How to Take Your Content Marketing from Data Reactive to Data Driven

You’ve been told over and over that content marketing needs to be data driven.

You’ve been told that you need to prove ROI. To show the business impact of what you do. To measure everything back to dollars and cents so you can make your case to the executive team.

While tying your efforts back to ROI is incredibly important, your efforts at utilizing data shouldn’t stop there. Being data driven doesn’t mean just showing value. It means using data to give your organization a competitive advantage against even the biggest, burliest of competitors.

In practice, it means understanding what campaigns will succeed before they are even created. 

Imagine that – no more trial and error, wasting months to figure out if your audience even cares about the content you’re creating. 

Sound appealing? Great, let’s dive into how to make it happen.

What data driven is not

Having solid numbers at the end of a campaign to show your executive team feels like a win for being data driven. But, unfortunately this isn’t being data driven. It’s being data reactive.

Unless you are actively using data to make predictions about what is going to happen with future campaigns, you’re stuck in a data reactive cycle.

You know you’re in a data reactive cycle if you find yourself constantly throwing content against the wall and then seeing what sticks. Then, when you find something that sticks, you have trouble replicating its success.

Data-reactive content marketing

Measuring your success at the end of a campaign doesn’t help you get to that end. It simply shows you how you did.

Knowing how you did is great, and you can probably use some of that insight into future campaigns, but it did little to no good for the current campaign.

Many organizations are stuck being data reactive. Even if you’re not utilizing data at all in your content marketing, you may think that just getting to being data reactive – just getting any kind of data – would be a win.

Instead of taking the intermediate step from no data to being data reactive, you are actually in a great position to make the leap to being data driven, because you have no data baggage. Sometimes it’s easier to learn a new habit than break an old one.

Data driven content marketing

Data is great at telling you how you did. The vast majority of analytics systems are built to show you this information. But getting data to tell you what to do next is a key differentiator between some of the best marketers in the world and those who are trying to catch up. 

Being data driven means utilizing data to know how you did AND what to do next.

Steps to become data driven

1. Set where you need to go

In order to know what to do next, you need to know where you’re going. So the first step in becoming data driven is aligning your content strategy to real business objectives.

These objectives must be:

• Specific – i.e., 100 leads, 20% growth in inbound traffic, etc.
• Time sensitive – 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, etc.
• Measurable – your goal has to be quantifiable and measurable.

Content marketing can support a myriad of business objectives – sometimes many at a time. 

The post How to Take Your Content Marketing from Data Reactive to Data Driven appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

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