Good content attracts visitors, but great content hooks people for life. To deliver the right content to the right person, marketers must embrace the data that is at their fingertips—their own and what’s available externally. Data can drive several aspects of your content marketing strategy to help ensure that your content marketing efforts are as effective as possible.

Think about embracing a data-driven approach across four key pillars of content marketing:

1. Content Ideation: using data to for better content creation and ideation
2. Content Distribution: analyzing distribution channels for greater impact and targeting
3. Content Experience: tailoring your content experience to your audience
4. Content Performance: measuring what matters so you know what’s working 

1. Content Ideation

At some point, we’ve all been able to pull a compelling content idea from thin air. But the reality is that ideation can be (and should be) data-driven. To create content that resonates with your audience and your industry, it is essential to understand what’s already working.

Since content marketing has exploded in popularity, several tools can help identify trends within your industry and types of content that are hitting home with your audience.

Buzzsumo, for example, shows you which content performs best for specific topics or websites (i.e. your competitors or partners). See a breakdown of the top ranked content and how it performed across each social channel. This gives you great insight into where your audience lives. Buzzsumo also lets you filter the results by type (i.e. articles, videos, infographics etc.) so you have a better understanding of which type of content is performing best.

Google Trends can help you identify trends for specific keywords and topics. Ideally, you want to capitalize on words that are in the midst of an upswing.

In the example above, we took a look at the term “content marketing” and how it’s trending. If you created high-quality content as the graph was starting to ramp up, you’re likely still reaping the rewards.

Beyond these tools, you can look within your organization for ideas. In many companies, the content team works in a silo, separated from demand generation, sales, and customer support. This can be a huge disadvantage. Your company's leaders often have behind-the-scenes knowledge that your audience wants. They’re interacting with customers and prospects on a regular basis and can identify key pain points, which makes great fodder for content. 

2. Content Distribution

Understanding your distribution metrics provides valuable insight into how you should focus your efforts and where your content is gaining traction. Various analytics tools can help you see where the majority of your traffic is coming from. Is it social? Search? Or is your content getting picked up by other bloggers?

Staying in tune with your distribution metrics can also help identify channels you may not have been aware of, such as other blogs that might be willing to accept guest posts.

3. Content Experience

Creating a killer content experience goes a long way towards increasing the engagement and distribution of your content. But your content experience should also be optimized for lead generation. Part of that means tailoring the content experience to your buyer persona.

Several tools allow you to do this, including marketing automation platforms like Pardot, Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, and Uberflip’s Custom Streams. 

Tailoring your content to your buyer persona allows you to tighten the message and keep your calls to action contextual, usually resulting in higher engagement—and, better yet, higher conversion rates.

4. Content Performance

Content performance comes down to understanding the goal of your content. While some businesses are creating content to generate awareness and position themselves as thought leaders, the ultimate goal is to drive business growth.

Many content marketers don’t have visibility into the metrics that are indicative of performance. If you can’t answer the question “Is it worth it?” and back up your response with compelling data (i.e. number of leads generated), then you’re wasting your time.

Understanding which content is generating leads can help guide your creation and distribution strategy, enable your sales team, and drive growth. You need a way to score your content so you can create more of what works and strip away the remaining noise. 

Taking a data-driven approach to content marketing will help you step out of the dark and truly understand what is (and isn’t) working. Digging into your metrics and extrapolating relevant information that can help guide your overall content strategy and decision making process.

So take a deep breath, jump in, and embrace the data that’s at your fingertips!

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