What You Need to Know to Create Data-Driven Content Marketing

Content marketing is an essential component of your overall digital marketing strategy. It also takes a wide range of forms, from white papers and ebooks to blog posts, articles, social media content, and everything in between. However, if you take a look at the most effective content and the least effective, you’ll find something interesting. The most successful, highest-performing content is all based on real data. How do you create data-driven content marketing? Here’s what you need to know.

Know What You’re Trying to Achieve

Data-Driven Content Marketing | What You Need To Know

Content creation for the sake of marketing alone is doomed to failure. Yes, you need content to reach your audience and gain traction, but you need to do more than just brainstorm random topics. You need to know what you’re trying to achieve. What are your goals with the content? This will inform the types of content you choose to create, where you share that content and more. So, why are you creating content in the first place? What audience segment is it geared to? What purpose does it serve? Before you do anything, analyse why you’re taking that action and then go from there.

Use Links to Your Advantage

Data-Driven Content Marketing | What You Need To Know

When it comes to Google rank, there are two important factors. One is that your content delivers value to readers and that it is original. The second is that your content includes links. So, if you want to create data-driven content marketing, make sure you’re linking out where you can. The more links, the better. However, you need to avoid some basic mistakes here. These include putting all your links close together and thinking that links from your site to another site are what you need. You need to ensure that the content you send out into the wild links back to relevant pages of your website. Even your blog posts should include at least one link to something like your contact us page.

Understand Your Buyer Personas

You should be using your buyer personas in the content creation process. Whether you’re writing blog posts, emails, white papers, or something else completely, those personas should be front and centre. Why is this? Simply put, if you’ve done your job correctly, then those personas are rich in accurate data that can be used to drive your content creation. What data might that be? Customer pain points, challenges, goals, and the like fall into this area. You may also consider things like geographic location, age, and age-related concerns, interests, and the like.

This is important because different audience segments prefer different content types. For instance, younger audience members generally prefer video content and infographics to slideshows, whereas those in the 45 to 54 age bracket prefer presentations and articles to video content. Your buyer personas should speak directly to the type of data-driven content Marketing.

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics should be used to inform your buyer persona creation process, and should also play a role in your content creation. Your analytics will tell you things like where your visitors are coming from, so you can tailor the language of your content. It will also tell you things like device type, screen size, operating system, browsers, and more. All of these factors may play a role in creating the right content for each segment of your audience.

Delve into Customer Data

Finally, make sure you delve into your customer data. Again, you should have done this when you created your buyer personas, and it will yield a significant amount of data that can be used to tweak and adjust your content. For instance, you might learn that 75% of your customers are female. You could discover that 80% of your customers are parents of young children, or that most of your customers have a higher than average income.

In Conclusion

Ultimately, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Data should underly every single facet of your content creation process, from the type of content to the wording used in it. Every aspect affects performance and resonance with your audience. Not sure you’re getting your content creation, right? That’s a significant issue, but we can help. Get in touch with Emarkable today to learn more.

Sean Dempsey Marketing
Sean Dempsey

With over a decade of experience, Sean is an amazing, data-driven inbound marketer who will manage the majority of the marketing funnel for your company. Sean attracts site traffic, converting that traffic into new leads for your business and nurturing those leads to close into customers. Contact Sean about Inbound Marketing.