Start gathering information, and iterating based on target audience search trends, social sentiment, competition ad campaigns, as well as current events and online traffic statistics, to start producing content that truly resonates and drives awareness, intent, and favorable purchase decisions.
In this post, we’ll talk about:
- Annual content plans of 200 pages are no more.
- There is no point in producing content in a vacuum.
- How data is guiding effective content marketing
Annual content plans of 200 pages are no more.
Instead of being consumed with providing their readers with genuine value based on actual events, marketers are more concerned with “filling in” their “year content strategy.”
Interest in the information that the target audience is searching for and where they are consuming it (social media, digital magazines, blogs).
Alterations to search engine algorithms, methods of ranking, and keyword trends
Competitive action includes proactive and defensive strategies.
current events that may leverage timely, popular stories as a hook for a good, service, or idea we want to implant in the minds of our target audience.
You may include this in your regular workflow with the use of an agile, data-driven strategy.
There is no point in producing content in a vacuum.
Having a plan is not “against” the Agile Approach; rather, it is “for” promptly assessing the area in which we wish to act in order to:
- Pique interest (‘Awareness’)
- Establish a connection (‘Interest’)
- Assist clients in making wise decisions (‘Consideration, Intent, and Evaluation’)
- Successfully close a sale on a good or service (to “Purchase”).
We can analyze their “present interest” if we have successfully evaluated our space from an “audience perspective” (i.e., who they are, what their problem is, and where they “hang out” online) (What content they are engaging with on social, and actively searching for).
This will enable us to make an “informed guess” on the type of material to produce in order to achieve our goal (awareness? interest?). When we start publishing content, we can utilize our Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics to assess whether or not a piece of content was successful in accomplishing its objective. If the answer is yes, we can continue to replicate that model and produce more of what works. If not, we must try again and iterate.
By leveraging data to guide all phases of the content development, feedback, and iteration cycles, an “agile content creation” process can be advanced.
How data is guiding effective content marketing
Take some time to assess the aforementioned content strategy utilizing a data-first methodology:
First, identify your audience.
Using data to map your audience may be different depending on your aims and business. But generally speaking, you’ll want to learn about and gather information on:
major search engine trends and keywords, or the subjects that appeal to audiences in particular geographic places. You could build specialized, targeted content clusters around the fact that Australian-based clients are looking for the “greatest locations to stay this summer in NYC,” for instance, in the travel industry.
Sentiment on social media: To determine which posts, stories, and articles are gaining the greatest traction, this would require crawling groups, influencer profiles, and other relevant sites (likes, shares, comments, etc.). For instance, an online retailer of goods might come across a chef who shares popular recipes and brief cooking videos on Instagram. This knowledge gained through data gathering can serve as the foundation for a collaborative effort to produce content, enabling you to reach new, relevant, high intent consumers.
Second, keep an eye on your rivals.
When deciding how to reach out to particular demographics, it can be crucial to understand where your competitors are putting their efforts and engaging with customers. While you don’t want to “blatantly replicate” other people’s ideas or act in a passive manner, you do want to make more intelligent, data-driven judgments. Here’s a good illustration:
Paid promotion – Observing the competition’s paid advertising is one of the best methods to stay on top of the game. Without investing time and money in your own advertising, you can gather information about their language, images, and consumer involvement to determine what is working for them.
For instance, a marketing firm wishing to advertise a financial research and trading platform might see that its rivals are attracting consumers by advertising their “financial academy.” This might motivate them to devote substantial time to cross-platform instructional content creation and promotion. They might begin hosting webinars, creating YouTube videos, and writing blogs and e-books as a result of realizing that their rivals were able to captivate audiences through the use of self-education. No more Proof of Concept (POC) is required. data alone
Third, monitor interest and trends.
Although many platforms come with capabilities to monitor these things, alternative data, for instance, can be significantly more effective in giving real-time insights. Here’s an illustration:
Trends in consumer behavior and purchases For instance, a marketing group tasked with supporting a cosmetics line might decide to compile:
- Customer feedback
- Transacted information
They might find out that ladies are giving their competitors’ products bad reviews and are dissatisfied with the results they are getting, as well as develop a special interest in eyeshadow that has a highly dramatic effect.
You’ve just identified explicit consumer interest in a niche and dissatisfaction with competitors’ performance, which is an opportunity driven by data. Not only can this guide your content strategy in the form of an instructional video or image-heavy social media post on how to properly apply the eyeshadow in question, but it can also guide your decisions about the product lines, branding, and messaging/creative for paid advertising campaigns.
Fourth, repeat or dismiss your findings after gathering insights.
You’ll want to have access to a data-driven feedback loop in addition to the data you finally decide to gather and use to guide your content strategy. You can repeat this strategy if the data shows strong engagement and the intended outcomes (purchase? consideration? ), but if not, you can stop using this kind of content or try again from a different position. You can use the following examples of data to determine how well your content is performing:
Analyze link data- One technique to determine whether a piece of information is becoming more popular is to look for links to it online (either backlinks or shares). To determine which pieces of content are unquestionably winners, you can make a chart and update the number of links from across the web. Then you can publish more of those.
Search for content – If your article is good, you will probably see sentences, paragraphs, and, startlingly, occasionally the entire thing repeated on another website or blog. This is a terrific approach to safeguard your brand and a useful technique to determine the value your “peers” place on the knowledge you offered.Using elementary school logic, i.e., “ordinary kids only copy brilliant kids,” the more your content is plagiarized, the better it performs.
Gather information on web traffic – You can do this for your landing pages, blogs, and competitors’ blogs. As your content strategy changes to become more flexible, you can compare web traffic. It might seem logical to conclude that the more traffic a page receives over time, the more interesting the content must be.
Gather information from search engines- This information can include information about your position in search results, how your posts are displayed for particular keywords, and the number of clicks and impressions they receive. These factors are largely indicative of the quality of the title and metadata, as well as your content’s “time on page” and how well Google, Bing, and Yahoo “spiders” indexed it.
The conclusion
When attempting to generate “evergreen” material that will always be valuable to your target consumers, content strategies are still effective and are a crucial part of any marketing strategy. However, it is wise to use data to drive a marketing strategy that is in sync with what is occurring online, in real-time, in a world where audiences, competitors, and algorithms are continuously in flux.