Marketing Product Review: StoryBase Content Idea Generation Tool

For inbound marketers, content generation is always at the top of our to-do list. Whether for our own brand or a client, we are constantly strategizing over content mapping, ideation, creation, implementation and sharing. In order to be successful, you must know what your audience is actually searching for before you can begin creating solid content. Enter a new tool we discovered: The StoryBase Content Idea Generation Tool.

This easy-to-use platform describes its service as, “your companion in the struggle to create more relevant, sharable content.” It takes complex data and presents it as simple insights that make content mapping and keyword generation a whole lot easier.

We started using StoryBase in 2016 to build out our client’s quarterly content calendars, and here’s our quick review of the product.

How the StoryBase Keyword Platform Works

Overview

When you first sign into your account, you see a very simple overview page that gives you a snapshot of the overall results from your search topic, including Questions, Phrases and Demographics. StoryBase pulls this data from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia. These categories can be found on the left-hand side of your screen, and the results are ranked by search volume.

Questions Tab

The Questions feature shows you the most popular questions that were asked on your search topic over the past year. For example, we searched the topic “interior design” and the top question asked is, “what is interior design?” The fifth most popular question asked is, “what is my interior design style?” Access to this information presents you with a wealth of new content opportunities in the form of answers to these questions.

And with this info, you can map out future blog posts, white papers, videos, tutorials and more, based on the most often asked questions by your audience.

Phrases Tab

While the Questions tab gives you sentence-structured results based on your search topic, the Phrases tab picks up more concise searches in the form of phrases that incorporate the keyword. This allows you to brainstorm interesting content angles you might have otherwise missed.

Related + Words Tabs

The Related Tab breaks down your search topic even further and reports the related phrases and words that were searched about your topic over the past year. Additionally, each of these features (Questions, Phrases and Related) also contains a Words tab, that allows you to find singular words that are related to your search phrase within the past year. This feature serves as an amazing tool that identifies which keywords are most important for your content and best for SEO purposes.

Demographics Tab

Using the free version, the Demographics tab offers the average age and gender of the audience searching your topic. More demographic information is provided in the paid versions of StoryBase. This info is good info to have for either honing in on your ideal target customer, or reaffirming your existing customer personas.

Save, Export + Create Lists

Users can save their search results for future references, export those results as a .CSV file and create lists for specific topics or clients.

Pricing

Presently, you can sign-up for free with no long-term commitments or contracts, with additional paid options for professionals and agencies.

Pros + Cons of StoryBase as We See It

Pros

• Very simple + easy-to-use platform
• One of the best tools for determining keywords
• Great for consumer-based content and clients
• Access to high-level demographics
• Enhances your position as a thought leader in your industry
• It’s economical! (Or free!)

Cons

• No mobile application currently available.
• No integration with other platforms currently available.
• Search results only compiled for the US, UK and Denmark at this time, making the tool ineffective for other countries or companies with markets outside of these regions.
• Lacks comprehensive data, so you may have to use it in conjunction with another platform in order to pull in data on content that has already been published on your topic.
• At times, it seems most helpful for B2C businesses, as opposed to B2B businesses.

Overall, we really like the StoryBase keyword platform. It couldn’t be any easier to use, and it provides us with just the right amount of data to dive into the minds of our target audience. While it may lack comprehensive data some marketers are looking for, StoryBase’s straightforward approach to presenting helpful information for initial content mapping is unmatched by any other product in the industry.