It’s not enough to create and publish content. In today’s saturated internet and highly competitive market, a data-driven content strategy is essential. You have to meet your customers where they are and provide them with the essential connection they’re looking for in your brand. Your content marketing strategy isn’t just about pumping out posts, building an extensive content library, and hitting the highlights when it comes to essential industry keywords. Instead, it’s about creating content that is genuinely beneficial to your readers. Check out these 7 data-driven insights that can help you build a winning data-driven content strategy that will help you connect with customers as never before.
The Importance of a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
Is content still important for your brand? In a word, yes. A winning content marketing strategy is critical to ensuring your brand’s overall success. It’s never been about optimizing for SEO alone (though, of course, that’s an important part of getting your brand noticed by search engines). An effective content marketing strategy can:
- Improve brand recognition
- Increase your authority in your field
- Generate leads and fill your funnel
- Increase site visits
- Encourage sales and customer success
If you’ve been struggling to get the results you want or need from your content marketing efforts, it might be time to shift tactics. Your content marketing isn’t just about increasing search ranking. It’s about connecting with your customers, building their trust in your brand, and encouraging them to purchase from you, not your competitors.
1. Know Your “Why”
Effective content creation serves a lot of purposes. Most obviously, of course, it’s about helping potential customers find your brand when they’re looking for something that your industry has to offer. However, a winning content strategy isn’t just about rattling off keywords and showing that you know your industry (and have done your keyword research). It can also serve a lot of other purposes. Your content can:
- Help customers connect with you by showing that you understand their pain points, their concerns, and the factors that could influence their choice of products or services
- Provide greater insight into what your products can do and why customers should trust you, including why your solutions shine when compared to your competitors
- Offer answers to customers’ most frequently asked questions, including the things that are most likely to come up during customer service queries
- Give customers more information about your industry, inviting them to dig deeper into what your brand has to offer
As you start developing your content strategy, take the time to think through exactly why you’re creating specific content. Sure, driving traffic to your website or increasing sales may be at the top of your list—but take the time to dig deeper to understand what you’re actually accomplishing when creating pieces. Once you identify your “why,” you can do a better job of producing content that meets those goals.
2. Dig Deeper Into Your Customers
When it comes to success, 82% of top-performing marketers attribute their content marketing accomplishments to having a strong understanding of their audience. It’s not 2012, and today’s customers aren’t just looking for cookie-cutter content that gives them a brief overview of your brand or your products. Instead, they’re looking for something that speaks to them.
Get to know your customers and what makes them tick. You may have more than one target audience–and that means you need content that speaks to all of them. Make sure you understand not just basic demographic information (age, gender, income, location), but also more in-depth things about your customers. You need to know:
- The signals that indicate they’re getting ready to make a purchase in your industry
- Their pain points
- Their specific online behaviors, including the platforms and devices they’re most likely to use
- Their preferences when it comes to interacting with your brand
- The type of content they’re most likely to search for
Some of that information, you may be able to obtain by observing your competitors. Other information, however, you will need to collect over time, through your interactions with your customers. As you increase the data you have available, you can use it to more effectively shape your data-driven content strategy.
3. Plan to Be a Thought Leader
Most internet searches turn up dozens of similar results for the same query. If you conduct a search for “How can you choose the right house for your needs?” you’ll be greeted with site after site that says essentially the same thing. (As well as an AI overview that summarizes that content.) Likewise, if you search for, “How do you know if your senior parent needs more care?” you’ll see multiple sources that offer the same advice.
There’s plenty of content out there that answers the queries that are most common in your industry. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t answer those questions yourself. After all, you want customers to be able to find all the information they’re searching for right there on your website. However, if you want to create content that sets you apart–and converts–consider stepping outside the norms and the content that all your competitors are producing and offering something more. Like say… information gain. What’s missing from your competitors’ articles? Aim to include that in the piece you create.
What is it that your brand knows that others don’t? How can you be at the cutting edge of industry innovation or provide answers to questions that customers often ask because they can’t find those solutions anywhere else?
60% of customers note that thought leadership increases their confidence in a brand that they didn’t have previous knowledge about. Thought leadership helps them get to know you, figure out what you have to offer, and connect with you on a deeper level than they have with your competitors. Furthermore, it shows that your brand knows what it’s talking about when it comes to the issues that matter most to customers. Including that thought leadership as part of your content strategy can help you stand out from your competitors and increase customer trust.
4. Cover the Full Customer Journey
Ideally, you want customers to have a long experience with your brand–and they should connect with you at every stage of their journey. If you want to bring customers into your sales funnel and keep them there, you need to provide content for every step in the process, from the moment they become aware that they have a problem and start searching for a solution to the moment they decide they’re ready to connect with your brand. With content that covers the full sales funnel and beyond, you’re more likely to keep customers engaged with your brand–not to mention bringing them back for repeat purchases.
- Awareness: At the awareness phase, customers need to know what solutions are available for their problem, including the ones your brand has to offer. They’re doing their research and trying to figure out what steps they need to take next, and you want to provide them with information straight from the solutions you can provide.
