How Analytics Will Boost Content Marketing
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It’s the last point that’s both extremely challenging and rewarding, making content marketing’s biggest aim that of building a meaningful relationship with customers and growing a brand’s image.
Winning your audience’s trust and turning your transactions with them into a relationship involves leveraging emotions. In a digital landscape where data drives everything, the question is ‘Can data leverage emotions and build relationships?’
The short answer is ‘Yes!’. The long answer is explored throughout this post.
Most businesses possess immense information and don’t use most of it or even know what to do. When your content marketing efforts are bolstered by data, you’ll see an improvement in engagement and other important metrics. Let’s get down to understanding how data, in different forms, will enable greater content marketing success.
Numbers and facts seem disparate from emotions, feelings, and the ability to build relationships. But when it comes to content marketing, AI and other tools can use data to drive personalization to make a business appear more human to customers.
This is why it’s important to have email marketing integrations in place and to use CRM tools. Sending emails that address the user by name or drawing up historical purchase information when customers ask for support will personalize customer experiences. The key is to ensure that it’s not just your sales team or customer support team or any single department that has access to technology and data.
As a leader, you need to restructure or reorient how your entire organization works by centering different activities around data analytics. Shared data enables more focused and personalized interactions from across the organization which leads customers to feel positively about your business.
How does data help you listen more?
There are several billion digital citizens online right now. And they are talking and creating content through blogs, social media, and forums. Tracking the sheer amount of content that’s being created every second is a near-impossible task without data.
For businesses, using social media tools for listening and to carry out sentiment analysis can be a game-changer. Today, you can work with AI-based platforms for social media listening to mine what people are saying. It can even go a step further and assign a positive, negative, or neutral score to your work.
Imagine being able to pick up negative chatter before it scales into something that’s out of control. You can engage your PR strategies at the very beginning and address your brand’s image online. And not just that, you can also listen to your customers, develop new product ideas, improve what isn’t working and enhance what people love by listening to what they’re saying.
We already know that we need to optimize content for searches on Google, but we also need to go another level deeper and account for user searches made through voice search.
Voice search is growing to become a major way through which people carry out searches online especially since smartphones and home voiced activated devices are the norm. Even when it comes to desktops, voice search plays a significant role. According to Microsoft, 25% of searches on Windows 10 is through voice commands. We’re also expected to see some 21.4 million-plus smart devices at homes this year. So, the impact of voice search cannot be overestimated.
To build content for audio searches and be aware of the kind of keywords driving traffic to your site, you need to use the analytics solutions you currently have. As of today, Google does not provide specific voice search analytics features, but we need to keep an eye out for its possible arrival in the future.
For now, when using Google Analytics or some other analytical tool, consider your long-tail phrases and conversational queries as possible voice search queries. Other indications are such searches coming from mobile devices as well as the demographics that are more likely to use long-term keywords. Millennials, as can be expected, form the largest group that uses voice search. By looking for indicators like the ones mentioned here, your analytics tools will help you tailor your content towards the right audience.
Studies by the Content Marketing Institute tell us that just 35 percent of B2B marketersand only 43 percent of B2C marketers measure content marketing ROI. The problem that this creates is that we have no way of improving our content marketing strategies when we don’t know what’s working and what isn’t.
Analytics tools play an important role in boosting your content marketing success. Here are some of the top tools you’ll need to support your efforts:
Depending on the area your business is in, some of these tools will matter more than others and you’ll need to make the best choice for your needs. When you can measure what’s happening you’ll have the ability to scale those content pieces that get the most engagement. Tracking backlinks and engagement KPIs like shares, comments, and likes can indicate how customers emotionally respond to your content and how to improve your marketing efforts.
The idea that facts and figures cant drive emotions does not hold good when it comes to content marketing. When your goal is to get attention, build trust, and nurture relationships, you need data to help you understand your customers better and to make content that touches them.
We’ve looked at the role that data plays in making content marketing more effective and how you can apply it in your own business. Use these tips as a springboard for your own marketing experiments and to help your business grow.
