How is Data Analytics Used in Content Marketing?

In the disruptive world of digital marketing, oftentimes marketers are faced with questions like
What are the characteristics of your content strategy that is driving leads, likes, comment and shares?
Is your content engaging the right set of audiences?

Are you sure your existing piece of content will increase customer engagement?

The answers to these questions will reveal the performance level of your content. The data thus revealed, helps you in planning your future strategies and get aid you in analysing the gap in your existing strategies. Lack of data insight is the biggest reason why your content strategy fails to engage the right set of audiences. Every successful piece of content starts with well-researched and widespread data.

Data analytics has dramatically influenced the way the business functions restricting the marketing strategies and the way the daily activities are carried out; hence making data analytics an effective tool for companies to stay ahead of the competition in their respective industries.

To make a focused content marketing strategy and to reach your target audience, you need data analytics to understand your target audience.

Businesses adopt big data to analyze the quantity and quality of the target audience, distinguish their interest and preferences, and understand the type of content they admire or seek. One can draw such information through platforms like as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Quora, etc. Thus, a successful content marketing strategy is designed through a survey of targeted customers and valuable insights to remodel the business performance.

According to a survey report, 73% of digital marketers use their website analytics to monitor their website content performance. Based on the data thus gathered they can understand the gaps in their content strategy which will help them in creating future strategies.

Everything About Content Marketing Strategy

Content Creation and Content marketing strategies enable the marketers to grow as a publisher by setting up audiences and drawing their attention. An expertly-crafted piece of content can address any business market leaders and develop a brand through acquaints and long-term customers.  But for your content marketing effort to work you need a solid content marketing strategy in place.

The first step in creating a content marketing strategy is content analytics. Content analytics is a widely accepted technique used to count qualitative information about your content. The technique saves a lot of time and effort by sorting data and comparing information about different content assets to summarize it into useful information. The range of content assets used varies from a simple word text, image post on social media, ebook, journals, article, infographic, to your website content. Here, the main objective of content analysis is to deliver qualitative content backed by valued data gathered through the analysis. Hence content analysis forms the first step in creating effective content marketing strategies.

Content marketing strategy works as a blueprint to assemble audiences by publishing, sustaining, and expanding pursuant and informative content that informs, entertains, and inspires end-users. It helps in converting strangers into followers and followers into clienteles.

Unlike the conventional mode of marketing, which is less productive than the data-backed content marketing strategy, they can anticipate and transform leads into potential customers.

Challenges of Content Creation for Marketing

Gone are the days when marketers invested only on creating quality content and marketing strategies. This is because, back then your audience had simple expectations. Hence coming up with marketing strategies was easy and simple. However in this tech-savy world your audience expect more than just quality content. They want brands to impress them with quality, relevancy, and a bit of other real-time factors. Hence to create strategies for modern-day customers you need the help of data analytics.

“With data analytics identified as the number one tech initiative driving 2021 investments, CIOs are facing the challenge of unlocking data insights and incorporating AI/analytics working with a largely remote workforce and while still maintaining a human connection. In this environment, a few emerging product marketing trends can be identified to help stay ahead of the game, not just in 2021 but beyond”

1. Inability to produce high-quality content
2. Failing to generate content consistently
3. Prioritising expertly-crafted content to become thought leaders
4. Difficulty in understanding different buyer personas
5. Creating content in appropriate formats
6. Measuring content reach and count
7. Creating content to increase organic traffic, generate leads, and build trust
8. Aligning your content marketing strategy with the buyer journey
9. Building a content strategy that ensures one piece of content leads to the next
10. Failing to promote the content on the right social media platform

The Importance of Data in Content Marketing

The value of data, in particular for digital content marketing, is truly immense.
Data can help identify your target audience and the trending topics, channel-specific platforms of potential customers, and the influencers relevant to those groups. By implementing data analytics as part of your process you can meet two significant agendas:

1. Provide insights to create informed content
2. And to evaluate post-distribution performance with metrics.  

Speaking about data-backed content creation, Thomas Zawacki, Chief Digital Officer, Strategy & Innovation at Data Axle, explains,

“Consider the four C’s of marketing strategy: customer, channel, creative, and conversion. Then, using data analysis and AI/ML predictive modeling, weigh each element differently depending on your KPIs. The ideal media mix for each company and each program is going to be different, so you need to be open to all of them and let data/intelligence lead.”

