How to create successful data driven content

steps to create successful data driven content

As we always say, “content is the king.” It applies well in your online business. With over 70 million blog posts created on it every month, WordPress alone has made it quite complicated for content marketers to stand out from the crowd. 

In recent times, the term data-driven content marketing strategy has been used quite often. The reason for the popularity of the term is that, in today’s cut-throat competitive world, you can’t rely on your stars to make your business a hit. 

What fuels your marketing engine is the content that you use to drive your business. A unique content strategy will help you reach out to a wider audience, build brand identity and place you separately from the rest of the community. 

Data-driven content helps you strategize better marketing policies which in return will give you increasing returns. In this blog, we’ll discuss how to create successful data driven content to increase your conversions and also understand the content driven definition. 

What is data-driven content? 

What is data-driven content? 
Data-Driven Content is the Future

Data-driven content, is a content marketing strategy that uses both quantitative and qualitative data to identify buyers’ needs, actions and motivations. In other words, it helps you identify your buyer personas, and in return, you can create audience specific content. 

Data-driven content marketing strategy includes analyzing and measuring every interaction your buyers have with your brand. Some of the buyer activities that help you gather data about your buyer personas are- what products buyers search most often, their purchases, their interaction with the brand’s social media pages, among others. 

You can use these data to form content topics that will resonate most with your audiences. Using customer analytics as a marketing tool will ensure rapid growth as the customer can engage more with such content and develop loyalty towards your products. 

Now let’s find out some tips to create successful data-driven content. 

Tips for creating successful data-driven content 

Decide content goals and objectives 

The very first step towards creating data-driven content is setting content goals. To set your content goals, you need to understand your business goals and identify your target audience. Setting perfect goals and segmenting the funnel stage is the secret to ranking higher in search engines and getting more links. 

You’re not supposed to create content just for the sake of creating it. If you want to see more conversions, create well-researched and purposeful content. 

Before you create the content, you need to find the answer to a few questions- 

  • What purpose will your content serve? 
  • What market does your content appeal to?
  • What is the goal of your content? 

Understand your audience 

Understand your audience 
Understanding Audience is the first step!

A secret to a successful data-driven content strategy is knowing your potential customers. You need to collect data that answers questions like customers’ preferences, habits, and needs. 

Nowadays, different analytical tools are available to understand customer demographics. Some of the popular among these tools are- google analytics, kissmetrics and Moz pro. These tools will help you understand- customer age group, gender, job title, location, average income, monthly spending, their emotional triggers, their pain points.

You can additionally include a data collection form on your website. Incorporate a form that requires customers to write their email address and add a few additional questions like gender, company, designation etc.  

Such data will assist you in understanding buyer habits, content types your customer likes to engage and the kind of communication channel they prefer. 

Do deep data analysis 

Deep data analysis is a crucial part of creating successful data driven content. Let’s understand this in different categories- 

Content analysis 

You will have to do in-depth research regarding the content topics that are most searched. These content topics should represent your content niche and represent your brand voice. 

Content analysis also includes doing a deep survey of all social media platforms. You need to find out in which social media platform your prospect audiences are most likely to hand out and present content accordingly. 

Website analysis 

Website analysis includes doing an in-depth SEO analysis of your website. You can use multiple tools for this search engine optimization analysis. Such a survey would help you find out which blogs or content topics are most searched and read by your customers. 

Once you get the data, you can formulate your website content accordingly. 

Keyword analysis 

Just like content analysis, keyword analysis also plays a crucial role in creating successful data-driven content. Keyword analysis would help you find out relevant, trending keywords which are most searched by people. 

If you’re wondering how to conduct a keyword analysis, well, it’s quite easy. There are multiple keyword research tools out there like Semrush, BuzzSumo etc., which will show you trending topics for primary keywords. Find the keywords that are trending for your niche and create content accordingly. 

Competitor analysis

In an environment where every business is thriving to be the best, ignoring your competitor’s content strategy would be the biggest mistake you can make. To go hand in hand with your top competitors, go through their website and social media platforms, check their blogs and other posts. 

Now figure out their content strategy, communication technique, content formats and their most popular topics. Use these data to devise your unique content strategy. But make sure not to entirely copy theirs, as your audience will directly find out the similarity. Apart from forming a bad image, copied content can have legal repercussions as well. 

Create your content keeping in mind the buyer persona

Buyer’s Persona

Doing a deep analysis of your audience might have helped you understand which type of buyers are visiting your website or social media the most. Your duty now is to create content, keeping in mind those buyer personas. Just like a definite style of clothing does not suit everybody’s interests, a single style of content won’t cater to all your audience. 

While writing each piece of content, keep in mind your buyer personas. You should never write content for a faceless audience. The goal here is to establish an emotional bond with them, hence having a purpose while producing any particular content. 

