Building a successful and viable online brand is almost impossible without proper content marketing. Content marketing not only allows you to build up customer’s trust but also helps to foster direct consumer interaction on digital media. A proof of this is the statistics that show that about 86% of B2C marketers believe content marketing is crucial and integral to their operations. However, it has also been shown that:
- About 5% of marketers rate their total content marketing approach as extremely successful.
- 23% consider it content marketing as very successful.
- 50% believe there content marketing to be moderately successful.
From the statistics above, it can be inferred that only a small fraction of the total content marketing leads to conversions. One way of improving and making your content marketing more successful is by making use of fresh and reliable data. Content marketing that is data-driven is more efficient, as it helps to save time, reduce cost, and effort by delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time. Below are some of the ways of creating a data-driven content marketing strategy to increase your conversions:
- Know your target: It’s important to know your target audience or your potential customers. You have to learn as much as possible amount, with a focus on what they want to read, and how you can help solve their problems. You must understand their habits, preferences, and needs. This usually involves collecting different sets of data along with careful analysis. Some of the tools that you may make use of include Google Analytics, or other tools such as Moz Pro, Kissmetrics, to know about customer demographics like the age, gender, location, income, their pain points, emotional triggers, monthly spending pattern, the type of information they like and so on. Having this data would help you build a data-driven buyer persona. In addition, it’d help you understand the type of content your target audience likes and shares, the communication channels they prefer, and their buying habits and cycles. The information you’ve gathered would be the basis of your content.
- Going deep with data analysis: After gathering the necessary information, including the things they like, gender, age and so on. The next thing to do is to dive deep into gathering and to analyze data that are related to your website. This should also include existing content on the web, keywords and your competitors. Below are some of the ways of going about this:
- Website analysis: You should carry out a detailed SEO analysis of your website making use of your favorite tool. You’d have to browse through your site and blog to find which content topics and types are popular among your target audience. As an illustration, some members of your target audience may prefer listening to podcasts, while others might like to read blog posts.
- Content analysis: This involves finding topics that trend, and also content types in your niche across the web. This may include social media and online platforms and so on. You should familiarize yourself with the social media platform where your target audience hangs out. Analyzing the most popular content to know why it has the popularity it has, and look for ways it can help you create the content ideas that your audience may like.
- Keyword analysis: This has to with collecting as much data as you can about trending keywords. It’d help you come up with relevant and trending topics by building a data-driven keyword strategy. As an example, there are some tools that show the trending topics for a core keyword. They also show the resulting long-tail keywords and information about the content’s performance.
- Competitor analysis: The competitor analysis involves browsing through your competitor’s websites and social media profiles in search of what the content strategy might look like. You should gather information on their most popular topics, communication style, content formats, and the level of engagement. The data you gather can be used to make your content strategy more effective. However, you should try not to copy competitors at all cost, as this can have some legal repercussions. In addition, your target audience may not appreciate that you’re copying the strategy of someone else.
- Creating the right content: You have to create content based on the data you’ve gathered. As an illustration, if the data you gathered shows that your target audience prefers podcasts, then your content has to be in a podcast. You can’t do what you like, but you must do what your target audience likes. In addition, you may also create precise and informative content, most especially after investing so much time and effort into gathering data. You should remember the following:
- Make use of a unique title for your content.
- You should cover the topic in as much as detail as possible.
- You should provide value to consumers.
- You should be consistent about the right tone of your voice.
- Setting up your content delivery network: Studies have shown that knowing the right time to publish your content may be as important as creating high-quality content. In simple terms, timing is as important as quality. You should make use of the data on when, where and the length of time your target stays online. According to a survey, which involved Facebook, Twitter, it was revealed that there is a high engagement rate at 9 a.m., while the high engagement rate is at 5 p.m for Instagram. The data may be very, as it depends on your niche, types of content, your marketing goals, and target audience.
- Check your content performance: It’s important to measure you’re the performance of your content regularly. This is to ensure your strategy is effective. Below are some of the ways of doing this:
- You can monitor the user behavior to see if there are any changes in the amount of time spent when consuming the content. Some of the things to pay attention to include the bounce rate, amount of new and repeat visitors to your blog.
- You should monitor the level of engagement. This includes the reach of your post, the shares, likes, and so on.
References
@theshelleywalsh, 1. (2019). 10 Characteristics of a High-Quality Blog Post by @theshelleywalsh – SEO tool station. Retrieved from https://seotoolscity.com/2019/04/03/10-characteristics-of-a-high-quality-blog-post-by-theshelleywalsh/
10 Characteristics of a High-Quality Blog Post. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/characteristics-high-quality-blog-post/300533/