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Digital Third Coast

We caught up with Digital Third Coast to hear how they use BuzzSumo for influencer identification.

Digital Third Coast

Digital Third Coast is an energetic and results-driven Chicago digital marketing agency, founded in 2007 and located in Wicker Park, one of Chicago’s most creative neighborhoods. We caught up with SEO Outreach Manager Matt Zajechowski to hear how they have been using BuzzSumo.

Why do you use BuzzSumo?

BuzzSumo is a tool we really love here at Digital Third Coast. BuzzSumo Pro helps both our content and outreach team with content development and content promotion/amplification. When developing new content for our clients websites, we first use BuzzSumo in the research stage of content brainstorming. In this brainstorming stage of content development we use BuzzSumo a few different ways.

First we look to see the type of content that is popular within our clients industry. We look at both influencers within our client’s niche and direct competitors to our clients. By doing that we can get a feel about the type of content that has been done and has been done well previously and also see if there is content that is interesting but can be improved upon.

BuzzSumo also helps with content brainstorming around certain keywords. We can type in a certain keyword and see the most popular content that has been developed and shared within a certain time period. The ability to filter by time period is great, especially when building content around a recent news-worthy story.

Using BuzzSumo to Identify Influencers

Another way our team uses BuzzSumo at Digital Third Coast is during the pre-outreach stage of the content development process. We use BuzzSumo to identify influencers within the niche that we are developing content around and outreach to them before the content is developed to see if they have any feedback for our content ideas and also if they would like to contribute to the content itself. We’ve found that this is a great way to get our foot in the door with publications without asking them to link to or share our content upfront. BuzzSumo helps us to be able to make these industry connections which can help to add credibility to our content and also provides us with an outlet to share the live content.

When it comes time to promote the content we’ve worked so hard on creating, our outreach team turns to BuzzSumo to help us identify outreach targets for our content promotion and amplification. Using the top content search I can search for similar content and outreach to sites that have shared similar content in the past. I personally love using the influencers search to find journalists and bloggers with large social followings to share my content. BuzzSumo makes it very easy to filter to see who has the largest reach with their followers. It saves me time in having to research that myself and makes it super easy to put together a targeted list of outreach candidates for our client’s content.

BuzzSumo provides us with actionable data that we can use to both develop and share content for our clients. It is an essential tool for our content team.

Why would you advise other organizations to use BuzzSumo?

BuzzSumo can benefit organizations looking to develop or promote existing content on their website. BuzzSumo is a great tool for brainstorming content ideas as you can see what has been covered and how much traction it has received on social. Content development can be a large up-front investment for many organizations. BuzzSumo can provide powerful insight into whether or not a content idea is worth developing and if there is an audience to share it with.

Why did you choose BuzzSumo?

I first heard about BuzzSumo from this post on Moz . Our agency had just started to shift our focus on content development and promotion and were searching for tools to help with that process. I was immediately blown with the ability to discover popular content within certain niche’s. The simplicity of BuzzSumo was something I liked right off the bat. Your options are limited yet extremely powerful. The ability to be able to export that data into a CSV and important into a tool like Buzzstream really helped to streamline our outreach process. The team at Digital Third Coast highly recommends BuzzSumo. We haven’t found any other products that provide the unique and useful services that BuzzSumo offers.

Has BuzzSumo become essential for your day-to-day work?

BuzzSumo is a daily tool for content promotion here at Digital Third Coast. BuzzSumo easily saves several hours in our prospecting process for content placements. The top content and influencers search option makes it really easy to filter outreach prospects by both social shares and social followings.

This way we are maximizing our time and efforts to sites that will help our content have the largest digital reach. The BuzzSumo Pro content Alerts helps our agency stay on top of what is going on within our client’s respective industries.