Any modern marketer knows that data is a fundamental element of any successful content marketing strategy. Audience-generated data is a powerful tool in the marketer’s arsenal.
The amount of data that is generated around audiences and how they behave, both online and offline, has snowballed in the past few years. Over 90% of data collected was collected in the last two years.
This extends to the data collected around content consumption. Prospects and customers are providing this data. This is where the marketer must turn the data based insights into an effective content marketing strategy.
A content marketing strategy involves constant iteration, testing, and measurement. Big data is an essential part of this method. It can help you to uncover new insights, find new audiences.
It drives content personalization and helps you to boost conversions. Ultimately it will allow you to become a predictive content marketer. Here’s how:
Understand your audience, get better insights
Let’s take it back to basics – a clear understanding of your audience means a more effective content marketing strategy. Data is a powerful method to provide this understanding.
These datasets help marketers to learn about their audience and interpret what kind of content is most likely to produce the desired results. Content shouldn’t be produced without the prerequisite data-driven insights.
This is where a data strategy will help to identify audiences and will provide considerable improvements to your content marketing KPIs.
Using data to identify audiences
To help understand which datasets can help with your content marketing strategy, we have split them into three categories:
First party data
This term is used to describe data that is collected internally by your company or organization. For content marketers, this is usually generated from marketing activity (such as email campaigns) or web analytics.
Web analytics data is usually generated by Google Analytics, and it’s one of the most powerful tools for content marketers to generate powerful first-party data.
First party data is integral to understanding how your audience behaves when interacting with your content, or any other touchpoint.
Every time your audience interacts with your company, data is generated. This is useful information for content marketers and can be used to further your audience understanding.
Look beyond the headline stats and first-party data can help you to understand where your audience is. Key metrics such as time spent per page or pages per session can help you to build a much clearer picture of your audiences.
The first step in any data-driven content marketing strategy is to make use of the first party data at your disposal.