Category Archives: Content Marketing

Is content marketing losing its sheen?

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Is content marketing losing its sheen?

Is content marketing losing its sheen?

One of those phases.

During a particular period of the year, you start coming across articles and blog posts evincing the end, or at least a steep decline, in your profession. It also happens in content marketing.

Yesterday I came across an article on Forbes telling how content marketing has overstretched itself and consequently, is killing itself. It also insinuates that many renowned content marketing companies are borderline scams.

Today I received a newsletter update from someone that conducts writers’ workshops and he says blogging seems to be on the wane.

My personal experience is the opposite.

The number of content writing queries from my website has almost doubled. I’m getting more queries from India, Malaysia, China and The Philippines. I’m even getting more queries from Europe and America.

Yes, the quality of the queries has changed. It has improved. People now understand what they want.

The Indian clients, or rather, the Asian clients, are the same: they cringe at the thought of having to pay to a lowly content writer, and they assume that most of the writing, no matter how well it is done, should be either provided free of cost, or dirt cheap.

But there has been a marked, a welcome change.

Once they have received a few documents, once they have experienced the quality, they are more or less, even if reluctantly, ready to pay what I ask. This didn’t happen before.

Not just my personal experience, this Forbes article says that 89% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing to increase their leads and branding.

One of the biggest companies, Coca-Cola, as totally turned its corporate website into the content publishing platform.

American Express uses its OPEN Forum content publishing platform to use content marketing to drive traffic to its website.

77% of Internet users read blogs in one way or another.

Why do some people think content marketing in general and blogging in particular are dying

It’s all about where you stand. I will tell you a story.

In the early 2000s I used to design websites. For some time I did great. There was a dot com boom and everybody wanted a website.

People weren’t aware of the concept of the phrase “content marketing” but there were some entrepreneurs, including yours truly, who were using articles and tutorials to promote themselves.

Anyway, just as everybody wanted a website, everybody started designing websites after a while.

If you live in India you must have come across poor tailors sitting at the roadsides, under shady trees if lucky, working with their sewing machines.

You could see web designers just like that, those days, there were so many. I mean, they were not sitting under trees by the roadsides like tailors, but you get my point.

Microsoft had launched a tool called Front Page, if I’m not forgetting, that would allow you to make websites using a GUI. It was notorious for generating junk code, but neither the clients cared, nor the designers who would charge Rs. 2500 for a 10-page website.

I used to hand code my websites. When I designed and developed websites, there was not a single line of code extra.

Naturally I couldn’t make websites for Rs. 2500. When I insisted on hand coding my websites, clients thought I was crazy. All the assignments dried up. I switched to promoting web hosting plans.

One day I was sitting in the front room that I used as my office and a person dropped by. It was 10 a.m., early March, if I’m not forgetting. His white shirt was torn at the seams, and was dirty. He was unshaven, sweaty, and with hair that hadn’t been combed or washed for a few days.

I thought he was some construction worker, or a sweeper, or some poor person who had stopped by to get a glass of water.

He wanted to design a website for me. He had come across my ad in the local newspaper. He collected addresses from the classifieds and then did door to door marketing for his web design business. He told me that he visited 30-40 business establishments every month and got 3-4 projects every month. He used Front Page to design websites. He charged Rs. 2500. He didn’t have a computer (laptops were mostly unheard of during those days). He used to design the websites in an Internet café.

I don’t remember now why I hadn’t published my website URL in the ad because I would never go into a business without having a website, being a web designer myself and having had 3-4 websites even by the early 2000’s. Anyway, I turned him away.

With my own experience and after having seen that person, I had the same feeling that web designing as a profession was dead, or at least, it was not a good way of making money.

Still, since then, I have come across, and I’m not exaggerating, hundreds of websites promoting web design services, doing great. They charge thousands of dollars and clients gladly pay them.

In fact, that was a time when most of the businesses didn’t even have websites, and now every business has a website and still, web design and web development companies charge a premium.

