The outcomes of content marketing are difficult to measure, and they’re even harder to predict. Great content has the potential to draw in new leads and revenue, but we all know that these objectives aren’t always achieved. Some content just works, while the rest falls flat or fails to achieve the desired outcomes.
So how is a marketer to plan a successful content marketing campaign? Is trial and error the only option?
Thankfully, it’s not. Whether you’re working with blogs, webinars or whitepapers, you can predict the success of your content strategy. You just need to tap into data and analytics to develop an empirical understanding of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to content and plan a campaign with predictable, measurable outcomes.
We spend a lot of time getting to know our customers’ buying habits and preferences, but we need to make sure that almost as much effort is spent researching the content preferences of our audiences. The audience for your content is probably made up of a large percentage of potential customers, but it also likely includes some thought leaders, advocates and current customers. The best content will feel like it speaks to each of these audiences directly.
As we said on Monday, look into what content your audience both creates and appreciates. A crowd that’s active on social media and used to digesting short bits of information may react well to a one-pager on your company’s point of difference, but a dense e-book might not work. However, if you’ve got a more niche audience that’s hungry for more in-depth content (and can’t find it anywhere else), such an e-book may be the thing that turns your leads into customers.
In December of 2014, we spoke about how the internet has increased the amount of readily-available content, and as a result, the quality of work has decreased as marketers use quantity to get their message across. Today, it’s important to use data and analytics to target quality content toward the right people to ensure that they get appropriate content at the right time. Craft plenty of different content to meet the needs of different segments of your audience, but don’t sacrifice quality, and allow data to tell you what they need.
The best marketers understand that content needs to tell a story. It needs to describe an audience’s pain points and provide a solution. In order to craft compelling stories, use data to identify the pain points that potential customers are experiencing and develop content around that. Using data to focus content around your audience’s needs as opposed to your services lets you work off an established data point instead of simply trying to see how well the audience engages with a feature of your business. With this approach, you’ll be able to better predict the rate of engagement and effectiveness of your content.
Let us know: how do you use data to plan your content?
Photo Credit: Seven Atoms via Flickr Creative Commons
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