Data collected during the routine ROI measurements for online marketing campaigns can be a powerful resource for planning content marketing ventures. This powerful resource often goes unnoticed by many content marketers. Below are a couple of ways the data collected can be used to create content to align with the needs of the audience.
Understand the Search and Keyword Statistics
An idea of the most frequently searched for terms and keywords is useful in understanding audience needs. Use available analytics programs to find out what the most frequently typed terms in your website’s search box are and then generate more content around these frequently searched words. Also, work on making these frequently searched items easily and quickly available/downloadable for your audience.
It’s also a good idea to build more content around keywords which led visitors to your website. These keywords are unmistakably of interest to the audience – which is why they looked them up and landed on your website in the first place.
Engage the traffic to your website:
While checking for the daily number of hits your website gets, dig in a little deeper and make a note of the blog posts, articles, pages.. which receive the heaviest traffic. A heavy traffic on certain content typically is an indication of the content’s usefulness and success in reaching out to the audience.
Say yours is an investment blog covering various topics and analysis shows the retirement planning section of your blog gets most visitors. It would be a good idea to include retirement planning in more and more of your posts then.
Exploit the conversion rate:
Here by conversion rate, I mean the rate at which visitors take an action on your website, ahead of merely viewing the content. Analyze the landing pages which get the highest conversion on your website. These are the pages which compel your audience to take an action most effectively. Analyze the page to find out what content called for more action from the visitors, and use related topics, language and theme to appeal to a similar audience.
Put into use social media trends:
Measuring social media metrics like comments on blog posts, likes on Facebook, re-tweets and favorites on Twitter, shares on LinkedIn and other similar metrics give meaningful insights into the audience’s minds. Content that gets liked or shared more is the content that your audience found most promising.
Make the most of back link analyzers:
Use tools like open site explorer or backlink history to access the list of links linking to your page. Once you know which pages and websites have linked to your content you’ll know the audience as well as related industries which find your content useful and share it.
Checking the manner in which content was referenced, the standing and reputation of the linking sites and the relevance of those sites to your business will help better understand your market; enabling better decision making for future content marketing campaigns.
Utilize email campaign statistics:
The data on various parameters like click rate, open rate, unsubscribe rate, scam percentage, number of unsubscribe, and the deliverability of emails sent out by you can be studied to get an insight into the characteristics of the more successful content.
When your email gets marked as spam by many, it is indication that the content was not in line with the needs of the audience you sent it out to. Similarly, a high unsubscribe rate shows what the audience finds undesirable. The open rate can be a measure of the effectiveness of your subject line. The click rate will show the effectiveness of the content. It is proof that not only did your audience open it – they also went through the email and clicked on links to go to your website etc.
Consolidate the information to see which email campaigns were the most successful ones. Study them to understand what language, subject line and content inspired more favorable response from audience and you’ll know what kind of content should you generate to have successful content marketing campaigns.