Have you been looking for a new tactic to turn your business site around and boost conversions?
Well, you may have just found one: Niche question research.
Niche question research can help you boost your conversions in so many ways, it is almost unbelievable, including:
- Knowing which questions people ask in your industry will help you discover your niche gaps and adapt your product to cover those
- By researching popular niche questions, you can better understand your audience and it needs, and thus develop better sales enablement content that will lure your site visitors into the sales funnel
- By utilizing niche question research, you can come up with a better-converting landing page copy (or email marketing copy) that would address customers' pain points
So how to perform niche question research and utilize it to improve conversions? Here are the steps:
1. How to Research Niche Questions: Tools
There are lots of tools that can be used to research niche questions. Here I am listing only those tools that I am using myself, but there may be many more options:
IMN Featured Snippet Tool
Featured Snippet Plus Tool collects and aggregates questions that show up in "People Also Ask" boxes for the queries your page currently works for:
The tool sorts results based on how many queries each question showed up for. The higher the "count", the more popular each question is.
Text Optimizer
Text Optimizer is the semantic analysis tool that collects questions based on their semantic relationship to your target query. It's a great content ideation and niche research tool that can be used for many purposes, including question research:
The tool will also show you the popularity of each question as well as how many sites are already addressing it. It's a great method to research "niche gaps", i.e. popular questions that do not have good enough answers yet. It is a good idea to start your competition and product research there.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a multi-feature digital marketing platform that has its own index of Q&A sites including Quora, niche forums, Reddit, Amazon's product Q&A sections, etc.
You can filter results by recency of discussions, source, countries, etc. You can also find more questions by clicking to "Related Themes" tab which shows questions around terms that are related to your initial query. This feature gives you a wider perspective and let you expand your list.
Excel to Organize Questions
Even using just these threw links above will give you lots of data to process. The next step is to create a clear plan of action, depending on what you are going to with each question.
Here I am using a Google Spreadsheet or an Excel file to record all niche questions I was able to find and include some notes as to where I am going to utilize them.
The spreadsheet contains a question, a further action required and when I am going to work on each mini-project:
Examples of further actions you may want to put into the spreadsheet include:
- Set up an email campaign
- Build a standalone landing page
- Include a lesson in your video course
- Forward to your product development team for them to include respective specifications in your future product
- Create a downloadable (whitepaper, ebook, etc.) for lead generation purposes
- Use a question to create sales enablement content to help your sales teams close more sales, etc.
You can also turn your spreadsheet into a calendar to make it even more actionable.
2. Five Ways to Use Niche Questions to Boost Conversions
1. Build a Knowledge Base
Turning your question research in a solid on-site brand-owned asset, like a knowledge brand or a (video) course has lots of advantages, including:
- Building brand loyalty by turning your site into THE destination
- Diversifying your organic rankings
- Building organic links and social media shares
- Helping your customer and sales teams by offering them up-to-date resources to refer customers to
All in all, when you are involved in a question research, it's only natural (and wise) to include your content team to have them build content around those questions.
Building an engaging knowledge base is easy (with themes and plugins from this list). If you decide to create a video course (instead or in addition to the knowledge base), you will easily do that with any of the tools here.
Finally, to better engage your knowledge base readers and get them deeper into the site, install Alter which uses artificial intelligence to engage readers just as they are ready to leave:
You can also use Finteza to create a custom goal for everyone who discovered your brand through your on-site knowledge base. Finteza allows to crate custom CTAs and conversion paths based on the previous behavior of each user, so you can customize your sales funnels based on their initial question.
2. Optimize Your Landing Page
Questions trigger a natural human instinct called instinctive elaboration. Asking a question also helps bypass a person's defense mechanisms and anxiety by piquing their curiosity.
Both of these psychological factors make questions a perfect tool for improving your landing page performance.
There are many ways to ask a question on a landing page. For example, you can phrase the main heading as a question, put it inside your lead generation form, or create an interactive Q&A to get visitors go further your sales funnel:
You can A/B test many layouts but it is definitely something to start playing with.
3. Make Your Email and Social Media Marketing More Engaging
Would you like to get more of your emails opened and more of your social media updates shared?
Utilizing niche questions in your updates and email subjects is likely to do the job.
Questions inspire curiosity, and curiosity is the driving source behind action.
Asking a question in an email subject line opens the conversation and prompts a customer to open the email in search for the answer.
Based on an old study by Mailchimp, questions in email subject lines performed much better than similar subject lines that were phrased as statements.
Similarly, a question in any social media update is likely to get more of your followers to participate in a discussion and share it to see what their friends have to say.
4. Create Sales Enablement Content
Sales reps often use out-of-date versions of content (which can be a major liability in the case of customer-facing content). Or, worse, they create their own rogue content composed of pieces of multiple documents that may not be up to date or aligned to the right persona.
As a result, 62% of sales reps surveyed in Forrester's 2018 Modern B2B Buying Experience said that they spend at least an hour per week (with some spending up to 19 hours) modifying pieces of content.
Use your question research to keep your sales enablement constantly updated and expanded and involve your sales team in the process for them to provide feedback and help build content.
To make your content strategy more effective, eliminate gaps in knowledge by producing both customer-facing and sales-rep facing content. Moreover, create diverse content answering all kinds of niche and product-related questions.
5. Create a Survey
Surveying is a great lead-generation tactic that can engage all kinds of your customers:
- Send an email to your current customers inviting them to give quick answers to an industry research paper
- Compile answers into a useful and downloadable paper to lure your future potential customers into becoming your subscribers in exchange for a download link.
All you need is an interesting question for your subscribers to be willing to participate, and your question research will likely provide you with a few great ideas!
Conclusion
Niche question research offers you lots of opportunities to boost your digital marketing efforts. It takes time and there's never really an end to this project: You will always keep discovering new questions as well as new methods to utilize them in your marketing strategy.
But that's also the beauty of this tactic: Never-ending research means a never-ending source of inspiration and ever-improving results. Good luck!
