Using Data to Expand Your Content Marketing Strategy

Data plays a huge part in a company’s content marketing strategy. Most data is usually applied towards identifying influencers or researching specific keywords, but there are many types of content that hold as much value and importance. By looking at all forms of data, you can review the overall landscape of your content marketing strategy.

Let’s take a look at how you can implement and leverage the data you receive for your content marketing strategy:

Data you should be looking at

1. Website content: When it comes to content marketing strategy, your company’s web content should be at the center of the data you study. Use an editorial content calendar to keep track of important dates and data, such as blog titles and publication dates. This calendar will provide you with a good starting point to your content marketing strategy as it provides you with insight on what to do next.
2. Competitor’s content: Understanding how your competitor’s use their content in their content marketing strategy helps you in many ways. For one, you will be able to observe and measure how your own content’s performance measures up. This gives you a chance to find opportunities for future content, determine what subjects to focus on, and create engaging content ideas. Analyzing your competitor’s content may take some work but going through their content can give you useful insights. 
3. External content: You should always track the content you create and publish on other sites that aren’t your own. Track and measure factors like engagement rates on posts, publishing times and dates, how many users visit your site, and more. If you’d also like to measure SEO, you should definitely look into your page’s rank, trust and citation flow, and domain authority. 
4. Social media content: Social media content is as important to track as all other content on this list. It can be a powerful tool to fuel your content marketing strategy. For instance, just by observing metrics on your Facebook or Instagram, you can see how much impact your content has. This can help you see where your performance is lacking and create content that receives more engagement.

How you can maximize your data

Collecting and analyzing relevant data from all sources gives you a chance to change up the way you run your content marketing strategy. You can use this data to further polish key aspects of your current content marketing strategy or even revise it if you notice your posts are ineffective. 

When analyzing your collected data, make sure to keep it organized and visually formatted so that you know where and what to improve on. For example, through a comprehensive report, you can see that posts receive better engagement on Monday and Wednesday mornings or that you should post more photos over a status update on a social platform. All of these details can vastly improve your content marketing strategy and bring in more of your audience. 

Implementing a data-led approach to your strategy is a lot of work but it has its pros. Continue collecting, observing, and scrutinizing the data you receive from your content and apply gained insights to your strategy. In time, you will radically improve, creating a content marketing plan that will boost your content performance—bringing in more engagement and conversions (of course!).

Looking to get ahead of the competition? Check out our blog, How To Create A Successful E-Newsletter for our tips on giving email marketing a shot!