When you invest any amount of time or money into your business’s marketing, you want it to have the best chance of succeeding. This is true for any type of marketing. You need a thought-out plan behind your marketing strategies. Trying something new and hoping that it has a positive outcome won’t get you very far. If you want to reach your marketing goals, you need data-driven marketing, which includes utilizing content marketing data.

Writing and data might not seem like two things that often go together or require similar skill sets, but good content marketing depends on understanding and interpreting data. Find out what you need to do to create a data-driven content marketing strategy.

Determine Your Target Audience

The same marketing tactics aren’t going to work for everyone, and your business isn’t going to appeal to the needs of every person. Before you start creating any content, you need to know who you’re marketing to first. Determining your target audience requires you to understand a range of demographics that make up the individuals who need your business.

If you already have existing clients and customers, you likely already have a good idea of what your audience looks like. However, newer businesses may not have defined this yet. Even if you are an established business, you might not have considered who your audience really is and what resonates with them.

Trying to target everyone will only weaken your marketing and make it less appealing. The more specific you can make your audience, the more effective it can be. Connecting with a smaller group that’s likely to need your business can be the most impactful. Of course, some businesses will have much broader audiences, while others are much more niche, so how narrow an audience is can vary.

Competitor Research

While you want to stand out and be unique, this doesn’t mean that you should never look into what your competitor is doing. In fact, you should be regularly checking in on them. Your audience is likely going to consider multiple businesses before making their final decisions, so they’ll be looking at what your competitors are up to. Competitor research can help you discover new opportunities or help you find areas where they’re underperforming that you can excel at.

If you know who your competitors are and who’s the most successful, you need to keep a close eye on them. You don’t want your content marketing to be lacking in comparison. Of course, you don’t want to simply do what everyone else is doing, you want to take what your audience is expecting from businesses like yours and make it even better.

However, if you don’t know who your competition is, this is something you can figure out with some extra research. While you can search for businesses like yours, you can also utilize SEO tools to get a more accurate idea of who your competitors are.

Keyword Research

If you aren’t considering what keywords you should use in your content, you won’t get very much out of it. Without the right keywords, you aren’t going to attract the right people to your website. Before creating content, you need to figure out what the best keywords to target are.

There shouldn’t be any guesswork when it comes to incorporating keywords into your content. Various SEO tools can provide information on what search terms people are using to help you find the ones that can offer you the most success. Keyword difficulty and search volume can show you which keywords you have the best chance at ranking for. While everyone wants to rank for keywords with the highest search volume, this isn’t always a realistic goal. For many businesses, long-tail keywords with lower search volumes, but with more qualified users, will have the best outcome.

When you begin searching for the key terms your audience searches for, you will also find many related terms to include in your content. These are terms you might not have thought of at first but can help bring more traffic to your website. The keywords users search for might surprise you, so don’t assume you know what they’re looking for.

Content Topic Research

There are many different ways you can find content topics that your audience will be interested in. When you conduct keyword research, it will likely alert you to many different topic ideas related to certain terms. Keyword research tools typically give you related questions that work as content topics as well as headings within a piece of content. When you know the keywords your content needs, it will make it easier to find similar topics people are searching for.

SEO tools can help make finding content topics efficient, but this isn’t the only way you can find new opportunities. The “people also ask” and “related searches” results that appear in the SERPs can be a valuable way of figuring out what questions people have. While this might not provide you with specific information, such as how many users are searching for it, it can still help inspire your content topics.

You should also be up-to-date with what’s going on in your industry. Trends are constantly changing in many industries, so there will often be something new to cover that you can get ahead of your competitors on. Following publications and thought leaders in your industry can ensure that you’re always in the know and are educated on what your audience wants to know.

Measure Content Success

Of course, content marketing data isn’t only important before and during the content creation process. If what you’re doing isn’t working and you keep doing it because you’re none the wiser, this will just be a waste of resources.

When your content isn’t performing well, you want to make improvements. This includes both updating old pieces of content and changing what you do for new ones. You should look into how many pageviews your content gets, how long people view your content, and if it helps contribute to conversions. Likewise, you want to know what successful pieces of content have in common and replicate it in the future.

Get Data-Driven Content Marketing with ENX2 Marketing

Having a gut feeling isn’t enough when it comes to content marketing or any other type of marketing. To feel confident in your decisions, you need research and data to back them up. A huge amount of work goes into researching content marketing data and creating successful content, which might be much more than you can handle. To ensure you have everything you need when it comes to content marketing and any other aspects of digital marketing, let ENX2 Marketing help.

How to Use Data in Content Marketing