How to elevate your content marketing with data

There are limitless ways for marketers to plan their content marketing strategies. But despite the growing number of methods available to drive content marketing efforts, content marketing on it’s own itself is still a difficult space to conquer.

We know that a good content marketing strategy is one that’s constantly evolving and adding value to every prospect and customer that visits your website or social media channels online.

Creating a well-researched piece of content takes time, which means there’s all the more  reason for marketers and content teams to optimize what content they choose to develop by using data to drive their plans, decisions, and even final publishing standards and processes.

A data-backed content marketing strategy will optimize the whole content writing and content marketing process.

Definition corner: content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, social media posts) that doesn’t explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in in the product/service.

THERE ARE A FEW WAYS IN WHICH YOU CAN GET BETTER DATA DRIVEN CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY.

Firstly, have a deep understanding of who your audience actually is. Creating content for your service/business without knowing who you’re creating it for is a colossal  waste of time. First and foremost, you need to be writing content that is relevant.  Today, marketers have access to data to help them understand who their prospects are, who their regular visitors are, and even what type of content resonates most with them.

Teams who use data to understand who their audience is, what kind of persona they are writing for,  and which channels they are most active on will be able to cater content types and topics to meet these content consumption patterns. This will in turn  help pique the interest of a target audience base a lot earlier in the buying journey.

Using this as a foundation to drive content creation and content marketing efforts can help build a sustainable strategy.

By breaking down your website visitor data you’ll quickly see that your brand’s website can be a goldmine of information. Content teams can do an SEO analysis of their website, to identify which topics are getting the most traction.

Another technique to use is to take a look at what your competitors are doing! To know more of what your target audience and industry is reading about, it’s  crucial to do a deep dive into trending industry topics, types of blogs or articles that your target audience is consuming from other sources. A detailed research into top content types and topics in your niche will all help determine what you need to focus on creating and doing differently to capture your audience’s interest.

By knowing what’s already out there in your niche will help you formulate and build your own content plans that stand apart and look different.

Aligning your SEO strategy to incorporate insights into what kind of keywords are trending related to your niche will further help improve and inform what categories to write about.

To be able to content market effectively, you’ve also got to know what you want your content to achieve. Are you creating brand awareness for your new products,  or are you trying to boost online conversions with informative content?