Without content marketing, it is difficult to build your brand’s reputation online. It not only helps you develop customer trust but also encourages customer communication on digital platforms.
But you would need a strategy for online content marketing. You cannot depend on gut instinct and speculations as a content strategy in today’s world. This will only lead to a loss of time, effort, and money.
In this era of technology flooded with data, what better strategy could you use other than a data-driven content strategy? Like food is to living beings, data should be for content marketing strategies.
But creating a data-driven content strategy can be a challenging process for many people. That is why we have put together the 9 most important steps to create a data-driven content strategy in this article.
Table of Contents
What is data-driven content strategy?
A data-driven content strategy is a strategy that employs consumer analytics as a tool for targeted marketing. A data-driven strategy uses particular information about your consumers that you’ve gathered to market something directly to your target audience.
Rather than instinct or assumptions, all content decisions are based on facts acquired through analysis and metrics. A data-driven strategy aims to improve content success and achieve positive audience response. It is recommended to use content analytics tools while collecting, analyzing, and researching data for data-driven content strategy.
The benefits of using a data-driven content strategy
- You can provide timely, intriguing, highly attractive content that is more likely to be shared on various platforms.
- You can gain valuable insights about your audience, which leads to more focused and forward-thinking engagement strategies and higher revenues.
- Your data-driven choices will decrease the likelihood of spending your time and money on ineffective content.
- You will have an idea of the type and amount of content to create, the time, and the platform to publish it.
- By comparing your competitors’ traffic patterns and content similarities to your own, you can make educated choices about creating unique content.
Steps involved in creating a data-driven content strategy
1. Revamp your content frequently
One of the most effective strategies to boost content marketing outcomes is by optimizing your content after publishing it. Due to the ever-changing algorithms of Google, you have to keep up with optimizing your content regularly. Your content will always be in sync with the current trends if you are vigilant with your content optimization.
You can use Google Search Console to monitor your SEO and Google Analytics for data about your audience, profits, etc. You can now optimize your content based on these metrics. Repair any areas where your content is underperforming.
Conduct an SEO audit for your content and address all the issues that arise. Make your content more interesting if your skip rate is very high. Optimize pages that have huge impressions and have the highest Google ranking for your target keywords.
2. Analyze the metrics of each marketing platform that you employ
Every platform will have its unique array of metrics that you have to analyze. You first need to have an understanding of the contribution of each and every metric towards your overall objectives. Only then will you be able to successfully monitor and evaluate the outcomes of your content marketing.
Allocate each platform’s individual metric to at least one of your objectives and create a KPI for that metric. This will assist you in determining your most effective platforms as well as areas for development in each platform and content strategy.
If one of your social media platforms is performing very well, you can harness that platform to direct your audience to other platforms including your website. By doing this you can increase your content’s overall exposure, promote your company, and boost the involvement of your audience.
3. Collect various data about your audience
If you have no idea about your audience and their needs, your content will be highly unsuccessful. The important things that you should know about your audience are their age, location, gender, problems, income, job, etc.
You should also know about their preferences for content formats (blogs, videos, audio, recordings) and which platforms they are most active. Also, you should know their purchase patterns and emotional triggers that make them approach your content.
There are plenty of methods using which you can collect these data. You can use an analytics tool or Google Search Console. You can also conduct surveys and award your customers for answering them. Go to online communities where your audience is present. Gather information from your sales team and your competitors’ activities.
4. Generate content based on statistical data
Based on the data you have obtained, select the appropriate content format. If the data indicates that your target audience prefers illustrations, then increase your efforts to develop illustrations. You must ensure that each content you create is keyword-optimized.
Using the content of your top competitors as a model is a brilliant approach to reproduce their success. If a site ranks top of the search results, particularly for a popular keyword, you can be certain that’s what your target audience wants to view.
The optimal content length, keyword positioning, number of headings, pictures, and paragraphs can help your content rank higher in search engines. A detailed analysis of the pages of your top competitors will reveal a lot about the optimal formula or keyword density.
5. Monitor success metrics with data analytics tools
You must track certain indicators over time to determine whether or not you are truly succeeding by achieving your objectives. The four success indicators that you should track are user engagement, behavior, profit, and success of SEO.
Each platform has its own set of audience engagement metrics to monitor, such as comments, shares, mentions, likes, and reactions. Observing the “audience” and “behavior” tabs in Google Analytics can help you identify user behavior. The number of views, skip rate, and time spent on your page depict user behavior.
You can track leads and conversions for revenue by creating and tracking objectives in Google Analytics or using other specialized tools. You can use SEO tools to track backlinks, analyze your performance, and evaluate your content. Data about your rankings and keywords on search engines tell the success of your content.
6. Refurbish old content to publish on different platforms
Content repurposing allows you to get the most out of your current content by maximizing its profitability. This approach of making the most out of what you already have should be followed by any data-driven content strategy.
Before beginning data-driven repurposing of your content, you must first determine the platforms your audience use, like blogs, videos, podcasts. Refurbishing your content increases your SEO as the number of articles on the same subject under your company’s name on the internet increases.
It aids in increasing visitors to your website as there are more articles on the internet. It enables you to reach a larger number of people from various social platforms other than your blog. It helps to build your business by increasing its social media presence with multiple contents regarding the same business.
7. Construct a framework centered on data
Include the following in your data-driven content marketing framework –
- Determine your content’s purposes and objectives: The audience’s action after reading your content, its existence, and how it benefits your company.
- Conduct keyword research: To create more engaging and relevant content to increase your possibilities of ranking high in search results.
- Analyze data: Track your results and success rates of your content to identify flaws and refine them appropriately.
- Know about your audience: Get to know about the audience for whom you are creating the content and their expectations.
- Establish a content delivery system: Make your content available to the maximum number of people by publishing it on various platforms where your audience is active.
8. Structure your content based on customer personalities
One type of content will not be able to meet everyone’s needs. Each content should be written for a single person, with a single message and a single objective in mind. Get to know about the person for whom you are writing the content before you start writing.
Getting to the personalities of your customers will assist you in creating precise, tailored content. For example, your most ardent readers may not be customers. Some may not even contribute to your earnings.
You will get an idea of your real target audience after you have a firm grasp on the following: who your audience is, which of them have economic worth, and how much. Studying your audience will assist you in identifying the most frequent trends on which you should concentrate your efforts.
9. Leverage influencer marketing to your advantage
Incorporating influencers into your content marketing strategy is an excellent method to grow your content and increase its exposure. You also conserve a huge amount of time since the responsibility of creating content is on the influencers.
Since influencers have active, purchase-ready followers, you can attract new customers for your business, get the advantages of word-of-mouth marketing and connections. Determine which aspects of your content marketing plan are the most difficult for you and assign them to the influencers.
The influencer should be an important person that your target audience follows on the platforms they are active. Before you approach any influence, consider your objectives, KPIs, and expected ROI from influencer marketing. Give the influencers specific monitoring links to use so you can track their promotion metrics in Google Analytics.
Conclusion
We hope that we were able to provide you the basics of creating a data-driven content strategy. It takes a lot of effort to create a data-driven content strategy. However, the effort is 100% worth it as your yields will gradually rise. But keep in mind that this is not a thing that you can complete once and then forget about it. Therefore, you will need to update your strategy on a regular basis.
If you want to discover more informative guides like this one, check out SaaSworthy Blog.
