How to Improve Your Business Performance With Data-driven Content Marketing Strategy

In recent years, businesses have realized how important data is to successful marketing. The term "Big Data Analytics" is now tossed around casually in conversation while some years this phrase was creating questions. Brands around the world have learned how vital this data is to developing content that can help their brand market itself.

But what is "Data-driven content marketing"?

In simple words, it is using data to determine the needs of an audience and then crafting a content strategy around those requirements. Big data allows businesses to analyze a large swathe of information collected from their clients to figure out the areas that are the most important. Marketers recognize these areas as so-called "pain-points". This approach has proven itself to be much more effective than "guesswork marketing" This may also help you to increase content engagement rates significantly.

By utilizing data in every phase of marketing content creation, you are effectively ensuring you are putting the right content in front of the right audience at the best time, in the perfect format, and using the appropriate channel. So, your marketing efforts will be more effective and will yield greater success in moving your audience through all the stages of inbound marketing and the buyer's journey.

But it is not easy to make your content successful. Apart from being engaging and informative, it should deliver genuine values. For proper data-based content marketing that can boost your ranking, there are some steps that we suggest you follow:

1. Find the Target Audience

Analyzing every detail of your potential customer is a starting point of a data-driven content marketing strategy. Content is such a broad subject, and many might claim that they know the secret that unlocks the 100% conversion formula. The reality is that a one-answer-fits-all scenario does not exist.

You need to find out the target customer's gender, age, preferences, wishes. If you manage the information even about their hobbies, income, location, emotional triggers, etc. it will bring a lot more advantages in creating outstanding data-driven content.

A Tip: Google Analytics and other analytics tools make it easier to find out the demographics of the customers.

2. Perform a Proper Data Analysis

The data you collect will be your treasure trove.

The proper data analysis includes multiple steps:

-Website Analysis

Perform proper auditing on the website and analyze it using a quality tool. Find the internal blogs from your website that bring more traffic. These topics are interesting for your target audience, continue with them.

-Content Analysis

Look at the social media platforms where your audience can be actively present. Look at open rates, click-through rates, engagement, and shares to glean insights on what your audience finds value in.

Now you can plan the content strategy accordingly.

-Competitor Analysis

Going through your competitors’ websites and analyzing the content strategy they perform might be highly useful. Find out their most popular topics, communication style, and engaging ideas. You can learn from this data to boost your content strategy. But try to remain creative and unique.

Only after analyzing the data from various sources can you begin to build data-driven content.

3. Develop Customer-Centric Value-Based Content

Alright, after your content topics are narrowed down it is high time to start creating content that your target audience love.

And here one key thing to remember. The number one priority for content creation is quality over quantity. It is not a race, you should be focusing your efforts on creating value, unlike your competition or other alternatives.

Use your research and analysis results to uncover what content has performed well and look for ways to repurpose content in different ways. As it was mentioned earlier, your past content performance is informing your new content direction.

What data can small or medium businesses use to generate their insights then? Companies can utilize readily available tools for their data analysis, such as:

• Trending Topics: From Google Trends to trending hashtags on Twitter, there are lots of information that small or medium businesses can use here to get their content marketing pointed in the right direction.
• Do not forget to take advantage of the power of keywords. But it is always a good marketing practice to ensure that your content is optimized for the topic you are writing about.

The right keywords and strategic SEO can get your content in front of the right audience fast.

4. Update the existing content

Take inventory of the content you already have stored away or published. You need to know what you have and where you can use it again.

You might find it useful to go back to the older posts and make sure you update them to reflect the latest statistics and trends. In this way, they are still actual and can attract your audience.

Other ways to reuse your older content include:

• Creating an infographic from a previous post
• Re-promotion on social media
• Using it to create video tutorials
• Turning it into a presentation or creating a Slideshare
• Using it for a throw-back campaign
• Turning it into modular content
• Using it to create email content

So, as you can see, you do not need to reinvent the wheel to improve your marketing strategy, just get inspired by your earlier ideas and innovate!

5. Analyze Your Content Marketing Performance

Here, you are looking at the performance of a unique piece of the updated content, published in a specific form on a particular channel.

Where are the gaps? Where are you exceeding your expectations?

Take advantage of your analytics to determine what content is working and what is not even after adapting it to the preferences of your audience. It might be that people do not see your content because it is not optimized correctly, or maybe the form of the content is not that much of a match.

In any case, do not give up, try to isolate the issue by testing different scenarios. Change up the type/form of your content. If it is a blog, try replacing it with a webinar; if it is a tweet, try creating an infographic instead. Sometimes just changing up the form or format of the same content makes it more desirable.

Uncover data points that will help you to optimize your content marketing efforts. The steps here aren’t really linear. This “analysis” is everything that you have been doing leading up to this point. If your content strategy is truly data-driven, then you have been analyzing all sorts of data to help inform every step along the way. This is just another task in the content strategy optimization loop.

Using this data-driven content marketing approach to analyzing your performance gives you the right insights to optimize your best performing content. Continue optimizing, analyze, repeat.

Final ideas and the way forward

Taking these tips and strategies into consideration, a company can then start developing a content marketing strategy that impacts those areas exactly. Creating content that appeals to customers’ pain-points while still providing valuable information and entertaining the audience is the core of data-driven content marketing.

The global market is becoming seriously competitive, forcing companies to avoid the guessing game of what works and what does not.

A data-driven content marketing strategy is one of the most effective ways to increase interest in your company and boost your customers’ engagement. It is important and it does work. But only when your business is digitalized and optimized well. In this way, you can change the focus and start to gather information, analyze, and implement a data-driven marketing strategy easier and more effectively. Consider the following services which might be helpful in achieving the goal:

• Implementing cloud-based software;
• Computer applications;
• Enterprise mobility apps;
• Salesforce services;

You can learn more about these opportunities or get a consultation by contacting the expertise and experienced Utah Tech Labs team.

Click here to start increasing your company’s performance.