Building the Analytics-Driven Content Strategy: How to Use Insights to Fuel the Process

In today’s competitive landscape, around 4.4 million blogs are published every day across different platforms. However, only a small percentage of this content can engage the audience and drive conversions. Most content marketers still rely on assumptions and hypothetical data to build their content marketing strategy. However, it’s increasingly clear that this approach doesn’t always work. Marketers need to harness the power of content analytics to build an optimized, well-thought-out, documented, and data-driven content marketing strategy that brings awareness and delivers value to their audience. A data-driven approach not only helps in forecasting the results of your marketing efforts but also enables you to stay ahead of the competition. Let’s understand the role and importance of content analytics and how it can help you develop a more focused, contextualized, and effective content strategy for your next marketing initiatives.  

Role of content analytics in optimizing content marketing strategy

Analytics-led content marketing aims to optimize marketing strategy based on data gathered through critical insights, such as unique website visitors, bounce rates, engagement rates, and more. Content analytics is crucial in measuring and analyzing your content performance by focusing on key performance metrics related to rational and emotional factors, changing marketing trends, and end-user preferences and behavior across different touchpoints. Once you have a firm grasp of the right analytical metrics, you can build a compelling data-driven content marketing strategy. Analytics-led content strategy helps you measure ROI and enables you to communicate the message effectively in your next marketing initiative with a better chance of resonating with the audience. 

How to conduct content analysis to make data-informed marketing decisions? 

Monitoring the right analytics metrics is critical for smarter content decisions to help you achieve your content marketing objectives faster. Moreover, the data gathered can help you understand and interpret how your content performs at every digital interaction between your brand and your end-users. It enables you to optimize your future content creation efforts. Let’s look at some of the key performance metrics. 

• Consumption metrics: These metrics provide information about unique visitors, page views, number of subscriptions, and so on. They act as a starting point for any marketing campaign and help to understand how your content reaches your audience.

• Retention metrics: Retention metrics helps you to measure the number of returning and new visitors, social media follower count, bounce rate, unsubscribes, and so on to track the engagement of the end-users with your content. 

• Sharing metrics: Sharing metrics help you track the count of social media post shares, website shares, blog shares, and online asset shares.

• Lead metrics: These metrics help you track the number of leads generated from specific content or campaign.

Sales metrics: Sales metrics provide a detailed view of sales done in a month/quarterly/yearly. You can set up your reports according to analytical needs to measure how your content generates sales and revenue.

How to track key performance metrics using tools?

There are various marketing analytics tools that can provide customizable metrics, a variety of visualizations, and intuitive dashboards to help you measure the impact of your content on end-users.

Moz

Moz is an excellent tool for determining your SEO content strategy. It helps to assess the impact of your search-engine-optimized content with the help of critical insights. This tool generates detailed reports that help understand which keywords rank better and can help your content gain more visits. Moz lets you run a competitor analysis to see what others are doing, how your content reaches your end-users, and how you can improve your overall marketing strategy.

Buffer

Buffer is one of the best content marketing analytics tools that help you understand channel performance via customizable reports. You can add or remove metrics based on your objectives for various channels or accounts. Buffer reports are up-to-date and are designed to help you visualize the live channel performance with engagement metrics. You can also measure stories, posts, hashtags, audience demographics, and more. 

Hubspot

HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software offers critical insights into your marketing campaigns. The tool provides features such as triffers, automatic schedule touchpoints and alerts, end-user tracking, and more. The tool can also track a buyer’s journey with behavioral events based on which you can determine when the end-user is ready for another stage of the marketing funnel. Unique features like attribution reporting help you connect with interactions, records, and the revenue generated.

How to navigate and use insights as fuel to develop an analytics-led content strategy?

An analytic-led content strategy is an approach that enables you to develop content based on insights gathered from end-user data. Let’s look at how you can use insights as fuel to optimize your content strategy. 

1. Build a foundation and framework underpinned by data 

Several steps such as topic selection, research, keyword search, overviewing analytics, repurposing, and curating help generate high-performing content. However, using data as fuel for your marketing engine can help your team make more accurate decisions to carry out work seamlessly. You can streamline your workflow with a good data-driven framework that includes the following steps:

• Define your goals and objectives: One of the most critical steps is to define clear objectives. For instance, you should provide a well-defined CTA to provide a clear message to your audience. Creating a list of marketing goals helps you assign an appropriate key performance indicator (KPI) for each objective. 

• Analyze your audience: An important objective of content marketing is to drive traffic to your website. However, you must understand your audience, their choices, and preferences to ensure your content delivers value. This knowledge will not only help you to generate personalized content but will also help your audience to resolve their queries.

• Conduct a competitor analysis: Knowing your competitors’ actions helps you stay updated regarding new trends, audience preferences, and new ideas and concepts. It also helps you understand what different companies are currently doing and what type of content creation will resonate with the audience. 

• Create user-specific content: Delivering high-quality content that delights your audience is an excellent way to draw their attention to your brand. Such content pieces also have the potential to rank high on Google.  

• Monitor the data and optimize your strategy: As soon as you publish your content, start analyzing it to measure the success rate. If you find shortcomings, optimize them accordingly. 

2. End-users / Audience Mapping

Audience research will help you discover the most prevailing patterns and enables you to deliver a personalized experience. You need to determine what motivates them, how to contextualize your content based on their ideal choices, and how to connect with them authentically. Here is the list of data points you need to know about your audience. 

• Demographics (country, zonal area)
• Buying patterns
• Pain points (problems that your audience is experiencing and how your content can resolve them)
• Emotional triggers
• Content form preferences (podcast, blogs, or infographics)
• Channels preferences (forums, guest posts, website visits)

To collect this data, you can use the google search console, run a customer survey, attach a data collection form on your site, analyze their social activities, scan your competitors, and so on. 

3. Championing 4Rs of content based on performance insights (Repurposing, Reusing, Recycling, Repeating)

Technology is rapidly changing, due to which it becomes essential to update your content with accurate figures, facts, and statistics to maximize the life of your content and make it more relevant for your audience. Apart from this, you can reuse, repurpose or recycle your content over time and distribute your high-performing content pieces to various platforms and channels. You can also repurpose a blog into an entirely different format. For instance, you can repurpose a whitepaper into a blog, podcast, infographic, or video. With these small yet critical steps, you can not only maximize the return on marketing investment but also retain traffic with minimum effort, help you reach a wider audience, and strengthen your brand.

4. Content Dissemination and Outreach Approach  

Once you have done your research and are all set to publish your content, you need to finalize the platforms and channels where you want your content to be published. Promoting your content on different channels will help you maximize your reach. However, you must look for the right timing when a channel gains a higher user engagement. With the help of a content delivery network, you can schedule the publishing time to deliver the right content to the right audience at the time when the engagement is at its highest. Provide your audience variety by creating different content, including social media posts, newsletters, blogs, case studies, and more. Additionally, you can utilize an influencer outreach approach to scale your content and gain new audiences for your brand. Influencers help to deliver more engagement, purchase-ready followers, and self-made content. 

Conclusion

Analytics-led content strategy helps in scrutinizing every element of your content strategy. With a data-led approach, you can not just create a robust content plan that works for the long-term but also gives you a stronger strategy, allowing you to identify new opportunities from your competitors’ activity and your audiences’ preferences. Furthermore, you can constantly improve and draw more engagements, traffic, and conversions by analysing your performance over time.