The problem was not with web design as a profession, the problem was the way I was promoting my service and the way I was targeting my clients. I wasn’t targeting the right clients. I was targeting clients who were okay with having Front Page websites. I wasn’t targeting clients who appreciated hand-coded websites. There were many, and they were ready to pay for the effort. I just didn’t look for them. Somehow I wasn’t able to reach out to clients who would gladly pay for quality.

Why am I telling this story?

It happens in every business.

Take for example the restaurant business. Does every restaurant owner get to start a franchisee? I’m pretty sure if 100 entrepreneurs start a restaurant business every year, 98 don’t succeed. It doesn’t mean the restaurant business is a dead business. Some people succeed, most don’t, and that’s fine. It happens in every business.

The same holds true for content marketing.

As it was bound to happen, when people started claiming great success with content marketing, everybody wanted a piece of the pie. And as it was bound to happen, there was a no holds barred rush to create and publish content.

So, why do some people believe that content marketing doesn’t work?

Because they don’t know how it works.

People to content marketing all wrong

People to content marketing all wrong

You see, you have to understand what content is. Most think that content is a way to improve your search engine rankings.

Although there is nothing wrong in wanting to publish content to improve one’s search engine rankings – I get lots of business due to this approach – eventually, it is an improved level of engagement that does the trick. And this is why, some businesses are doing great with content marketing, but most don’t. Maybe the problem is with the “marketing” part. I don’t know.

Publishing content on your website or blog is all about helping people make a decision, and provide them timely help when they need it.

Even if you are able to generate lots of traffic from search engines by publishing “optimized” content, if people don’t feel motivated once they come to your website, they are not going to buy from you.

Do I mean to say you shouldn’t publish content for traffic? I don’t mean that. Every business needs traffic and content marketing is the best way of generating targeted traffic to your website.

In fact, a big reason why people use content marketing is because they don’t want to solely depend on search engine traffic. Search engines can be whimsical. If you are a serious business, you cannot afford to completely depend on search engines for qualified traffic. You need to create your own sources, and content marketing is the best way. You become known for your quality content and authoritative insights.

The problem is not with wanting to generate targeted traffic. The problem is using content marketing just for generating targeted traffic.

This sort of content marketing doesn’t work, it has never worked and it is never going to work.

Sure, you need to publish content to draw targeted traffic to your website. But the primary purpose of your content must be to provide quality information to your visitors so that they can make up their mind regarding doing business with you.

This is exactly why the newspaper industry is failing. There was a time when content – journalism – used to be the primary content. Now it is advertising. Journalism is almost dead. Mostly it is either propaganda or traffic-oriented content to earn advertising revenue.

The primary purpose of content marketing should be to become a valuable part of your customers’ and clients’ lives.

You need to become an information hub, and believe me, even if you are a very small business, you can become an information hub within your niche. Don’t think that only big businesses can become information hubs.

All the businesses who have understood this are doing great with content marketing. The ones who are just greedy for targeted traffic aren’t succeeding.

Why do people get trapped in the traffic trap? Because it’s easier to generate traffic than generate business. Content that gets you search engine traffic is very cheap. It is very easy to create such content. Hire a jobless writer or someone who simply wants to make a few extra bucks and isn’t bothered whether your business benefits or not, and you can get scores of blog posts and articles without even realizing you are spending money.

And when you are able to publish 50 articles or blog posts every month, the quantity reassures you. The traffic DOES begin to manifest and you begin to feel that eventually, this is going to lead to more business.

It doesn’t.

What gives you more business is the quality of your content, the meaningfulness, and the level of engagement it can generate.

Search engine traffic should be a byproduct. When people begin to understand this, content marketing will work wonders for them.

How to use LinkedIn for B2B content marketing

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Use LinkedIn for B2B content marketing

Use LinkedIn for B2B content marketing

LinkedIn, as I’m sure you know, is a social network for professionals. An interesting fact about LinkedIn is that it was launched back in 2003. People were not even aware of the concept of social media and social networking.

Although exceptions are always there, people often have a LinkedIn account to find business opportunities. Whether you’re looking for a job, business leads, or business partners, LinkedIn allows you to create a presence that provides all the relevant information your prospective employers and business partners might be looking for.

