How To Make Your Content Marketing Data Driven

Even the best content goes nowhere when it doesn’t connect with the right person in the right place at the right time.

Sure, you can make some pretty good guesses about what or who your potential customers are, where they hang out online and what kind of content they connect with.

But, using data to drive your content marketing makes it a whole lot more effective.

Want to make your content marketing is data-driven (and improves your campaigns)? Here are five steps to get you started:

1. Narrow your focus

The first step in creating a data-driven content marketing plan is to align your strategy with your business goals. These goals should be specific, time-sensitive and measurable. For example, you might set a goal of getting 200 leads in a week. Or you might shoot for a 15 percent increase in inbound traffic in a month.

Some areas to focus your efforts on should include the following:

• Brand Health: improving attitudes and conversations about your brand and behavior around it
• Marketing Optimization: improving the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns
• Revenue Generation: increasing the places and ways that your company generates income
• Operational Efficiency: increasing the places and ways that your company reduces expenses
• Customer Experience: improving your customers’ experiences of your brand and your relationship with them
• Innovation: increasing collaboration with your customers to drive new products and services

2. Decide how you’ll measure success

Once you’ve picked a focus for your campaign, it’s time to decide how you’re going to measure it along the way. By measuring your campaign while it’s still ongoing, you’ll be able to see whether you're on course to meet your goals or if you need to adjust your efforts.

This constant course correction is what sets data-driven content marketing apart from data-responsive content marketing. In data-driven content marketing, you update your roadmap as you go based on how your journey is going, kind of like when you’re using Google Maps for directions, it reroutes you whenever there’s a surge in traffic or you make a wrong turn.

Here are just a few example metrics you can employ to measure your progress:

3. Use predictive analytics to spot opportunities

Predictive analytics looks for data patterns to help you identify emerging trends. For example, platforms like Concured or Ceralytics can identify which topics you’ve exhausted and which trending topics you haven’t fully covered.

Predictive analytics can also identify the pain points of people who are similar to your target audience so you can focus on them instead of relying on guesswork.

4. Use prescriptive analytics to help you get there

While predictive analytics show you where your gaps are and where potential opportunities lie, prescriptive analytics build on that and suggest what you should actually do. It does this by marrying the data you’ve already gathered with predictive analytics and coupling it with data points from many other sources. The result is both a complete picture of how your marketing plan is going and what your next course of action should be.

Depending on your situation and goals, prescriptions will vary. But it could look something like this: considering your particular audience, their underserved pain points and current trends in those variables, you might find out that videos will help you meet your goals more easily than blog posts, for instance.

5. Constantly measure your success

Gone are the days when content marketers wait till the conclusion of a campaign to measure its success. In today’s competitive market, success requires measuring campaigns while they’re still ongoing so you can adapt and get the most out of your investments. You might need to allocate resources away from underperforming efforts to ones that are performing better. But the result will be improved content marketing campaigns.

Looking to create and implement an agile content marketing campaign for your business? Reach out to us here at Mediaplanet. We’re happy to help!