How to Make Data-Driven Content Marketing Decisions

How to Make Data-Driven Content Marketing Decisions

Posted on Sep, 30, 2022 I Elise

Successful content marketing campaigns don’t have room for gut feelings and guesstimates.

Implementing the best practices passed around the marketing community is a step in the right direction. But to reap the full benefits of content marketing, you need an ongoing optimization strategy—one data-driven decision at a time.

Here’s a checklist to help you leverage the power of data to maximize your content marketing results:

1. Start with Traffic Analytics

Traffic analytics is all about understanding how your audience interacts with your website.

Where are they coming from? How much time do they spend on your pages?

Which pages get the most attention?

Answering these questions lets you make data-driven decisions in your optimization efforts.

How to Use Traffic Analytics

Implement a content tracking system with a website analytics platform like Google Analytics to analyze important metrics like:

• Bounce rate: What percentage of web visitors leave without clicking anywhere else on your website?

• Pages per session: How many pages do visitors open on average?

• Session duration: How long do visitors dwell on your website?

• Users: How many people visit your website overall?

Use traffic analytics to identify the weaknesses and strengths of your website content strategy.

For example, Google Analytics will easily show you your top-performing content pieces. Use them to identify the content types and topics that your readers prefer.

2. Conduct Competitor Content Research

Identify your top competitors, analyze their marketing strategy, and “borrow” ideas you can incorporate into your campaigns.

Competitor research lets you skip a lot of number crunching and capitalize on the research done by someone else. With the right tools and tactics, it will reveal profitable keyword ideas, potential backlink sources for SEO, and content topics that win the most traffic.

Analyzing your competitor’s content is also useful if you want to learn how to create amazing SEO content. Borrow ideas such as subtopics, subheadings, CTAs, and internally linked supporting content.

How to Use Competitor Research

Competitor research can be done in multiple ways:

• Use SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush: Get to the heart of your top competitor’s content strategy by performing page-level and domain-level analysis.

• Check out the top 10 search results: Learn what it takes to rank for your target keywords by analyzing the top 10 results on Google.

• Fire up competitor analysis tools: Outperform top competitors with dedicated competitor analysis tools like SpyFu to gain actionable insights.

3. Use Social Media Analytics

Social media platforms—from Facebook to TikTok—include built-in audience insights tools that enable you to refine your content strategy over time.

Unveil information such as the best posting times, hashtags, content formats, and topics that get the most user engagement.

You can also streamline your social media performance reporting using third-party platforms like Hootsuite, Vista Social, and Buffer.

How to Use Social Media Analytics

Social media analytics can be accessed using native apps.

Here are a few tips on how to make data-driven decisions with social media analytics:

• Re-post your content: Re-posting old content and comparing your results lets you test anything—including Twitter hashtags, TikTok quotes, Instagram Stories questions, and so on.

• Ask the community for suggestions: Use tools like Instagram polls and Facebook surveys to extract first-party insights about your audience’s preferences.

• Observe your top competitors: Look at the top pages your audience follows, adopt their content strategies, and create better posts.

4. Track Advanced Engagement Goals

Traffic analysis platforms like Google Analytics are also capable of tracking custom engagement/conversion goals, painting a much clearer picture of your target audience’s experience.

Scroll depth, for instance, measures how far your visitors go when reading your content.

Google Analytics 4—the platform’s latest version—features a default scroll tracking event that you can use. If you still use the old version of Google Analytics, read this guide to configure a custom scroll depth tracking goal.

How to Use Engagement Tracking

Apart from scroll depth, you should also track the following metrics using the right tools:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Google Analytics, ClickMagick, and form builders

• Conversion Rate: Google Analytics, eCommerce platforms, form builders, and email marketing platforms

• Social media shares: Sumo Share, AddToAny Share Buttons, and Social Snap

5. Use Third-Party Performance Analysis Platforms

Use third-party website performance analysis platforms to identify key issues that affect the user experience on your website.

For example, use PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to find performance-related issues along with the recommended fixes.

How to Use Third-Party Platforms

Optimizing your website’s performance is a great way to improve user engagement and conversion rate. Apart from page loading speed, you should also optimize the layout of your conversion pages, including:

• Product pages
• Contact pages
• Pricing pages
• Signup pages

Heatmap tools like Crazy Egg and Hotjar streamline the analysis process by visualizing how users interact with your content. They work by identifying parts and elements of your page that get the most clicks (hot zones), along with portions that often get ignored (cold zones).

Use heatmaps to reposition important conversion elements, such as CTA buttons and offers, into areas where users are most likely to click.

6. Consolidate Analytics with Content Distribution Software

Use content distribution software to consolidate your publishing, tracking, and optimization efforts.

Remember, content marketing isn’t just about blog posts.

It includes an array of content creation and distribution channels, depending on your marketing goals. You can create YouTube video tutorials, curate content on Twitter, buy SEO articles on guest posting sites—you name it.

Content distribution platforms let you manage your posting schedule and generate performance reports from a single location. That means you don’t have to rely on a swarm of analytics tools to determine what works and what doesn’t.

How to Use Content Distribution Software

Content distribution platforms let you connect your social media profiles. Once linked, you can post and share content across all networks from one dashboard.

You’ll then be able to track the performance of all content shared through the platform. Most of them, including Hootsuite, Buffer, and Vista Social, generate unified reports with crucial performance metrics on one page.

Some of the best content distribution software also goes beyond content publishing and reporting tools. Hootsuite, for example, comes with a social listening feature that monitors for brand mentions.

Social media listening lets you keep tabs on conversations involving your brand. You can engage potential customers who ask about your products, clarify or address misinformation circulating online, and so on.

Conclusion

Regardless of your industry, the success of your content marketing campaigns depends on data-driven decisions.

Use the proven strategies above to plan, track, and optimize your content marketing efforts with data as your guide. Alternatively, consider hiring fully-managed SEO services to have everything—from content planning to optimization—handled for you.