There are two reasons why people are on LinkedIn:

  1. Seek new job opportunities
  2. Seek new business partners/customers/clients

The second point is the focus of this blog post.

Just like any channel or any network, when there are too many people vying for attention, you need to stand out. How do you stand out? You market yourself. You promote yourself. You do something that makes people notice you for the right reasons.

For example, I provide content writing and content marketing services and I would like to draw attention of people on LinkedIn who are looking for businesses and individuals providing these services (and preferably, find my profile).

The problem is, just as I want to attract these clients, there might be hundreds of content writers and content marketers trying to achieve the same. I need to compete with them.

On social media as well as search engines, when you are vying for targeted attention, you’re not just competing with your competitors, you are also competing with numerous other distractions that may prevent your prospective customers and clients from taking note of your presence even if your presence is right in front of their eyes.

Sure, on LinkedIn people may search for keywords and tags associated with your business and they may be able to find your profile for the right reasons, but if your competitors are aggressively marketing themselves on the platform, even if your prospects come across your profile, they may get distracted by more aggressive professionals who are constantly posting highly valuable content on their timelines, conveying in the process that they are proactively promoting themselves.

But why focus on LinkedIn for B2B content marketing?

As mentioned above, LinkedIn is a business networking platform. These days, it is also evolving as a high-quality content publishing platform – content mostly catering to businesses. This Content Marketing Institute report says that 94% B2B companies that were surveyed for the report find LinkedIn as their preferred content marketing platform.

Among the top five networking platforms, when it comes to doing business, people trust LinkedIn the most. The report was published in Business Insider. Somehow, the web page has vanished, but here is the Twitter update posted by the publication and in case you cannot access even that, I have also put a screenshot of the Twitter update.

LinkedIn B2B content marketing screenshot

LinkedIn B2B content marketing screenshot

Facebook comes second, then Instagram, then Snapchat and then Twitter.

This is mostly because when people are browsing their timelines on LinkedIn they know that LinkedIn users are not interested in sharing what they had for breakfast or what new cute cat video they have stumbled upon. Most probably they are going to publish some business-related information that can be directly or indirectly used.

Why people trust content, on LinkedIn and elsewhere?

When I talk of content I don’t mean junk content published only to improve search engine rankings (they no longer improve, but that’s a different topic). Good quality content means you are sharing your knowledge and you are sharing it not just to prove how good you are, but also in such a manner that the knowledge that you share helps people.

For example, if in this blog post I talk about how to use LinkedIn for B2B content marketing, one of the bigger aims is to tell you something that you can use to grow your business. The more I help, the more you trust me.

When you trust me, it doesn’t mean I have succeeded in manipulating you. I’m not forcing you to do business with me. I’m just sharing with you something that I know. Through sharing, I let it be known to you that when I work for you, I’m going to use the same expertise, the same knowledge, to help you grow your business through my content writing and content marketing services. If I were a lawyer, I would like to talk about the cases I have worked on (of course, without revealing confidential information) and how much knowledge of law I have.

Content breeds familiarity and no, such familiarity does not breed contempt. Again, not just content, good, useful, relevant content.

It is the familiarity factor that makes people work with you. If you’re constantly publishing junk content people lose respect for you and if they don’t have respect for you, how do you expect them to do business with you?

Good content, even if it is of no use to them, builds trust. Your presence on their timelines isn’t just a nuisance they are too lazy to get rid of, it’s a value addition. They pay attention to your content whenever you post it on LinkedIn or elsewhere. They share your content with people who may find it useful.

This, of course, also helps your search engine rankings. Google has built advanced algorithms that can actually gauge the quality of your content. Also, it matters how many people are linking to it and sharing it.

Using LinkedIn for B2B content marketing

First, understand, what is B2B content marketing and how it is different from B2C content marketing. Is it really different?

In theory they are not, but in practice they might be.

In B2C, even cute cat videos may do the trick, although, you may have to create a presence on another networking platform like Facebook or Instagram. B2C content marketing is mostly for brand awareness. In B2B, people want information they can use to do business with you. In both the cases you publish valuable content – although the definition of value may change with the sort of audience you are trying to target. B2B content marketing is mostly about lead generation.

