Your 10-year-old niece is tapping the glass on her fish tank. The fish looks at her for just a moment then it swims away. Your clients are that goldfish.
Studies have shown that humans now have a shorter attention span than goldfish.
You have approximately 8 seconds to capture your audience’s attention. That’s right. Just 8 seconds! This seems intimidating, and you may be wondering how to best to achieve this.
The simple answer is data. Data is the king, and content is the queen. A great marketing strategy must use content data as its foundation.
How do you implement content data into your marketing strategy? Continue reading to find out.
Google Analytics Data
Google Analytics is a free service from Google that provides insights about your website. The information provided through this service will allow you to measure your performance and adjust your strategy.
The data is categorized into three sections – the ABCs.
- Acquisition: How you get your website traffic
- Behavior: What visitors are actually doing on your site
- Conversion: How you convert visitors
Most reports will fall under one of these three categories which will help you narrow down your analysis. If you need to attract more visitors, rely on the acquisition reports. Do you need to understand your clients better, use the behavior reports. If you are receiving traffic but not converting, review the conversion reports.
This can make the data less overwhelming.
Acquisition
Again, this is how you are acquiring traffic. Are your visitors finding you from Google or Pinterest? If only 5% of your website traffic is coming from Pinterest, maybe you reduce your focus there or work to improve it.
You can also view how your content is performing on social media. Where are people viewing your content and what type of content performs best on each platform?
The Acquisition section can integrate with your Ads account so you can track how your campaigns are performing in terms of acquiring customers.
Behavior
The behavior reports provide information on what visitors actually do on your website. You can asses the performance of your website content and determine if your visitors are taking the actions you want them to. This can be broken down into a few smaller sections.
Site Content
Analyzing your site content will allow you to understand how users interact with specific pages. You can determine which pages perform the best or the poorest.
Determining top landing pages, which is where your visitors enter your site, will show you conversions based on your goals. This enables you to see which pages are most likely to lead people to convert. Use this information to optimize your campaigns to direct more traffic to the pages with higher conversion rates.
Exit pages are equally as important, as it’s crucial to understand when and where people are exiting your site. Determine why and improve upon that.
Site Speed
Understanding site speed will help you understand which areas of your site may need optimization. If your blog page is one of the most visited pages on your site but also the one with unsatisfactory load time, you would begin optimization with that page.
Site Search
Knowing what keywords or phrases that your users search for the most on your site can help you develop content. For example, you notice a significant amount of users searching for SEO services, you can develop blog content focusing on that subject matter.
Conversions
The Conversions section of Google Analytics is all about understanding how people convert on your website, which is essential to improving your conversion rate.
This section provides information like the Goal URLs report, which shows the URLs where people actually convert.
The Reverse Goal Path report works similarly to the Goals URL report but shows you the previous three steps to goal completion. Use this to see the pathways people take to conversion as well as how many steps it takes someone to get to that converting stage.
This information can be useful in understanding what pages and content are converting the best.
Audience
Understanding your audience’s demographic is one of the first ways to develop a smarter marketing strategy. By knowing your audience’s age, geography, and type of mobile device, you can provide a better experience.
Geography
Is your online advertising primarily in English? Google Analytics may tell you that you have a high-conversion user base that speaks Spanish. This presents the opportunity to localize your online advertising and even re-target
Device
Are your users primarily on laptops/computers or mobile devices? This question can help you determine how to best optimize your online ads, as well as decide what social media to focus on. For example, if your users are primarily on computers, Instagram would not be a focus platform. If they are primarily on mobile, you would also consider optimizing your site in addition to other mobile SEO tips.
Age/Sex/Interest
Again, understanding the demographics of your users will allow you to tailor your marketing efforts. Google Analytics allows you to drill down into an age group, then you see the breakdown by gender, then interest.
If you know that your users are primarily 30-40-year-old men whose interests are sports, you know what content to develop to keep their interest. You also know where to place your online and social media advertising.
For example, you may decide to target YouTube ads on various interest groups that would appeal to your audience.
Another useful tool within the age group reporting is the breakdown of age group by revenue and conversion rate. You can continue the breakdown even further as previously mentioned and find a very specific and lucrative target market.
Survey Data
Now that you have analyzed your website data to develop and refine your marketing strategies, where can you find more?
Your clients.
Surveying your clients is a unique and competitive advantage. Work to understand their interests and more importantly their pain points.
Example: You are a clothing boutique and your customers constantly tell you that dry cleaning is expensive or that it’s impossible to find good alterations, you can develop an email marketing campaign or video series to address those pain points.
Maybe you develop a mini video series providing basic sewing lessons, or you email dry cleaning tips and tricks.
Strategies like these keep current and potential clients engaged.
Sales Data
How often do you analyze your sales data? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?
You undoubtedly review sales data with your teams, but have you ever approached this with content in mind?
Are your sales cyclical? If you sell bathing suits, yes, but what about office supplies? Your sales could coincide with keywords or events. Using Google Correlate could connect the dots and identify keywords that follow the same patterns as your data.
When analyzing the performance of advertising as it relates to sales data, be sure to study the data. Who were the targets? What mediums did we use? What keywords drove traffic and conversion?
External Data
Analyzing internal data is key to a successful marketing strategy, but it lacks one thing. Conquest customers.
How can you reach completely new customers if you have no data on them? Well, you do! There are several tools that provide data that can help you develop smart marketing strategies.
Google Ads offers a keyword research tool that helps you learn what people are searching for. Knowing highly searched topics can help you with developing content and your SEO strategy.
Buzzsumo is a popular program that allows you to search keywords and find out what’s trending across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. It also allows you to find influencers to share your content.
Competitive analysis is discussed but often overlooked when developing marketing strategies. If one of your competitors suddenly has an increase in traffic, are you able to notice any changes? Did their website change? Do you follow their social media? It must be an ongoing process.
Review, Repurpose and Retarget
Now that you have created your data-driven marketing strategies, what do you do? Implement.
After implementation, you review what worked and what didn’t.
For the campaigns that worked well, find ways to repurpose your content.
Did your email marketing campaign result in a ton of conversion? Try using that topic to create a Youtube video.
Based on the data from BuzzoSumo, you discovered that tasty keto recipes were a trending topic. Because you sell kitchen appliances, your team created a freebie keto cookbook that received thousands of downloads?
Use that data to dig further into that topic. Now you can email your users “ABC Appliance’s Favorite Crockpot Keto Recipe”.
The key is to take your successful campaigns and keep them alive. Use different platforms and find different angles on the same topic. Keep using data to repurpose your content.
What about when your new data-driven strategies don’t work? Before completely scrapping the idea, review and retarget.
Ask yourself (and your team) why something didn’t work? Dive into the data again and search for something you may have missed. Was the content not placed in the best platforms for your audience’s age group? Did you find an angle to make an overused topic fresh?
Continue using your content data to review, reuse, repurpose, and retarget.
Getting Started with Content Data
Data is the king, but utilizing content data to create marketing strategies can be overwhelming. Where do you start? How do you use this data to create and implement strategies? Our team can assist you on this journey. Contact us today to get started.