Content marketing remains the second most effective tactic used in digital marketing today, only behind social media. The problem is, content marketing is one of the most difficult strategies to implement. The most successful content marketers use data to drive their approach to this type of marketing strategy.
Using Data to Drive Your Content Marketing Strategy
In its rawest form, customer data is just a bunch of numbers and letters. However, when you begin to parse that data and delve into what it means, it offers detailed knowledge of how users interact with your company and where you can position your content for the most effect.
Here are key questions you can answer through focused data analysis:
- Who is your actual audience?
- What channels do they prefer?
- What time of day or night will they be more likely to consume your content?
- What kind of content is most appealing to your target audience?
Implementing a Data-Driven Content Marketing Strategy
Once you have the data at hand, you can use it to create a data-driven content marketing strategy. Here are three steps you can take to make that happen:
- Get to know your audience intimately.
The more details you know about your target audience, the more you can focus your content delivery to that group of people. It begins with developing a customer persona that details the ideal recipient of your content. It needs to include things like gender, age, education, employment status, income range, location, how much they share content, and their preferences for channel.
- Determine what content appeals to your audience
Keyword research has become a tried-and-true method for targeting search engine users. In addition, content needs to focus on the consumer’s needs at that exact moment. For example, a consumer who is just starting the search for a particular product has different needs than a consumer who is further down the sales funnel.
- Select the right channel
Did you know Pinterest is more appealing to women? That YouTube users are mostly male? And that older audiences tend to favor Facebook over Instagram? Knowing where your target audience is most likely to be helps you deliver content to the right channel. Selecting the channel helps determine what kind of content to deliver. For example, it is hard to deliver written content on YouTube or Pinterest.
Creating a successful content marketing strategy based on data starts with knowing what insights can be extracted from the data. The next step is taking that data and using it to make smart decisions along the way.