It doesn’t mean every piece of content that you publish on LinkedIn or distribute through LinkedIn needs to be a lead generating magnet – some pieces of content are simply published to raise awareness about one’s business.

But generally, when you post content on LinkedIn to attract B2B opportunities, people should be immediately able to make out what business you are in. For example, if I am promoting my content writing and content marketing services on LinkedIn, I shouldn’t be posting coffee making tips all the time, unless I specifically provide my services to this niche. Even then, the primary focus needs to be on content writing and content marketing instead of simply coffee making.

There are two ways you can market content on LinkedIn for B2B opportunities:

  1. Publish blog posts and articles directly on LinkedIn
  2. Publish blog posts and articles elsewhere (preferably on your own website) and then publish the link in a LinkedIn update

There are different reasons why you should publish content directly on LinkedIn and why you should publish it on your own website because both the platforms have their individual merits.

LinkedIn is a ready-made publishing platform with its own content promotion mechanism. There is a greater chance of more people coming across your content on LinkedIn rather than on your own website if it isn’t yet very popular and it doesn’t get much traffic from search engines.

On the other hand, unless you publish quality content on your website, you are not going to improve your search engine rankings and you cannot build your brand through quality content if the content does not exist on your own website.

You need to maintain a balance. For example, for every three blog posts that you publish on your own website, publish at least one on LinkedIn.

Grapevine has it that LinkedIn gives preference to content published on its own platform over content published somewhere else and then simply the link posted on LinkedIn.

What sort of content you should publish on LinkedIn for B2B marketing?

Mostly, informative content written in a casual manner. Remember that most of the people will be accessing your LinkedIn content from their mobile phones. They don’t want to read heavy text. Write in the format of case studies. Present a problem, then present a solution and present the solution in such a manner that you should be providing that solution.

You can also publish content to display your proactive approach towards your business. Suppose, recently you attended a conference. You can write about the observations you made, the new ideas you got and things you agreed and disagreed with.

Or maybe there is a blog post written by another authority figure in your niche and you want to add your own point or you want to contradict that person with your side of the story. Go ahead, people are going to find it interesting.

You can also post shorter tutorials. For example, how to optimize the title of your blog post so that your blog post enjoys higher search engine rankings. Or, if you provide accounting services you can write about how to do effective bookkeeping for certain transactions.

The basic idea is, publish something that people will find useful and relevant.

How your typical content marketing evolves

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How your content marketing evolves

How your content marketing evolves

Content marketing comes with very esoteric expressions these days, but every content marketing strategy begins from the basics.

Why does your business need a content marketing strategy?

Established content marketers tell you that your business needs content marketing so that you can build a platform for yourself that you can someday use for promoting your business.

Michael Hyatt, in his book, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, says “Without a platform – something that enables you to get seen and heard – you don’t have a chance. Having an awesome product, an outstanding service, or a compelling cause it is no longer enough.”

bigger goal of content marketing

The bigger goal of content marketing is to attract, convert and retain customers.

Of course, they are right. Every business needs its own platform, whether micro and macro. You need your audience if you want to do business. People should be eager to listen to you. Not just listen to you, they should pay attention to what you are saying, and the best would be that they also react to what you are saying.

What is the initial goal of your content marketing strategy?

That’s a bigger goal – building a broadcasting platform. Your broadcasting platform takes shape when you have done content marketing for your business for at least a year (assuming you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on promotion and marketing).

What happens in the beginning? When you have just started content marketing?

In the beginning, you work at the basics.

All the basics boil down to one thing: you need targeted traffic.

no traffic no platform no business

No traffic – no platform – no business.

There are rivers of traffic. There are lakes of traffic. There are seas of traffic, oceans of traffic.

You have to dig channels towards your business and these channels will bring traffic to your website either in small streams or flash floods depending on the tectonics of the Internet world.

Although throughout your content marketing you may try to get as much targeted traffic from the search engines as possible, in the beginning you primarily focus on your main keywords.

I’m not suggesting that you focus on your keywords so much that you don’t pay any attention to your quality and relevance, but you have to strike a balance between writing and publishing keyword-rich content and providing value to your visitors.