- Consideration: Customers are doing their research into different brands and options. They need to know what sets your brand apart, whether it’s a winning customer experience, lower prices, or solutions that your competitors don’t have.
- Decision: Customers are ready to make final decisions about their purchase, and they’re doing the final research to be sure that your brand meets their specifications. They’re looking for the details, and they need you to make it easy for them to find them.
- Retention: The longer customers stay with your brand, the greater their total value. You want them to return to you for future purchases, so you need content and connection solutions that are designed to encourage them to do exactly that.
By providing content that will guide customers through each stage of the sales journey, you let them know that your brand is there to support them every step of the way and that they can trust what you have to provide. Ultimately, that means higher levels of customer satisfaction, greater trust in your brand, and increased odds not only of a first purchase, but of other purchases after the first one.
5. Encourage Interaction
Your content shouldn’t be static, flat, with nothing that pushes your customers to connect with you more directly. Instead, you need to create content that encourages engagement. Customers should be interacting with you on social media, sharing your content with others, and chatting with you in the comments section.
Some types of engagement are organic and occur because you have presented content that interests the customer and prompts them to ask questions or share it with others. Other types of engagement, however, you can create. Try:
- Inviting customers to answer questions
- Spotlighting customer-created content
- Asking customers to create their own content
- Hosting interactive sessions, including the use of live video or chats
When you interact with your customers, you aren’t just increasing their overall engagement with your brand or creating the deeper sense of connection that customers are asking for. You’re also increasing overall brand visibility, which can help increase your search ranking and drive more traffic. Keep in mind that most search engines and social media pages prioritize pages that see a lot of interaction, so encouraging that connection with your customers is key to increasing your reach.
6. Create Content Regularly and Consistently
The content creation process is ongoing. Creating a comprehensive content library means that all of that content is accessible to your customers and that they can access it as needed. Unfortunately, the creation of that library doesn’t mean that you’re done. Ongoing content creation is essential for a number of reasons. First, of course, is your search ranking: if you stop creating new things, Google will start dropping you down search results, which means that interested customers will no longer be able to find your brand.
Not only that, things change. New technology is developed in your industry. Your customers may face new challenges or need different solutions for their needs. The winds shift, and you need content that will address those changes.
According to HubSpot, you’ll see steady benefits when you post an average of 5-10 posts per month. Of course, exactly how often you need to post will depend on a lot of factors, including the type of content you’re creating, the questions your customers have, and even how interactive customers are with your content. It can also depend on how well-established your brand is. If you’ve already created an extensive content library, you may not need to post as often as a brand that’s just getting off the ground–and if you’re trying to build your content library, you may want to post more frequently for a while in order to build up the content available to your customers.
It’s not just about how often you post, either. Customers are more likely to respond to consistency. They like to know when new content is going up, what type of content they can expect, and how you’re going to notify them about it–and when that’s predictable, they’ll keep coming back to see what new information you’ve provided.
7. Update Existing Content
Remember above, when we noted that things change? That means that, eventually, your past content will be less relevant to your potential customers. If you’re focused on a data-driven content marketing solution, make sure you take into account the reality that posts steadily fall through search rankings as time passes.
Statistics change. Numbers change. Even the solutions your brand can present may change.
By updating your existing content regularly, you ensure that you are still providing your customers with accurate information that will continue to fit their needs. You aren’t just leaving content to rot in your library. Instead, you’re reviewing existing posts. Sometimes, that may mean that you remove content that no longer has value: that blog post about technology that is completely outdated, or the video about products your company no longer makes. In other cases, it may mean updating statistics, providing new advice or solutions, or simply ensuring that your content meets current company standards, branding, and tone.
Not only that, updating your content increases the odds that it will continue to get noticed by search engines. When your content hasn’t been viewed for a while or it’s aged, search engines will drop it down in ranking to move other, more recent content to the top. Updating that content lets Google know that it’s still relevant, which means they should still send customers to your website.
Bonus: Get Ongoing Data Through Content Testing
If you’re looking for data-driven insights into the best types of content or the best content solutions for your brand, conducting regular testing could be key to your ultimate success. Consider:
- How long is the content your customers are most likely to read or engage with?
- What format do customers prefer for their content?
- What types of content are customers viewing or interacting with most often?
- Where are customers most likely to connect with your content? Are they more likely to visit your website directly, click on a link through email, or engage with you because they’ve connected with you on social media?
In addition to testing the performance of each piece of content and each content type, don’t forget to test things like overall website design, the types of calls to action customers are most likely to respond to, and even logo placement. Little changes can make a big difference when it comes to improving customer interactions–and if you want a data-driven content marketing solution, it’s important to continue to build data on how your customers respond and what they’re looking for.
Quality Solutions for the Content You Need
Developing a winning data-driven content strategy doesn’t happen overnight–and in many cases, support from content experts can help you accomplish your goals faster and more effectively. If you’re looking for help developing your content marketing strategy, creating your content, and so much more, reach out to us to learn more about our content solutions.
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