A data-driven content strategy creates emotional connections with your audience that lead to conversions and long-term customer relationships
Key takeaways:
- Focus on audience rather than brand
- Use data to set strategy goals
- Effective marketing is data-driven but also appeals emotionally
- Personalization, enhanced customer experience, and asking for and utilizing feedback all increase conversions
- Regularly monitor for effectiveness and make changes as necessary
When people think about website content, they often think about the creative aspect. But great content marketing is an engaging, converting blend of creativity and insightful data.
Per recent research from the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, of the 86% of companies who said they use content marketing, 84% said they always or frequently focused on audience versus brand.
To focus on an audience, you need to know who they are. It’s hard to overstate the value of data in content marketing. Making successful connections with the right people means keyword analysis, SEO savvy, and the audience demographics only the proper data can provide.
So, what are the most effective ways to use data to inform your content marketing?
1. Use data to set strategic goals
You can’t develop a content marketing strategy without goals, and you can’t make decisions without the data. You have to analyze your current business situation to know where improvements are needed, and how you can reach the next level.
Sift through your data to find the gaps in your marketing strategy to inform decisions now and for the future.
2. To be effective, marketing must be data-driven
To truly connect with your audience and address their specific needs, you must know their behavior, goals, and challenges. By analyzing your data to discover browsing patterns, social media usage, purchase behavior online, and other metrics, you can find and focus on what works.
3. Make campaigns personal
Using a broad brush for content marketing simply doesn’t work. And there’s no excuse: Todays’ analytic tools can take big data and boil it down to create highly targeted campaigns personalized to a specific audience.
Data gives you an increased understanding of your target, which enables you to develop better strategies. Personalized content has a better chance of striking an emotional chord with your audience, which encourages positive engagement.
4. Provide enhanced customer experiences
Data-driven marketing provides your customers with news they can use by targeting a specific information need. By using customer value analytics, you can speed up your sales cycle without sacrificing personalized service.
Data provides a multi-channel service that makes the customer experience consistent, whether you interact with them on social media, text, chat, over the phone, or face-to-face. This continuity of experience and information improves customer relationships.
5. Increase engagement
Users appreciate personalized content driven by data, and they’ll show it through increased engagement with your brand. This, in turn, increases brand trust and improves their perception of your products and services.
Content that is relevant to their needs will lead your audience to like and share it with no effort on your part, further enlarging your audience.
6. Continuously improve your content
By combing your data, you’ll be able to fine-tune your marketing using new information and metrics. Customer needs change, and the data will help you improve your products and services, as well as your content, to respond to their evolving needs.
A data-driven approach improves the overall quality of your content, as long as you keep it refreshed. The more you use your data, the more effective and complete you can make it, as well as improving standardization, accuracy, consistency, and integrity.
7. Collect and use customer feedback
An effective content marketing strategy doesn’t just use data it collects it. This can be accomplished through normal data-collection channels, or you can speed things up by just asking your customers what they want.
Utilize customer surveys to inform and drive your strategy. Use incentives, if necessary, to encourage participation. Develop a concise and clear survey, and use data you already have to compose it. What sort of comments have you received on social media? What questions come up most often in chat or phone calls to your customer service center?
8. Measure performance regularly
Unless you measure the performance of your content on a regular basis, you won’t know if your strategy is working.
This means you should:
- Monitor user behavior: Is there any change in time spent consuming content, bounce rate, and the number of new and repeat visitors to your blog?
- Examine levels of engagement: Have the numbers of shares, likes, and social mentions about your content increased? That’s great! If there’s been a decrease, you should examine and revise your content strategy.
- Calculate your ROI: What is your cost per acquisition? Use your data and analytics tools to find out. A positive ROI means you have an effective strategy. If not, take a hard look and modify what you’re doing.
The bottom line is that a data-driven content strategy will steadily increase conversions if you know your target audience, do a deep analytical dive, and develop engaging content. Don’t forget to check the performance regularly and make changes as necessary.
BDEX provides quality data for increased conversions and ROI
The tools at BDEX help you get the quality data you need, right when you need it, which means increased ROI for you.
We have over 6 billion unique IDs, over 5,500 data categories, more than 800 million mobile ID-to-email matches, and over 1 trillion data signals. With BDEX, you’re empowered to create your own custom audience. All you have to do to get your messages in front of the right people at the right time is to build your ideal customer to target and download the data.
BDEX data is always clear, high-quality, and current. To start making real human connections with your audience, contact the BDEX team today and transform the quality and accuracy of your data.