If you have lots of time and resources at hand, you can focus on multiple sources of traffic like your own blog and website, other blogs and websites and various social media channels, but if you have limited resources and no extra help, I suggest you first focus on your own website and blog.

Make sure that all the necessary pages on your website are there. All the information that a prospective customer or client may need to make a decision in your favour, should be there. All the concepts should be explained. All the doubts should be cleared. All the apprehensions should be laid to rest.

Then focus on your blog. Publish lots of useful content that is keyword-rich. Don’t get carried away. Initially stick to 1-2 blog posts every day and follow this pattern until you have 50+ blog posts.

According to the latest patterns emerging through various SEO and content marketing conversations, longer pieces contents are better than shorter pieces.

By shorter pieces I don’t mean “thin content”, that is totally useless, and even harmful; shorter pieces mean blog posts of 500 to 700 words. These are no longer sufficient.

Publish fewer blog posts, but publish longer blog posts – 1200-1500-2000 words if possible.

Seems daunting?

Look at it this way: publishing in 2000-word comprehensive blog post that covers your central topic from all the angles gives you far better returns than publishing 4 blog posts of 500-700 words. These 500-700-word blog posts – considering you publish quality content – may take more time than the 2000-word blog post, and in many instances, may even cost you more.

Longer blog posts obviously take time and effort, and this is the reason why search engines like Google take longer blog posts more seriously compared to shorter blog posts – anyone with little effort can write shorter blog posts, but it takes lots of effort and dedication to write longer blog post.

So, just starting your content marketing? Don’t go overboard with the number of blog posts. From the beginning itself, start posting bigger, more comprehensive blog posts even if you have to publish fewer blog posts.

Once you feel that you have covered all the topics that you could have possibly covered in these 50+ blog post, start focusing on other publishing platforms also. Occasionally publish on Medium. Publish on LinkedIn. Answer to people’s questions on Quora. Start networking with other publishers so that they publish your content on their websites and blogs.

This is your initial stage of content marketing and it can easily take up 4-5 months.

What is the advanced stage of content marketing for your business?

For continued content marketing success, you will need to maintain the pace.

There are many reasons:

  • Just like you, many businesses, your direct and indirect competitors, are using content marketing to promote themselves.
  • Your current and prospective customers and clients need to be kept engaged constantly otherwise they lose interest in your business and even when need to avail your product or service they may not recall you and do business somewhere else.
  • Search engine rankings are being shuffled every second. Millions of blog posts, webpages, images, videos and social media updates are being indexed by Google every hour and all these pieces of content are competing with your content. You constantly need to feed Google and other search engines with new content.
  • People’s attention span, especially on the Internet, is quite fickle. You constantly need to remind them of your capability. If you are simply promoting others’ content, you don’t make much impact. But if you share your own content, if you engage people through your own content, they remember you better and the respect you for your knowledge and experience.
  • When you publish content continuously some of your content begins to appear on other websites and blogs. Remember that for the effective back linking, people need to link to your content voluntarily. The more content you publish, the better are your chances of being linked to by other Webmasters and bloggers.

From simple SEO, your content marketing evolves into a complete content publishing and promotion routine

This is how your content marketing evolves. In the beginning you simply focus on improving your search engine rankings, but eventually, you begin to build a platform for your business and for your brand.

There is no use hurrying. A few months ago, I created a video titled “Content marketing is like growing a tree”, in which I have explained that just like you cannot hurry when you want to grow a tree and enjoy its fruits, you cannot hurry with content marketing. It evolves at its own pace unless you are ready to pump in lots of money and effort. Here is the video:

Behind every successful content marketing there is unique content and a very remarkable quality of unique content is, it can sustain itself even in the face of competition.

After you have attained a traction with unique and quality content, you can slow down your pace. Instead of publishing 1-2 blog posts every day, maybe you can publish 1-2 blog posts every week, or even a couple of weeks if you want to focus on detailed, longer blog posts.

By the time you have published 50+ blog posts you become known for your content quality and people begin to seek you out when they are looking for quality advice and insight. This is an indication that you have built your platform.

