Publishing online sometimes feels like a game of chance. You write something, release it, and hope it does well. But hoping is not the way to do content marketing.
You’ve got to measure your efforts to discover if it’s working. After all, content marketing is about publishing content your audience wants and needs, right? How can you know if the topic or content type were right?
Without data, you won’t know the impact of your content. The data tells you about audience behaviors and preferences, giving you the chance to personalize content and make deeper connections.
How Does Data Drive a Content Strategy?
Most content data is based on user activities. People search a website, read and share content, interact with social media messaging, and make purchases. You can leverage that insight to inform future topics, formats, and work by understanding the content they’re interacting with and what resonates with them.
Check out the patterns in your data to identify the topics with the most engagement. Use online monitoring tools to see trends in your industry or market. Google Trends, Quora, and Reddit can help with this.
You can also use data to define how you’ll execute your content strategy since it has all the details (calendar, workflows, promotion tactics, and data points to measure) about your efforts. For example, you must choose the right marketing channels to optimize promotion. Content performance data tells you which channels perform the best, so it makes sense to prioritize those during the initial promotion phase.
These tactics will give you a well-rounded perspective on topics based on data. You’ll drive engagement and make better connections with your audience if you do.
Why Is a Data-Driven Content Strategy Important?
Data helps you develop a high performing, high-ROI content strategy without many downsides. It can power your strategy in a few ways, including:
- Decreased risk of wasted resources: Because you’ll know what resonates with your audience, you’ll eliminate the flops and concentrate on high-value, high-performing topics and assets.
- Streamlined content workflow: Gone are the days of staring at a blank page. You’ll know what to create, where to publish, and how to optimize it for the marketing channel. Reduce or eliminate the friction in your content workflow.
- Increased authority: You’ll establish an authoritative voice on a topic when you create highly relevant content for your industry, market, and audience. You’ll be contributing meaningful content that provides value to your audience.
So now that we’ve talked about why it’s beneficial to create content you’re sure will resonate, it’s time to break down how to make this tactic work…
8 Steps to Creating a Data-Driven Content Strategy
Follow these steps to create your own high-performing, high-value, data-driven content strategy.
- Set your content objectives: Keep your content focused by knowing what action the content should achieve, what to measure to identify success, and how it affects the company’s bottom line.
- Choose the right metrics: With so much data available today, deciding on the ones that’ll work for you can be challenging. Be selective about the ones you choose so you’re not overwhelmed and still get meaningful results.
- Know your audience: Get to know your audience before writing a single word. Use customer surveys and feedback, listen online with social media listening tools, and speak to sales and customer success teams (if you’re doing this for a client).
- Do keyword research: Use your favorite SEO tool to find the top buyer-focused keywords and keywords closely related to the product or service. This will help you ensure the content is picked up in online searches, no matter where they’re done.
- Identify the right content format: Tools like BuzzSumo can help you analyze the content from your own site, your client’s site, the sites of your competitors, or even a specific keyword. Use it to reverse engineer what’s popular, gets high engagement, and use the info to define your strategy.
- Generate high-value content ideas: Use everything you’ve researched and tracked so far to identify relevant themes and topics that’ll form the foundation of your strategy. Then, start creating compelling, keyword-focused content that adds something new to the conversation and is in a format your audience loves.
- Track performance: Use online tools to track the metrics you identified earlier. See what content is working and what’s not. Identify new topics to explore and add these to your strategy.
- Refine the strategy with data: Content optimization is where a data-driven strategy really shines. Feed the data back into the production cycle to improve the impact of future content.
Embrace Data to Create More Impactful Content
Whether you use this strategy for your own writing business or your next B2B writing client, data can be a powerful tool. You don’t have to make assumptions with data because you’ll already know what matters most to your audience and what to publish for them.
