We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: content rules, but only with the support of data insights. Even as content is serving as the public face of a company’s marketing, data is behind the scenes calling the shots. Is your organization making use of the power of data, or neglecting all it has to offer?
In order to take your content to the next level, you need tools to harness the power of the data you collect. Here are some we recommend:
Tracking and analyzing the right metrics can improve your content targeting, and the best way to measure the most actionable metrics is through marketing automation software. Tools like Hubspot, Pardot and Infusionsoft all offer their own unique approach to automating many routine marketing tasks while gathering cross-channel insights on marketing activities on a contact-by-contact basis. Not sure what marketing automation software is right for your organization? This guide from Digital Marketing Depot lays out some of the key differentiators of each product.
Benefits: Marketing automation software allows your team to understand the impact of each marketing activity you engage in on each individual lead in your pipeline. Imagine being able to click into the profile of a specific contact and see what links they’ve been clicking in your emails, where they’ve been spending time on your website, and what kind of content they’ve been downloading all in one spot. Then, imagine being able to run aggregate reports that tell you how a specific subset of your pipeline is responding to different types of content and messaging. With marketing automation software, these things are not just possible, they’re easy and often automatic.
An integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system shows your team what role each of your marketing activities is playing in the sales funnel — not just what role you think it is playing. While any CRM tool can help marketing and sales track interactions with prospects and customers throughout the buying cycle, a CRM tool that is fully integrated with your site and marketing automation system tracks this data more fully and automatically.
Benefits: An integrated CRM system allows you to do more than figure out what content is resonating most with your targets. It allows you to understand what content is driving sales.
Heat-mapping software shows your team some of the most granular data you can gather on each page of your website. Learn what people are actually looking at, how far they progress through each page and where the most attention falls on a page at any given time.
There are many options out there, including LuckyOrange, Crazy Egg and Clicktale. Do some research to figure out which one fits your organization’s needs.
Benefits: These heat maps let your team visualize the nitty-gritty details of your content’s effectiveness. Now your team can truly see what aspects of a specific piece of content resonate with your audience most, and make appropriate decisions about how to lay out future content pieces. You can even A/B test aspects of page design to see how they affect the heat map.
What other tools do you use to empower your team with the most actionable data insights available? If you want to hear more about how marketing changes could help your team improve your data, contact us.
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