One of my best skills is being able to see holes clearly.

What does that mean? It means I can look at your niche, do some research and tell you exactly what you’re missing. These all important holes can make a huge difference in getting you connected to the right audience and making business happen. So this is a very good skill to have.

How do I do this? And how do we make sure that we are getting through with those holes? Let’s take a look.

Create a fan persona

This goes back to knowing who your audience is, but it’s more on the micro scale because we are going to talk about the audience in terms of one person. Will this one person encompass all of the characteristics of your audience? Absolutely not. But it should be a close resemblance to a majority of your audience.

Most people ask whether they should have more than one persona. And honestly, for organizations who want to market to a few different audiences, that’s a great question. You can have more than one to represent different aspects of your audience. It is only when we get to the actual use of personas that it becomes tricky to have multiples. I would also handle creating them one at a time to really get to know them as a person.

Because you need to create enough of this persona to think of them as a person. What are their wants and needs? Even the ones that are outside of your organization. What kind of job do they have? Are they male or female? Do they have a family? Are they married, single or divorced? What do they read? What social networks are they on? And so on and so on. I would even give your persona a name to help you make them as real as possible. It will just help as you’re creating content for them.

Now look at this new person you have created. Is your content addressing their needs? Are there any holes out there that are not being fed by your content or any content on the internet? If you’re not finding a lot, then you’re doing an amazing job. But the fact is that, even with so much content being produced on the internet, it is very unlikely you won’t find some. And that is the stuff you need to prioritize on your content calendar.

Talking to fans

There are two groups of fans I like to talk to while I’m doing my research. The first is anyone who closely resembles our persona. The second is the rabid fans.

I ask both groups of fans very similar questions to what I ask the organization during their in-take process, but in a much more informal way. That can give me a sense of what is hitting and what is not. But then I also like to just let them talk and that’s a big part of the reason why it’s better to do this face-to-face or at least where you can see each other’s faces. People tell you so much more when they’re just allowed to talk to a real person, and it can let you know if you have created the right kind of persona for the brand.

But some unexpected things will also come about. They will tell you about where they still need support or any needs left unfulfilled. This is crucial. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve created a whole new product for a client based on these conversations. But it also can help you figure out how to reposition products and messages as well. And it tells you what holes you have. This may not even be a content hole though. You may have the content, but it’s not reaching its audience.

After these chats, you should come out with some great content and distribution holes to work on and fill. If you don’t, you weren’t listening well enough.

Checking searches

I love Answer the Public. With a keyword, I can find all the different ways people are searching it. I then have more context around what they’re interested in when it comes to the organization. I’ll take the most interesting ones and I’ll put them into Google. It gives me an idea of whether people are actually writing that content or whether that is a hole that needs to be filled.

It all has the added bonus of being what people are actually searching, which is information you will never get out of a single person any other way. And the words they use in addition to those keywords to give more context to their thoughts and fears. This is my biggest goldmine of content when it comes to clients. With this information, I can easily do six months of a content calendar to plug up all of the holes we have missed. And then when that six months is just about over, I can go back and do it again. That is how rich this tool is.

There are so many people putting out the same content as someone else that writing for the holes can seem like a superpower. It’s not. It’s just a whole lot of work getting to the bottom of finding out what your audience wants and building from there.

How do you write for the holes?