Every successful content strategy starts with data. The term data-driven content marketing has been thrown around a lot over the last few years, and for good reason too. In today’s competitive landscape, it is impossible to purely rely on guesswork and intuition.

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, data should be the fuel that powers your marketing machine. Using data in every decision can help you craft an effective content strategy and generate more leads and conversions for your business. In this article, we cover what it takes to develop a cohesive data-driven content strategy. It will also cover what it means to be data-driven, why it’s important, and how to successfully implement it in your organization.

A data-driven strategy uses data to predict trends, needs, and activities so you can make smarter decisions about your content. Building a data-driven approach based on a clear plan that outlines content purpose, audience, and overarching business goals can help your brand use data effectively to create demand and meet needs based on facts, not assumptions.

The steps involved in using data within content creation are as follows:

1. Set content goals

The first thing you need to decide is what you want to achieve. You can’t be everything to everyone, so you have to make some decisions. Determine your content goals and identify the best channels to reach those goals. Once that’s done, you can set your key performance indicators (KPIs). Anything you add to your website or campaign should be fit for purpose. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your audience won’t know either.

2. Identify your audience

Data helps us identify the right people. Data helps eliminate assumptions about your audience and who is reading your content. Moreover, data also provides information about a set target audience, including age groups, interests, emotional triggers, and which social media platforms they use.

3. Competitor analysis

If you want to grow in your industry, you need to know what your competitors are doing. Data analytics help you look at your competitors based on the exact metrics you use to analyze your brand. It effectively helps brands analyze the obvious elements of their competitors’ content to derive meaningful insights. Learn how you can improve your business by analyzing your competitors and the type of content they create for their content marketing strategy, how their content is performing in your industry, and how popular it is. You can understand better. It helps identify opportunities to meet unmet needs, create new subject areas, and generate ideas for other content.

4. Conduct keyword research

Once you’ve determined the audience, competitor strategy, and your own set of defined goals, it is time to conduct keyword research. Use a tool like Google Analytics or Semrush, or something platform-specific like YouTube Search Insights, to find out what kind of language your content should use. This is useful for more than just SEO. Using keywords in your content shows that you speak the same language as your audience. It doesn’t mean using basic language but a planned nomenclature that everyone in your niche can understand.

5. Analyze the results

Even if you are actively using data, you should continue to analyze your results to improve future content based on your audience’s behavior. Analyzing the results also helps you know when to update your content. Regularly updating older content keeps it relevant. Factors to consider when updating existing content include audience behavior, audience engagement, and search engine rankings. Your data analytics content strategy should also consider the business impact of your content. Data may show direct sales growth, especially when a consumer purchases a product after linking to it in your content. However, it can also be indirect sales growth.

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