How to market your content from Reactive to Data Driven

You have been told over and over again that content marketing should be data oriented .

You have been told that you need to demonstrate ROI. To show the business impact of what you do. To measure everything back to dollars and cents so you can make your case to the executive team.

While tying your efforts back to ROI is vitally important, your efforts at using data shouldn't stop there. Being data driven doesn't mean displaying values only. It means using data to give your organization a competitive edge against even the biggest, heaviest competitors.

Being data-driven means using data to give your organization a competitive edge over even the biggest, heaviest of competitors. Click to Tweet

In practice, that means understanding which campaigns will be successful before they were created .

Imagine: no more trial and error and wasting months figuring out if your audience is even care about about the content you are creating.

Sound appealing? Great. Let's learn how to make that a reality.

This is not data-driven content marketing.

There are solid numbers at the end of the campaign to make your executive team feel like a win for being data driven. But, unfortunately, this is not data driven. It is being fed back data.

Unless you're actively using data to make predictions about what will happen with future campaigns, you're stuck in a data response cycle.

You know you're in a data-reactive cycle if you find yourself constantly throwing content against the wall and then seeing what it sticks to. Then, when you find something that works, you'll have a hard time replicating its success.

What is Reactive Content Marketing?

Measuring your success at the end of the campaign doesn't help you get there. It simply tells you how you did.

Knowing how you did it is great and you can use some of that insight into future campaigns, but it doesn't benefit the current campaign.

Many organizations are struggling to respond to data. Even if you don't use data at all in your content marketing, you might think that just becoming data reactive – just getting any kind of data – would be a win.

Instead of taking the intermediate step from no data to response data, you're actually in a great position to take the leap to becoming data driven, because you don't have the data baggage that comes with it. Whether. Sometimes it's easier to learn a new habit than to break an old one.

What is data-driven content marketing?

Very good data tells you how you did. Most analytics systems are built to show you this information. But get the data to tell you what to do next is the key difference between some of the best marketers in the world and those trying to catch up.

Being data driven means using data to know how you did AND what to do next.

5 steps to becoming a data-driven content marketer

1. Set where you need to go.

To know what to do next, you need to know where you're going. The first step to becoming data-driven is to align your content strategy with actual business goals.

These goals should be:

Specifics: Example: 100 leads, 20% growth in incoming traffic, etc.

Time distinction: 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, etc.

Measurable: Your goal should be quantifiable and measurable.

Content marketing can support a multitude of business goals – sometimes multiple at the same time.

become data driven

2. Determine how you will measure your progress.

Next, you need to know how you will measure your progress on the road. This measurement will tell you whether you're on track with your goals or if you've gone off track and need to make adjustments.

This is where the data-driven methodology begins to deviate from the data-responsive approach. In the responsive data approach, you can wait until the end of the campaign to see where you ended up. In data-driven, you're using data as a step-by-step map along the way.

Here are just a few sample metrics you can use to measure the business goals listed previously:

3. Use data to predict trends.

There's a lot of talk about predictive analytics, but what does that data mean predictive?

First, it looks for patterns in the data to identify emerging trends in the future. For example, content intelligence platforms like Ceralytics or Conclusion will look for patterns in your own content and determine what saturation level the topic you've covered, meaning that each piece of content you create on that topic has diminishing returns. It can compare that content to topics it determines you're underutilizing: topics that you don't cover enough and are emerging trends.

Other predictive analytics can uncover untapped audiences that have similar constraints to your target audience that you're not addressing.

This data predicts gaps and untapped areas where you should focus your time, instead of relying on trial and error.

4. Plan the actions to be taken.

Based on predictive analytics, descriptive analytics tells you what you should do next.

Knowing where there are gaps and untapped opportunities is great. But you need to know what to do with those opportunities, right?

Descriptive analytics collects data points from a variety of sources to build a big picture of what is happening and what should be done ahead.

For example, if an emerging trend in your industry is identified by predictive analytics, then predictive analytics will tell you that making a video, compared to a blog post, will produce results. better when you solve a particular hard point through content.

5. Continuously measure your content.

Measure no longer something that happens at the end of the campaign. Instead, it needs to take place while the operation is underway, when changes can still be made and the ship is repaired.

With content campaigns, you may soon find that certain channels are performing better than others. It can be worthwhile to adjust budgets immediately to allocate more money to more performing channels and away from underperforming channels.

Some tools will even alert you in real time if campaigns start to go inactive.

Turn your data into action.

The biggest content marketing players are using data-driven analytics to make decisions about their content. Click to Tweet

In the reactive data approach, you could have created 6 months worth of posts, analyzed their performance and then created more posts like the best performing ones. This method is resource intensive and takes too long to find out if you are succeeding or failing.

With a data-driven content marketing approach, you analyze what is currently working for you, where are the new trends, and what content you should create to capture those opportunities. And it's done without guessing.

The biggest content marketing players are using data-driven analytics to make decisions about their content. They have the team of people to make this happen.

The good news for the rest of us is that new marketing AI technologies are democratizing data, so players of all sizes now have access to data that can give us a competitive edge. painting.

Next steps

Moving your content marketing from data-driven to data-driven won't happen overnight, but it won't happen unless you start taking solid steps. now. If you don't have the ability to predict and specify what will perform in the future, now might be a good time to investigate how you can get that data.