Why your Content Marketing Needs to be Data-Driven

When content is created, intuition-driven words are often the result, but it actually works the other way. When we think content, the first thing that comes to the mind is storytelling, obviously, without a story, your content is just a collection of words that could’ve been sourced from Wikipedia! So make your content meaningful for your readers with a clear outline. Have an objective and a takeaway for your readers.

What and why is Content Marketing important?

Broadcasting your content in the right channel/platform is as important as the content and keywords. Marketing is all about experimenting. If you don’t try a Plan-B you will never know if your Plan A was the best choice. It is imperative to experiment with new ways and dig through new platforms to showcase your content and it is equally important to measure the success of your content. If your content is not reaching the right audience, it simply doesn’t contribute.

Why use Data for Content Strategy?

Data can help marketers track success while evolving the creative process. Most marketers fail to leverage the data analytics and go with their gut. Content is created keeping the target audience in mind with an attempt to reach the largest audience possible. Ignoring Data and analytics will take you down the poll and waste your resources.

Set Yourself into Overdrive with Data-driven Content Marketing Strategy

A professional content marketing strategy integrates data-driven insights fairly well to please the search engines, social media forums as well as the targeted audience.

Data can help you identify-

• Target audience
• Trending topics
• Potential customer whereabouts (preferred social media channels)
• Influencer outreach

What should be your approach?

Let us acquaint you with the gears of a Data-driven Content marketing approach.

1. Know your audience

   Align your strategy with your target audience, customers, and prospects in mind. Understanding their needs, behavior and expectations will put you in their shoes as a reader and deliver the right content through right channels. Observe your competition closely and study their every move to connect with the audience.

2. Gather data

   To have a great content, these three criteria must be incorporated- Creativity, Engaging Information, and Relevant Data.

   Analytics tools such as -SemRush, Buzzsumo, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, and Google analytics, etc. can help you measure the insights and interaction with respect to your content. You need to know your audience and the channels your audience is using. Track the conversions, time, and engagement on your previous shares. This will help you organize and schedule your content while you have analytics backing you. Identify your content KPIs to get data that converts.

   Tip: When in doubt, gather more data than you think you should

   Look at the following as content choices by age presented by Scribble Live survey:

3. Evaluate what goes out and what comes in

   Content marketers who are already fluent in the content creation process also follow their post-campaign metrics. Along with audience-resonating stories, content creators should pay heed to the graphs to understand if their target audience actually resonates with their content. In a recent research by Content Marketing Institute (CMI), they revealed that only 43% of B2C content marketers are clearly able to understand if their content marketing strategy is actually working or not!

4. Reach Out to the Influencers

   If you’re following us, - you will come to know, we suggested you to understand your audience better, but along with that, you must also closely watch whom do they listen to. Collaborate with the influencers, companies and others like you in your niche to get an exposure to a larger audience and have a broader reach. Here, data will help you only if you have noted the trend and closely evaluated your data correctly. Leverage this information to co-create.

   Marketers often wonder how can trending topics like: Pokemon Go, Snapchat filters, etc. be leveraged to drive their content. It is fascinating to get the increased attention but you’ve got to follow your brand identity. Most trending and hottest stories attract you but the most relevant are what your brand NEEDs.

   Ultimately, the number of audience does not stand above the most relevant audience. Reaching the right audience must be your goal.

Build a Team with Proper Balance

Have a team that has the right creativity to create content and has knowledge to evaluate the right data to add value to your brand. It is critical for the content team to have the knowledge to understand the effectiveness of its creation and the data mined. It is equally critical to decipher deep insights from the data available.