How to use first-party 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 subscriptions 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’s a better way.

You may be sitting on a wealth of data about your target audience and your existing customers, and you don’t even know it. These insights are invisible to your competitors, yet they’re unread, unanalyzed, and underutilized by the marketing team.

The problem: Third-party tools can create an over-commoditized content echo chamber

While SEO toolsets are invaluable (and I’ll always be using one, pretty much daily, for the rest of my career), they aren’t a failsafe way to ensure you’re creating the best content for your audience. These tools measure existing search demand through their own data, giving the best estimate of keyword traffic and search results.

However, when these aren’t viewed through the lens of your own customers, the result can be content that’s oversaturated in your market, overwhelming anyone looking for help or answers online.

When your content isn’t unique to your current or target audience, your organization and its offerings may get lost in the sea of SEOs and content strategists at your competitor organizations, who are trying to follow the same best practices and strategy.

It’s time to better utilize your own data to implement content campaigns that drive interest from the very audience that’s already shown a proven interest.

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What first-party data actually is

For the purposes of this article and marketing content creation, first-party data is any data from current, potential, or past customers that’s only accessible internally. The top “5 goldmines” where I’ve consistently found nuggets of content foundations and insight are:

Internal site search queries: What visitors couldn’t find on your site, but keep searching for.
Sales call transcripts: The exact language and questions prospects say before they buy.
CRM data: Spotting patterns in deal stages, objections, and lost deals.
Support tickets: The issues and questions your product or service keeps failing to answer, leading to frustrated customers.
Email replies and metrics: What the audience actually responds to versus what they ignore.

These five areas are a great place to start collecting and utilizing first-party data to its full potential.

Dig deeper: How to harness the power of data gathering for SEO

Why this data wins

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

It’s proprietary

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

It reflects real buyer language

This relates to the “curse of knowledge” cognitive bias, where you know so much about a topic that you assume others do as well. One of my favorite examples is the “facial tissue” market. You may know facial tissue as “Kleenex,” even though that’s technically a brand name for a type of facial tissue.

With many consumers using a competitor’s brand name colloquially, how do competitors refer to their own product? Because most people likely aren’t searching “facial tissue” with the intent to buy, it’s up to manufacturers to determine the language their audience uses to find alternatives.

Even though employees at XYZ Tissue Co. know the product is technically “facial tissue,” that doesn’t mean their customers do.

It maps to your full marketing funnel

While third-party keyword data usually skews to the top of the funnel, first-party data captures mid- and bottom-funnel content gaps that drive conversions and brand loyalty, not just traffic.

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How to get content ideas from first-party data: The specifics

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

Internal site search

Site search is one of my favorite sources of insight and inspiration. It’s active, ongoing, real-time data showing how your target audience is trying to interact and engage with you through internal site search. No matter 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 it using Google’s programmable site search feature. While it will provide internal site search data, it may also display ads or external results on users’ results pages.

To use site search effectively, export the queries monthly, clean the data to remove spam, then cluster by theme (such as product collections or service offerings). Finally, run it through keyword research tools to flag anything with high keyword volume and low competition that’s missing from your site.

Bonus: For products or services your customers are searching for that don’t exist, it might be useful to send that data to the R&D department for potential new offerings to consider.

Dig deeper: Why internal site search can be your competitive edge in enterprise SEO

Sales calls and CRM data

Use a service like Gong, Chorus, or manual transcriptions from sales calls and CRM data to look for recurring needs, questions, and objections across customers from all stages of the purchasing funnel.

If, for instance, you see continued resistance to your enterprise SaaS analytics platform due to the 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 great collateral for the sales team to address popular objections.

In the CRM, you can also filter lost deals by reason. For instance, finding “went with competitor” + common objection could lead to a comparison or differentiation article that highlights your features vs. the competitors you keep losing deals to.

Besides reviewing the data, ask the sales team directly on a call or email about their most common objections. Because they’re constantly in communication with potential customers, they’ll likely know immediately the top objections they receive regularly.

Support tickets

The support team can also 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 queue and dashboard to find old and new tickets with recurring issues (your top 10 most common complaints are probably content gaps you need to address ASAP).

An explainer blog post, knowledge base article, or PDF guide that tackles the issue from an actionable angle can not only give you more content to promote, but also help the support team with materials to share with your customers.

Email replies and metrics

Depending on the industry, your email lists’ reply inboxes may be exploding with valuable customer data. At a supplements company I worked at, we regularly received customer responses to our email marketing campaigns. They asked questions about products, gave suggestions, and even offered enthusiastic reviews we could feature on our website.

You can also look at the metrics.

If your monthly newsletter is the highest-performing email, should you increase it to a biweekly newsletter?
If your product features never get high conversions, is that because of the content, or are they more interested in value-focused blog posts and videos?

Dig deeper: How to apply ‘They Ask, You Answer’ to SEO and AI visibility

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