3 Steps to Data-Driven Content Marketing

Too few brands use a data-driven content marketing strategy, which is a shame considering that, at a cost that’s 62 percent less than outbound marketing, content marketing generates triple the number of leads. With more than 2 million articles published on the web every day, it’s essential to know how to leverage data to create content that’s relevant and accessible to your consumers. Does your content simply look nice, or does it leads to engagement and conversions?

Using the following three steps to set clear goals and make data your guide will ensure you're developing the right type of content, getting it in front of the right audiences, and understanding its impact in a way that lets you continually optimize your strategy.

Step 1: Understand the Context

Understanding your target consumers is the first step toward creating data-informed content. By gathering data on consumers’ online and offline search and purchase behaviors, it’s possible to establish the context of each interaction.

Another aspect of context is being aware of your competitors’ content, and where they are placing it. If one channel is already saturated by competitor content, you can move to a different platform to distinguish your own brand in the mind of your consumers.

These context-informing tools can help you understand your consumers’ behavior:

1. Google AdWord’s Keyword Planner looks at search volume and helps you gain insight into information consumers are actively seeking.
2. Google Trends identifies popular topics and gauges interest in search queries over time, bringing rising trends such as seasonality to bear on your marketing efforts.
3. Buzzsumo researches specific topics and identifies which content within these topics is performing most strongly. It also identifies influencers and charts social shares by platform.

An informed approach to gathering data will allow you to create more relevant, timely and differentiated content that will inform and convert consumer searches.

Step 2: Make Connections With Your Target Audience

Once you’ve gathered relevant data, you will be better able to develop content targeting your optimal audience. Now you need to connect with them by distributing it through the right channels — just posting the content on your blog may not reach them.

To our surprise, after all that work developing context-informed content, many marketers leave distribution as an afterthought. Sitting on your content and waiting is not an option — its success depends on successfully syndicating it.

Here are three ways you can connect your content to your target audience: