Data Driven Marketing
Data Driven Marketing
Data Driven Marketing
Content Marketing
How To Create & Optimize A Content Strategy With Data At Its Core
By Hana Abaza
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CH 1 Introduction
CH 3 Content Ideation
CH 4 Content Distribution
CH 5 Content Experience
CH 6 Content Performance
CH 7 Conclusion
Editing
Braveen Kumar
Graphic Design
Jenny Choi
CH 1
Introduction
From Mad Men to Modern Marketing, we’ve seen
some major shifts in the marketing industry over
the years. The biggest shift is one of accountability.
Marketers, just like our counterparts in sales, have to
show value - show our contribution to the bottom line.
If you can put a checkmark beside each of the above (or can work
towards that), then you’re part of the way there.
Creating a Content
Strategy with Data
at the Core
Like anything else in business, you first need to establish clear goals
and a strategy (one that you can adapt as you gain more insight into
how it’s working). Developing buyer personas, defining the buyer
journey and mapping the right content to the right persona at each
stage of the buyer journey will provide a foundation for that strategy.
I’m going to assume that you have started this process, but if not, here
are some great resources that can point you in the right direction:
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
Optimizing your content experience
for your audience
4. CONTENT PERFORMANCE
Measuring what matters so you
know what’s working
4
CH 3
CONTENT IDEATION
Luckily, there are several tools that can help identify the
trends within your industry and the type of content that’s
hitting home with your audience. Here are a few that our
content team at Uberflip uses regularly:
BuzzSumo
This includes a breakdown of how well the content performed across all
major social channels, giving you insight into where your audience lives.
BuzzSumo also lets you filter the results by date and by type (e.g. articles,
videos, infographics, etc.) so you have a better understanding of which
type of content is performing best.
Google Trends can help to identify trends for specific keywords and topics.
Ideally, you want to capitalize on words that are in the midst of an upswing
in interest.
For example, here are a couple of questions I like to ask our sales team:
Don’t just tweet or email your customers - actually talk to them. Seems
like a strange concept, but there’s no substitution for a real conversation.
Email and social media often lack the nuances that you pick up on when
speaking to another human being.
Why does this matter? Ann Handley writes that, in order for your content
to be compelling and effective, it needs to be “useful, inspired, and
pathologically empathetic to the needs of the people you are trying to
reach.”
CONTENT DISTRIBUTION
The first step is to set a baseline by analyzing the metrics associated with
your distribution channels - this can be eye opening! Tools like Google
Analytics, KISSmetrics (or even Buffer and BuzzSumo, if you’re primarily
focused on social media distribution) will help determine where the
majority of your traffic is coming from. Is it social? Search? Or is your
content getting picked up by other bloggers?
Once you understand where your existing traffic is coming from, you
might be able to gain some valuable insight into where you should focus
your distribution efforts. For example, if you discover that people coming
from LinkedIn are very engaged, it might be worth putting some paid
distribution behind this channel. Alternatively, you can also look into
other channels that LinkedIn users also frequent, such as forums or other
networks.
Staying in tune with your distribution metrics can also help identify viable
channels you may have been unaware of, such as other blogs that accept
guest posts.
Segmenting Your Audience For More
Distribution
Once you understand where people are coming from, take the time to
segment your audience. Look at the metrics from each source, like time
on site, bounce rate and social shares. Are people coming from social
media more engaged than people coming from a Google search? Of those
visitors, who is ultimately converting to a lead and then a customer?
In the (oversimplified) example below, you can see that people who are
coming from LinkedIn are much more likely to convert into a subscriber
than those coming from Facebook.
SOCIAL MEDIA TRAFFIC
4% Subscribed
Source: Twitter
to Newsletter
12% Subscribed
Source: LinkedIn
to Newsletter
While the focus of this eBook is tracking and measuring your content
marketing strategy, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least touch on distribution
channels. Without knowing your industry, audience and customer, it’s
impossible to make any concrete recommendations. But, in general,
distribution for content marketing falls into the following categories:
Platforms like Outbrain and Taboola are great ways to distribute your
content to a variety of publications. Be sure to analyze not just click-
through rates, but also conversion (for example, a newsletter signup) from
these sources so you can optimize where they are publishing your content.
3 Email Marketing
5 Content Syndication
Sites like Business2Community, Social Media Today and others provide the
opportunity to syndicate content. If you can find something similar in your
industry, it’s worth exploring. Be sure to syndicate wisely as it can have a
negative impact on your SEO. Pro tip: ask the syndicating site to include
rel=”canonical” tag when possible.
6 Guest Blogging
Offer to submit a guest post on sites that are either highly targeted (so
there’s a disproportionate number of readers that fit your ideal customer
profile) or slightly broader with a larger reach and considered “high
authority” by the powers that be (i.e. Google).
7 Influencer Marketing
Are there any heavyweights in your industry that love your product? Take
the time to develop a relationship with them. Help them in some way
(maybe free use of your product?) and turn them into evangelists for your
company.
8 Advocate Marketing
Industry influencers aren’t the only ones who can act as evangelists on
your behalf. Your customers are also the perfect people to spread your
message. Using an advocate marketing platform like Influitive is the
perfect way to turn customers into advocates, encouraging them to share
your content with their own networks.
9 SEO
Like email marketing, SEO isn’t dead but it has evolved. As expected,
Google is increasingly emphasizing semantic search. In order to have an
impact on your content’s SEO performance, you have to consider both
keywords and the actual language people (your customers) are using.
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ent H
ub
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CH 5
CONTENT EXPERIENCE
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18
CH 6
CONTENT PERFORMANCE
While it’s usually easy to get a “bunch of data” (provided you have
the right tools in place),identifying the right data, interpreting it
combining it with qualitative feedback and turning it into something
actionable can be tough.
1. Engagement metrics
2. Growth metrics
Growth metrics are more directly related to your bottom line and
include things like sales, revenue and customer growth figures.
Here’s an example of some metrics that fall into each category.
For example, here’s what a very simple funnel might look like at
Uberflip for one of our webinars.
Submit Form
Click Attend
Visit Blog Post on Webinar
Webinar CTA Webinar
Landing Page
If my end goal was simply webinar registrants, I could stop here. But, I
can also take it a step further to see the impact on growth.
Submit Form
Visit Click Attend
on Webinar
Blog Post Webinar CTA Webinar
Landing Page
While our end goal is to get more quality leads for Became a
our sales team, the webinar registration is a “micro Qualified Lead
conversion” - an essential step in the overall process.
If this step doesn’t deliver, the overall performance is
affected. Understanding the conversion rates at each Customer
stage of this funnel, helps us optimize the process so
we can maximize the end result.
As you can see, once you’ve mapped out your funnel, you can begin
to determine what the overall return on your content marketing
might be.
visitor to lead
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lead to SQL
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Demo
You can see that, while there are several steps in the funnel, I’m
looking at some overarching conversion rates in this case. I want to
know:
Google Analytics
Two reports that are particularly valuable in GA are the channel and
landing page reports. The first lets you drill down into specific traffic
sources so you can see what’s driving the most traffic. This is a great
way to discover different referral sources that you might be able to
further exploit. Here’s what it looks like:
Channel Reports
The second landing page report tells you how each piece of content
is performing with respect to pageviews. Again, this isn’t the only
metrics you should measure to establish success, but it can be a good
indicator.
While we can also dig into each of these metrics separately, looking
at engagement metrics from Google Analytics (page views, time on
site, etc.) alongside how call-to-actions are performing in our content
hub, Content Score tells us what’s performing well at a glance, at the
moment and over the past few months. This insight helps us improve
content creation and distribution by focusing on sharing high-
converting content, ultimately driving more leads for our sales team.
At the end of the day, understanding which content is generating
leads can help guide your creation and distribution strategy, enable
your sales team and drive growth. In a sense, you need a way to score
your content in order to create more of what works and whittle out
the remaining noise.
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CH 7
Conclusion
Effective content marketing isn’t a “hit or miss” practice; you can
significantly improve your success rate by taking the time to analyze
your performance.
So take a deep breath, dive into your metrics and embrace all the data
that’s at your fingertips!
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