Putting Data in the Driver’s Seat Seven ways to use data-driven content to improve sales

Well, those good-ole-days, if they ever actually existed, are long gone. Your customers are much more sophisticated these days, and so is modern digital marketing.

These days, successful content is backed by a data-driven content strategy. It means using user information – demographics, preferences, desires – to create a responsive, changing and deliberate strategy to help you decide where to spend your time, effort and resources to obtain the best effect.

How do you do this? Here are seven ideas to get going.

1. Set your content goals

Decide what you’re trying to accomplish with your online marketing. Increase traffic? Make more sales? Improve conversion rates? Generate leads?

Once you determine your content goals, then you can identify the channels best suited to meet them. And begin creating content that works.

2. Define your audience

You’ve probably got reams of demographic data about your customers. You can create a customer persona and spot the commonalities that they share.

Once you’ve ID’d the ‘type’ of customer you have (and you may have to break them down into ‘prospective customer,’ ‘buyer customer’ and ‘repeat customer’), you can begin to drill down and find what they have in common. That’s your content and marketing sweetspot.

3. Review the competition

This step is often overlooked. Your competitors are probably putting as much time and effort into finding customers as you are. Check up on what they’re doing: Are they using blogs? Discount offers? Competing for clicks? Using industry influencers?

Once you get an idea on what the other guy is doing, you can better analyze and determine if what they’re doing is good for you and your customers. Or not.

4. Keyword research

Once you have a good handle on your customers and what they like and want, you can begin drilling down on that old staple: keyword research.

There are plenty of tools out there now (Google Analytics is the biggie) that can help you find the exact language your content needs to use.

Using the right keywords in your content tells your customers that you speak the same language, share the same wants and desires and are on the same wavelength.

5. Adapt the content

Now that you’ve determined your goals, drilled down to understand who your audience is and what they want, you can begin to create successful content.

Remember: this content can take many forms, such as videos, blog posts, infographics, case studies, white papers, customer reviews and recommendations.  The analytical data you have assembled will help guide you to adopt the correct format your customers will react to.

6. Promote on the right channels

With your new data-driven content in hand, you can begin producing it. But where?

Again, your data research has hopefully told you where your customers can be found. These days, most people are on smartphones, so making sure your content is mobile-friendly is absolutely vital. Your website should be mobile adaptable so you won’t chase potential customers away.

7. Measure and analyze results

Data never sleeps. Neither should your processes of analysis and measurement. 

Whatever your initial content goals were, you should be able to measure the results. Did you want to increase sales and conversions? There is data that will tell you whether you succeeded or failed. Wanted to improve traffic? What do the data say?

Creating this kind of data-driven marketing and content is not as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of work and a lot of data testing and analysis to reach success.

But you don’t have to do it alone. Here at Fuel Media, we have experts in data-driven campaigns, in SEO marketing and execution, and in website analysis. We stand ready to help all of our clients wherever they are in the data-driven marketing cycle.

Contact us and we’ll use our years of experience and expertise to help you achieve your marketing goals.