For instance, if your customer base includes both young girls and middle-aged women, you can write similar types of content for both age groups. The tonality for the youngsters will be much different from that of the mid aged women. 

Additionally, you will have to categorize your content in three different stages- awareness, considerations and decision. There will be customers who will be visiting your digital platforms for the first time. For them, the awareness content will be useful as it would make them aware of your brand. 

There will be another section of the audience who are revising your site and are already aware of your brand. For this section of people, your content goal should be to drive them into potential customers. Hence, for them, you need to focus on the other two categories of content- consideration and decision. 

Incorporating links is the way to go

Link Juice is Important!

As Google says, the two top-ranking factors for successful data-driven content are- content and links. A study by Backlinko validated this statement. As per the study, content with optimum backlinks have higher rankings in the search engines. 

However, getting backlinks has become harder in recent times. In addition to a good piece of content, you need lots of social shares to get a few backlinks. But you can significantly ease out the struggle of getting backlinks by creating link magnet content. 

For instance, adding infographics, whitepapers, ebooks, videos, outlier case studies are types of the link magnet content. But why does such content work? Because a majority of the audiences are visual learners. Visual content will give you more shares and engagement than basic content. Hence, it becomes easier to attain some extra backlinks. 

Create interesting headlines

You have written excellent content, but a boring basic headline would not give you the traffic you were looking for. Hence, creating catchy headlines is another primary factor to create data driven content. 

A thought provoking and curious title would earn you more clicks and increase the number of visitors you are getting. Also, placing a CTA in your content headlines is another data driven content marketing strategy.  

But creating catchy headlines is not always easy. Most of the time, it is difficult to make out what sort of titles would appeal to your customers and what would not. Fret not!

There are certain tools in the market like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer, which helps you make interesting headlines. All you’ve to do is place your headline in the analyser, and it will give you a score out of a hundred. It will also break down your headlines based on different parameters. 

Such tools are amazing to figure how strong or weak your content title is. It will also show you what your title is lacking and improvise it accordingly. 

Create based on hard data 

Once you finish prioritising audience, market goals, and content topics, it’s time to optimise the content. Optimise your content for the primary as well as secondary keywords. It is the only way to rank top on search engines. 

These are some of the things you should pay attention to to create optimised content- 

Keyword density: Search engine’s mechanisms work on certain algorithms where they set certain words for specific niches. Incorporating those words as keywords in specific niches will show search engines that you are providing niche specific content. 

Structural aspects: While creating content, you need to be careful about the ideal or standard keyword placement, content length, number of paragraphs, subheadings, images. Adding these additionals in proper proportion will help you rank high in the search engines. 

User intent: You need to get the user intent behind their search query right. Either you get that right, or you won’t rank in SERPs.  

Optimise your content regularly 

The process of data driven content does not end after publishing the blog or post. Regular optimisation is vital to make sure you retain your position in the search engines. Also, keep updating yourself about search engines algorithms as they are constantly changing. 

Tools namely Google Analytics or Google Search Console will help you check your content performance regularly. These tools will show your SEO positions, will let you know about your audience, conversions etc. 

Why should you focus on data-driven content strategy? 

Now that you have learnt the steps of creating data driven content, you should also understand why creating data driven content is necessary. First of all, it is stated by several companies that content created with data performs much better than content created with gut feeling. Hence, it has become crucial to stand out among the trillions of content marketers worldwide. 

A few other benefits of data driven content are- 

Better Return on Investment (ROI) 

Data driven content will let you choose the right distribution and publication channels which means better visibility. Data will help you create a personalised content strategy for your customers, meaning you generate more leads and sales. 

Time and money-saving strategy 

When you collect appropriate data, you no longer have to spend time on random brainstorming. Also, when you do an acute survey, there are fewer chances of you wasting money on unfruitful content. 

Establishes your brand name 

Creating high-quality data-driven content will let the audience connect with your brand identity. In return, you are forming a strong brand voice and establishing your brand identity. 

Rank high in SERPs

Every content marketer’s goal is to rank high in the SERPs. Currently, to create SEO based content, you need to go beyond simple keyword research. This is where data driven content comes into the scenario. 

As data driven content is based on proper demographic research, it is valuable and meaningful content. Hence, you have a higher chance of capturing that top rank in Google and other search engines. 

Wrapping up 

Creating data driven content might sound like a lot, but it is your holy grail to generate leads and revenue. Hopefully, the steps we mentioned have helped you understand its importance and informed you about the process of creating data driven content. 

Make sure you utilise these ideas and the tools that are mentioned to create personalised content for your audience. It’s the only way to succeed in today’s competitive age. You will also save a lot of time and resources if you focus on data driven content.