In this post, we will talk about how you can gauge whether the content you write is engaging your audience before you publish it. There are plenty of tools out there that help you measure how well your copywriting performs after it's been published. But how can you maximize your tone of voice/audience fit, writing style, copy length, or call-to-action before your content sees the light on the interwebs? Let’s dive in.

Even experienced marketing copywriters who have put plenty of content through the analytics grinder would love to have insights into their content’s effectiveness before they hit “Publish.” And just how can marketing copywriters and advertisers gain access to this data? Look to the helpful tools available (usually for free) on the market. Using freely available data-driven tools, we'll go over a 5-step methodology to assess your copy engagement potential, looking at target demographics, SEO analysis, reader profiles, and performance predictions.

Let's test drive our methodology on a hypothetical blog post, "The rise of NFTs." And we won’t just stop at the blog post itself. We’ll also analyze the Facebook ads and posts to promote our newly minted content. The first step: Google Trends.

1. Google Trends: Trend Tracking + Demographics

Before a marketer or advertiser goes to write about any topic, it’s important to have the appropriate and relevant background information about that topic. So, taking our topic of NFTs, we used Google Trends to dive a little deeper into the subject.

Why should Google Trends be our first step? The free platform provides insights on search interest over time, as well as broken down by region. For example, search interest for NFTs over the last 12 months was concentrated in mostly California, Nevada, and New Jersey. 

If we wanted to get even more granular, we would see that the top cities searching about NFTs are Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, San Diego, and Las Vegas.

Google Trends also helps us gauge general interest in a topic over time. As we can see below, search for NFTs grew steadily over the second half of 2021 and has started to drop into 2022.

How can we use this information to our advantage? When we inevitably go to promote our blog on social media, like Facebook, we’ll have a better idea of which location demographics to target. This can also aid in the actual writing for our blog, now that we know generally which city demographics are searching for this topic the most.

When we look at what else we can learn from Google trends, it’s important to also pay attention to the related topics and related queries. This could help shape the keywords we want to include in our blog post, as well as give us ideas for future topics (or even subtopics within our blog).

2. Hubspot: Reader Personas + SEO Analysis

Next step: Hubspot. We’ll use Hubspot to define our reader persona, and then analyze our site SEO. So first to define our reader, we’ll use the tool’s free “Make My Persona” tool. When thinking of our reader’s identity, we need to specify some things about our target audience:

• Which industry do they work in?
• What is their job title?
• What are their goals?
• How do they gather information for their job?

So, for the purposes of our NFT blog, we could create an audience persona that looks something like the profile below. But our audience isn’t just limited to this one profile. We could also have a very different persona — one that’s someone thinking of investing their own money. Thinking of all the different audiences that our content could reach helps us refine our thinking around our tone of voice, keywords, and of course, targeting.

Here, we can see that we have a professional audience, versus our alternative that would be a more consumer-based audience.

Why is understanding your reader so important? Knowing who you’re writing for helps shape your messaging, tone of voice, keywords, target — as well as helps you pinpoint areas of value or pains that you weren’t previously addressing in your past content.

Next, we can use Hubspot’s free SEO Website Grader to understand how well our site optimizes, as well as get ideas of how to improve it. Say we ran a finance blog, we would simply put in our URL and let Hubspot grade our site. With this tool, you get a broken down analysis of site performance, SEO, mobile device traffic, as well as security.

From there, Hubspot provides you with a whole list of “What should I do next” options to help get your site on track for better SEO results. And a lot of these suggestions could be implemented immediately in a new blog post.

3. Ranktracker: Competitor Analysis

When looking to use data to back up and fine-tune your content, it always helps to take a look at what others are doing as well. Ranktracker allows you to analyze your competitor’s best-performing pages for the keywords you’d like to use.

Not only will this let you peek into what’s working for others, and what could work for you, but you can also pinpoint any keyword gaps your site may have. Are your competitors finding success with keywords you hadn’t thought of? Take advantage of Ranktracker’s global database and put in specific keywords to see how other sites are performing and tracking.

4. SEMrush: Keyword Analysis

The next tool we’ll turn to is SEMrush for further SEO analysis. But here’s where we’ll really dig deep into our keyword research. SEMrush allows you to input any keyword and outputs a whole slew of useful data for you to explore.

For example, when we search “NFTs” on SEMrush, we get a dashboard that looks like this:

Now, to make sense of all of this information, there are a few key metrics to pay attention to:

• Volume: We see that in the United States, the search volume for “NFTs” was 165K. And globally, it was 381.2K.
• Keyword Difficulty: “NFTs” has a keyword difficulty score of 100%. What does this mean? It would take a lot of SEO effort in order to perform well on search.
• Keyword Variations + Related Keywords: These alternatives help us determine what other keywords we should be including in our content.
• CPC: We see that the average cost-per-click for this particular keyword is $1.37. This is roughly what we would pay to promote our blog using Google Ads. 

So, what are the main takeaways from our SEMrush analysis?

• Because of keyword difficulty, we can’t just rely on “NFTs” as our main keyword. We must diversify our keyword efforts and utilize some of the variations included in the dashboard (and any others we might think of).
• The United States is our main location demographic interested in searching “NFTs”.
• NFTs seems to be a highly-saturated topic, so it’s probably best for us to fine-tune and really flesh out the angle of our blog post. The more specific, and the more added value, the better. And this is where having defined our audience will come in handy. We can determine a specific angle for our topic (as well as relevant keywords) to help us stand out.

Now it’s time to dive deeper into the actual writing of our NFT blog post, keeping in mind what we’ve learned and gathered from our research. 

5. Anyword: Engagement Predictions + Audience Analysis

And for this, we turn to Anyword. Not only does Anyword allow you to write an entire blog post from scratch, but the AI data-driven copywriting platform also provides exclusive engagement predictions and audience analysis.

Using Anyword’s Blog Post feature is simple — all you need to do is tell the platform what it is you wish to write about (in this case, NFTs). From there, you’ll be prompted to select a headline from the generated options (or write your own). Here’s where Anyword’s powerful data comes into play.

Along with each headline variation, you receive a unique Predictive Performance Score. These “grade” indicate its conversion potential. And if you hover over that score, you get access to even more insights.

The score panel gives you a look into which audience demographics your copy might resonate with, as well as a gender breakdown. And because different platforms and search engines have their own sets of policy guidelines, Anyword also lets you know if your copy is “safe” with its policy checker.

Anyword also gives Predictive Performance Scores for all introduction paragraphs generated by their platform. And these scores update in real time if you make any edits to the copy.

To top it all off, Anyword also allows you to include any keywords that you’d like to use in your post. And luckily for us, we’ve already done extensive research and analysis on which keywords will work best for our topic, our site, and our audience.

From there, let Anywork generate your blog paragraph by paragraph, letting you edit and rephrase as you go. Explore how to kick your copywriting up a notch with Anyword’s wide array of data-driven capabilities. Get started by booking a demo with us today.