10 Essential Tips for Data-Driven Content Marketing (Sponsored)

Thanks to AI, any marketer can create a blog post, article, or other type of content in minutes.

But whether that content resonates with your audience is a different story – especially if you rely on keyword research and generic AI ideas in your strategy. It may improve your search rankings, but it doesn’t necessarily build brand authority, create trusted connections, or result in a positive marketing impact.

To achieve all of these goals through your content marketing efforts, you need a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs. You also need the right data, including insights into who is accessing your content, what they want to accomplish, and what content they engage with most.

To help you on your path to success, we’ve put together 10 tips on how you can use data to sharpen your content marketing strategy. Follow these recommendations to create content that demonstrates your brand’s unique value and leads to stronger marketing performance.

Tip 1: Go beyond basic demographics

Don’t rely solely on age, gender, or location data to shape your content approach. Instead, dig deeper and use research methods that provide a clearer understanding of your target audience’s behaviors, motivations, and preferences.

This can be achieved through audience surveys, customer interviews, and social media listening techniques. Useful insights can also be gained from your existing website analytics, customer feedback channels, and interaction history data.

What you discover can show you ways to optimize your messaging, targeting, and channel selection.

Tip 2: Focus on topics, not just keywords

Yes, SEO is important. However, searching for high search volume keywords will not necessarily improve your rankings or make your content stand out. Use insights from your audience data to create content that truly interests them.

Begin by applying the information you’ve gathered using the research techniques suggested above. Let’s say the data shows that your audience wants advice on how they can benefit from machine learning. You can fill this knowledge gap with on-topic content optimized to drive search traffic to your company’s website.

Tip 3: Align with sales and customer success

Your company’s sales and customer service teams regularly interact with members of your audience, making them valuable sources of content insights.

These organizational partners have direct access to insights such as:

• Frequently asked questions from consumers
• Common objections they encounter
• Behavioral trends and preferences they have observed
• How existing customers use (or want to use) your products and services.

Ask them to share what they learned from their customer conversations. Then use it to guide your decisions about the topics and ideas you want to write about. This allows your content to better address real-world challenges and allows your internal teams to leverage this content in their outreach efforts.

Tip 4: Develop the core content first

Choosing specific content types and topics can be overwhelming. There are millions of conversations you can create – how do you know where to start?

Guide the insights you gather by following the three tips above: look at the data you’ve collected, narrow down your list of topics, determine who your target audience is, and create an outline for the overarching one Content marketing strategy you want to use.

Start with content that highlights your unique value proposition and addresses your audience’s key concerns. Then create complementary content to support your overall strategy.

The core content can vary depending on how well established your brand is. Newer brands should cast a wide net with content designed to increase brand awareness. Brands that are already well-known or have built a strong customer base may want to prioritize topics at the bottom of the funnel to engage with consumers who are ready to convert.

Tip 5: Create a logical content hierarchy

Use website analytics to structure your content experience to accompany your audience on their buying journey. You can analyze data to identify common questions and create Q&A and how-to content because people often search for answers and your content is more likely to resonate if you provide helpful information.

Additionally, focusing on evergreen content – ​​assets that have remained relevant over time and can be easily updated according to your data – should make up a significant portion of your core content. Structure it to guide your audience to the specific content they may have shown interest in. Add questions and answers, how-to articles, content clusters, and recurring topics to guide your audience into their specific areas of interest.

Tip 6: Publish targeted and update existing content

Your strategy should include a sales plan that targets specific audiences for key topics. This will help your audience find the right content at the right time to influence their decision making.

Know why you are publishing each piece and where it will be most effective. Continue to use this as a guide for future content.

The world of content is constantly changing – sometimes quickly. For this reason, keeping track of published content and regularly reviewing its performance data is just as important as publishing new content. You don’t want valuable information just gathering dust on your website.

Over time, the information in your content may become outdated or the audience may demand new details on the topic. Address these issues by updating or improving underperforming content before creating new content. Smaller updates can increase rankings and conversions.

Tip 7: Diversify and personalize content along the entire customer journey

Create different types of content for relevant appeal at every stage of the customer journey, from awareness to post-purchase support. This can include blogs, social media posts, infographics, and multimedia content formats.

While you demonstrate your expertise, don’t be afraid to make your content a fun and interactive experience for customers. Creating content such as surveys, personalized offers, quizzes, and events is a great way to demonstrate your brand’s expertise while providing consumers with a fun and interactive experience to engage with.

Using a customer data platform (CDP), you can deliver personalized content based on insights collected from your customers’ previous browsing, engagement, and purchasing behavior.

Tip 8: Publish consistently and prioritize human response

Quality is key, but volume and cadence are also important. According to a HubSpot studyPublishing 5-10 articles per month will result in good ROI and help you keep content relevancy and website traffic consistent. This also continually checks off keywords that your audience regularly searches for, further feeding into your SEO data.

Keep an eye on your ROI. This measurement of your content performance can give you insight into how often you should post and allow you to try out new ideas. Simply put, if some articles are more popular than others, you can focus on creating more content around those top-performing topics.

Use AI for research and ideas, but rely on human creativity to write. AI is good for research purposes, but it takes away the human aspect of the content. So make sure you include well-written pieces that will resonate with your audience. Incorporate customer reviews, testimonials, and social media posts to add authenticity and credibility to your content.

Tip 9: Test everything

Use A/B testing to find out what works best in your content, design, CTAs, and sales methods. Test your layout, design, headings and subheadings, and other content and see what impact they have on your business goals.

Tip 10: Centralize content management

Use a modern CMS to manage, publish and measure the performance of your content across all channels. This helps maintain consistency and allows you to personalize content as needed.

Remember to adapt to the ever-changing trends in content creation. You need to adapt accordingly to best reach your target audience. By following these tips, you’ll have a data-driven content marketing strategy that truly connects with your audience and drives results.