media updates
Images – Memes, infographics, social media updates, how-to tutorials
Videos – YouTube, Vimeo
Standalone Audio – Podcasts, Downloadable Audio
Interactive Content – Infographics, Questionnaires, Games
What Topics Are You Already Dominating…And On Which Channels?
The next step is to figure out what topics you already “own”, and what channels you own them on. For example, you could have a popular YouTube video that ranks well and draws in a lot of traffic for “best headphones under $100”. You could have a popular blog post that pulls traffic for “how to climb a tree”.
Go through all of the traffic channels that you have content on and identify the particular pieces that are doing well. Then, cross-reference each channel against the other channels to see if there are any areas where you are missing content about that topic.
This visual explains the process a bit more.
Fill Your Media Gaps
This is the fun part. Let’s imagine that you identified that you rank very well for your “How to Climb a Tree the Right Way” blog post, but have no presence for that topic on YouTube or graphics. All you have to do is create and integrate this new media into your existing blog post and you will by default start owning the other channels.
If you’re already ranking and pulling traffic in one channel for a topic, it won’t take much effort to starting owning the other channels as well. This is for a few reasons:
- Adding the new content to the already-popular content will help kickstart its popularity
- You have already proven that your current material is popular and pulls traffic
Think of it this way: if you create an awesome video about climbing trees, and put out a striking infographic with the content that has already been proven to rank well and drive visitors and leads, then it’s almost guaranteed that the new media will perform well.
Practical Ways to Identify And Fill Media Gaps
- Google Analytics Landing Pages -> Identify high performing blog posts
- Google Analytics Organic Keywords -> Despite [not provided], you can correlate top landing pages with keywords for optimization clues on new channels
- YouTube Most Popular Videos -> Figure out what they’re ranking for, order a transcript and build a blog post out of that transcript
- Popular Infographic -> Translate into text and create blog post to embed infographic in / create video and interlink with other assets
- Podcast Episode -> Transcribe and build blog post / if suited for visuals, create graphics / next time, record video of every podcast and upload to YouTube
The end result? You have achieved the Be Everywhere strategy without having to come up with NEW content – only new CHANNELS to publish that content!
If you’d like a simple template to use to execute the media gapping strategy, download it here.
For those of you that are more visual/auditory, feel free to watch the video:
Enjoyed this? Used this strategy in your own business or a client’s business? Let me know below how it went for you, and feel free to share anything I missed 😉
Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.