Data-Driven Techniques to use in Content Marketing Strategy that can Boost Your Rank.

There are many different techniques, and it is impossible to know what works and what doesn’t.

Following are the top data-driven techniques to use in your content marketing strategy to boost your ranking.

1. Set content goal – awareness, engagement, promotion, or conversion
2. Post content more often, keep your audience engaged and updated.
3. Try to interlink your content and build a connecting bridge for your next piece of content.
4. Come up with attractive headlines, add your primary keyword to it for better readability.
5. Supplement your content development with social media postings for better content reach.
6. Repurpose your content in the form of videos, graphics, GIFs, infographics, posts, SlideShare, etc.
7. Analyze and list down the topics that aren’t covered on your; this will help you with your next piece of content.
8. Mention links to the sources and gives backlinks to increase on-page engagement.
9. Make your content as informative as possible. Your content piece should come out as an article by a thought leader/influencer.
10. Video content is one of the most trending forms of content creation recently.
11. Use tools such as Grammarly and Hemingway to improve the content quality and ensure that the content is error-free.
12. Create content with the brand, promote your brand voice, audience persona, and brand tone so that your reader understands and relates to your brand.

How to Use Data Analytics to Create More Effective Content?

Creating high quality content with metrics such as uniqueness, relevancy, and usefulness for readers, high-valued, visually appealing, and stats is essential in creating compelling content. We all understand the need to start using the data more smartly. However, it can be hard to know where to begin. Businesses need to update their content marketing strategies by collecting new data to retrain algorithms, keep pace with the changing requirements, expectations and anticipate customer behavior.

According to The Global State of Enterprise Analytics report by BI company MicroStrategy, 56% of participants said data analytics help with “faster, more effective decision-making” at their companies. Other benefits of data analytics are:

• 64% said it improves efficiency and productivity
• 51% said its better for financial performance
• 46% said it helps in identifying and creating new product and service revenue
• 46% said it improves customer acquisition and retention
• 44% said it improves customer experiences
• 43% said it has a competitive advantage

Hence you need to use analytics to,

• Formulate a hypothesis about your content performance
• Determine a question to support it
• Create a report to answer the question with report/data
• Take action based on your analysis

Here’s an example of a content marketing strategy using data analytics;

During an interview with Media7, Tara Ryan, Chief Marketing Officer at Incorta, explained how Data Analytics platform-Incorta, simplifies and processes data to provide meaningful information at speed to help marketers make informed decisions.

“At the digital pace of business today, that can mean millions of dollars for business leaders in finance, supply chain or even marketing. Speed is a key differentiator for Incorta in that rarely has anyone been able to query billions of rows of data in seconds for a line of business owners. In the world of Big Data, AI, Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics, this is important. In other words, someone in charge of the supply chain for a major food brand can reduce millions in wasted orders if they understand in real-time what customers are ordering across the globe on any given day or hour. In times like and especially with Covid, the amount of data an organization can automate, organize, ingest and analyze against can mean millions in savings and efficiencies. The direct link between data, analytics and business impact is something I get excited about.”

Final thoughts

Data analytics has influenced the way the business functions. Its influence has limited the marketing strategies and spread how the daily activities of a business are led. This makes data analytics an effective tool for businesses to anticipate competition in the industries. Big data is a widely used strategy to apply content marketing by giving access to data that allows marketers to improve their content reach their target audience.

Frequently asked questions

How data analytics encourages content creation?

Data analytics is a widely used strategy to create well-researched content by giving access to data that allows marketers to improve their content reach their target audience.

How to practice data analytics?

Data analytics can be practiced in the following way;

• Define your Objective.
• Understand Your Data Source.
• Prepare Your Data.
• Analyse Data.
• Report on Results.

What are data analytics used for?

Data analytics helps individuals and businesses to develop data-driven content. Data analysts analyse raw data for insights and trends.