Making informed decisions rather than depending on intuition or throwing paste at the wall to see what sticks will help you create content that engages your audience.
You must concentrate on data-driven marketing and data-driven content marketing and how they may assist you in gathering, analyzing, and applying data to your content if you want to make these informed judgments.
Continue reading this blog provided by SEO company to find out the best ways to use data before, during, and after the content production process if you’re out of blog post ideas and unclear about how to include them in your writing.
Table of Contents
The Idea of Using Data in Content Creation
As a marketer, you must use data-driven content three times:
- Before creating content (to decide what kind of content to create and for whom).
- During the creation of content (to shape storylines, provide scale, etc.).
- After the creation of content (to analyze how well your content has performed).
Learn more about 16 of Top Content Marketing Metrics
How Can you Use Data-Driven Content Strategy?
Let’s think about the proper use of data prior to, during, and after the content creation process.
1. Utilizing Data Before Creating Content
Marketers shouldn’t create content without first considering the data, just as no one starts building a house without first estimating the cost. So the cost here is data-driven content.
Data insights can help you decide what kind of content to create, for whom to create it, and in what format to present it.
Before you begin creating, consider some of the specific ways you can use data-driven content.
Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research is one way to use data in creating content.
Knowing the subjects you want to cover or the keywords you want to target is the first step in producing any kind of content.
Finding out what people are looking for online is essential because one of the main objectives of content creation is to engage an audience. You can gain useful insights (data-driven content) into these queries through keyword research.
Analyzing the search intent, whether it’s informational, navigational, transactional, or something else is essential when conducting keyword research.
Choose Your Audience
Before using data-driven content, choose your audience!
Imagine producing the best steaks in town and then attempting to market them to a vegan clientele. Similar to this, even your best content can produce only average results if it isn’t seen by the right audience.
You can find the right people with the aid of data.
You may eliminate assumptions about your audience and the people who read your content by using statistics.
Data can provide information about your target audience’s age range, hobbies, emotional triggers, and preferred social media platforms.
To learn more about your audience, you can utilize Google Analytics, customer surveys, or another social media analytics tool.
Select the Appropriate Content Format
You can utilize statistics to determine your audience’s preferences for data-driven content formats after learning more about who they are and what they seek online.
Will they read a blog post? Twitter conversation or watch videos like those on TikTok? Snapchat Reels?
Where you focus the majority of your content creation efforts will depend on the data, which will help you maximize your return on investment.
You may utilize tools like BuzzSumo and Sparktoro to locate the type of content your target audience enjoys.
2. Utilizing Data When Creating Content
Now let’s talk about how to use data in content creation.
When used properly, data may give your posts new life and meaning. This does not imply that you should insert spreadsheets right into your posts. Instead, consider how to ethically provide the information in a way that strengthens your argument.
You may give readers a post that will stick with them long after they’ve left the website by contextualizing data and using it to support your point. Here are some storytelling strategies to take into account when including data in your posts.
Prove Your Change
Using data-driven content to show change over time is the most potent narrative approach there is.
The Zebra illustrates how the price of auto insurance in the United States has changed over the past few years in the example below using statistics and maps.
On the map, the areas with the highest premiums for auto insurance appear darker. As you move the slider, you can see how the price evolves over time.
Why It Functions
In addition to adding weight to the conversation, demonstrating a noticeable changing trend (whether it be a sharp decline or improvement) can also elicit an emotional reaction from your readers.
Show Disparity
Data on its own can be ineffective. But if you put a set of data into context to draw attention to inconsistencies, you have a compelling story.
The Atlantic illustrates the disparity between the many COVID projections (and other economic difficulties) and the reality in the example below.
Why It Functions
You can emphasize gaps that result in unambiguous calls to action by demonstrating disparities between perception and reality or between two sets of data.
Display Correlation or Connection
The British Heart Foundation (BHF) used data-driven content to demonstrate the link between television viewing and the risk of developing coronary heart disease. BHF does a good job of illustrating the impact of a sedentary lifestyle, even though the initial data came from a third party.
Be careful not to imply causation when demonstrating a correlation between two events. Make it clear that you are merely demonstrating how two things are related and not establishing a direct causal relationship.
Why It Works
Readers can choose more wisely what to do in the future when data is used to demonstrate the relationship between two or more different things.
Give scale
Scale visualization is a superb technique to leverage data in content development.
The New York Post created this chart to show the scale of the world’s highest buildings through a visual depiction of data.
Why It Works
Scale can assist you in giving the context of your post. Which of your data-driven content can be adapted to this kind of visualization? Did you, for instance, serve more customers at a Red Sox game last year than the usual number of spectators? How can you illustrate the extent of your influence?
3. Data Use Following Content Creation
You’ve seen how data can be used both before and during the production of content. Now let’s talk about how data can still be used even after your post has been published.
Publish Optimized Content
Finding opportunities for content refreshing is a great way to use data-driven content “post-content creation.”
You can identify content that needs to be updated or refreshed by looking at data from tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which can show you content that has been steadily losing traffic over time.
Run a content audit to find the best-performing pieces of content from the archive that can be used or repurposed for other marketing channels.
Analysis of Audience Engagement
After publishing a piece of content, there are a ton of metrics you can monitor to see how your audience responds to or engages with it.
For instance, Google Analytics can be used to determine how long readers spend on particular articles. To monitor your audience’s clicks and cursor movements on a webpage, you can also utilize additional tools.
Final Thoughts
There you have it: nine straightforward but efficient methods for incorporating data into various stages of article creation.
Even if you’ve never utilized data-driven content in your business before, the content marketing techniques described in this article are simple to use, and there are a variety of tools available to you to help you make the most of the data.