Creating new, relevant content to attract buyers and better improve awareness of your brand requires research. As an intern at StitchDX, I did different kinds of market research in order to help StitchDX create a new offer and generate blog ideas. The goal: increase brand awareness and help customers.
In doing this research, I learned the process by which a company generates new offers, best practices for getting your blog post to the top of a Google search, all while learning new language specific to marketing and digital workplaces.
Bringing a New Product to Market
StitchDX recently became a new partner with Powell Software, a program used within Microsoft Teams to help improve governance, efficiency and user adoption. They gave me the task of researching offers currently being promoted by other Powell partners. We didn’t find any offers specific to Powell and few firms making any kind of concrete offers at all. Here we saw that there was an opportunity to create an offer with which we could go to market.
After this, I started researching what general Microsoft Teams offers existed. I found mostly one- to four-day workshops. Here, we saw the opportunity to create a longer offer providing more tangible outcomes to a company than a simple workshop.
Establishing pricing became the next task. When doing this, one needs to figure out the number of hours it takes to deliver the offered program to a customer, while cross-analyzing what other firms charge for offers with a similar time frame. Seeing these steps and participating in the market research necessary to establish a final product taught me about product development and how to bring a product to market.
Researching and Writing a Successful Blog Post
I also researched new blog topics to help potential customers find StitchDX. I used a combination of Google and SEMrush, an online analytics software that analyzes commonly searched keywords.
The StitchDX team wanted to blog about Microsoft Teams in order to attract new customers. I used SEMrush to find what people want to know about Microsoft Teams and what other keywords they use when searching. This way, a blog post can be tailored to match people’s searches and hopefully become a top ranking search result. Ranking, or achieving a high spot on a Google search, is the goal when creating a new blog post in order to attract new customers.
To do so, one must find a topic that will rank well. The best way to do this is to use keywords and specific, relevant answers that Google will analyze and move to the top of the search. Adding sub-headers also helps Google analyze your post more effectively and gives you a better chance of a higher ranking.
SEMrush uses a keyword difficulty percentage metric that indicates the difficulty of ranking for a specific search. The best searched phrases are those with a medium to low keyword difficulty percentage, while also having a reasonable number of searches per month.
StitchDX offers a free site audit to explore how your site is utilizing keywords and metadata.
After identifying topics and keywords, we choose final blog topics resulting in a schedule of blog posts to go out over the next couple months. This will help promote the brand and expertise of StitchDX.
Creating content that people will find and engage with is the foundation of marketing. Doing this research helped me improve my understanding of how to create this type of content.