A platform means people converge at a particular point associated with you to achieve something, and in terms of content marketing, they want to be informed, so they pay close attention to what you publish on your website, blog and even on your social media timeline. You have got an audience. People carefully listen to you.

After this, you just need to sustain your platform. At this stage, your content marketing has evolved and unless you do something really disastrous, the only way from here is forward.

What is the future of content marketing?

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Future of content marketing

Future of content marketing

Quick note: Of late I have been very busy with work (which is a good thing, right?) and I haven’t been able to publish my regular blog posts. For the time being, I will be publishing smaller, quicker blog posts, that I will be mostly referencing from other content marketing websites and blogs.

So, what is the future of content marketing?

I came across this quandary on this blog post.

In the past, content marketing simply meant publishing lots of articles and blog posts on your website and it would get you good traffic.

Back in 2002 when blogging hadn’t yet been invented (or maybe it was, I’m forgetting) I used to publish .asp web pages on my website and then I would manually update the index file to include the latest web page.

I knew it generated traffic (although, it didn’t help me grow my business much but that’s a different story).

I also published lots of web design related articles on other websites because I knew that would to get me traffic, and it did.

Since then, content marketing has turned into an industry, and, “content marketer” is a profession.

There are two trends that have mostly affected content marketing over all these years:

  1. Advertisements are no longer effective; in fact, people devise ways to avoid them.
  2. Google has been continuously changing its ranking algorithm, increasingly giving prominence to content that is high-quality, relevant and useful.

Social media has also impacted the way people consume content and hence, content marketers are constantly brainstorming on how to format their content and how to steer their content marketing strategy to get more attention from their social media followers.

The continuous effort is to get more eyeballs and, through more eyeballs, more targeted traffic to the website or the blog.

What has changed in the past and what is going to change in the future for content marketing?

In the past content marketing has become, from just a form of increasing your search engine rankings, to a full-fledged form of marketing.

Just as content marketers paid close attention to what the search engines did to their content, the search engines now pay close attention to what the content marketers are doing to their content.

Aside from that, there are different forms of content that are continuously gaining prominence over the written content.

Yes, written content still matters, but you can get traffic to your website through all types of content including images, sound files (audio files like podcasts), GIFs, PDFs, and of course, videos.

According to a Cisco study that came back in 2016, by 2020 75% of mobile traffic will be video (source).

It means video may dominate content marketing – more of your content may exist as video rather than text and images.

But if you are a big fan of content writing – text – focus on content clusters. I have written about content clusters in the blog post titled What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO?

It means you create very long web pages and blog posts – 3000-400 words – and cover your topic from every possible angle.

Writing individual blog posts and web pages for your keywords and key phrases is frowned upon by Google these days.

Comprehensive blog posts and web pages also help you bring down your bounce rate because people get lots of valuable information on a single page and they don’t have to come back to Google to look for additional information.

Talking about creating topic clusters, one thing that I must point out is that to create very long blog posts and web pages, your writing needs to be very engaging and conversational.

Long streams of boring text are going to send people away.

I’m already observing this trend among my clients – they are coming to me for the need to publish very long pieces of content and they know that I can keep their readers interested.

So, this is a new door of opportunity for writers who can write well.

Anyway, the purpose of this particular blog post is not to publish something very structured and informative. Due to my ongoing workload, I haven’t been able to publish much. I’m trying to figure out how to regularly publish on my blog while writing for my clients.

What is data driven content marketing and how to use it to grow your business

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Data driven content marketing strategy

Data driven content marketing strategy

Content marketing in its current avatar is not considered very scientific. It works on perception, experience, sometimes even guesswork, and mostly estimation.

Data driven content marketing on the other hand, can be more precise and more scientific. Data, as they say, does not lie.

What is data driven content marketing?

What do you understand by data? Data is information in the form of numbers. If you say that out of every 100 visitors that come to your website 2 buy from you, that is data.

If you know that out of every 500 visitors to your website every day, 245 enter your website via your services web page and out of these 245, 10 do business with you, and then you try to create content to replicate the success of your services web page and then try to promote that content to the sort of people that enter through your services web page, that’s data driven content marketing.

When you depend on data to create content and distribute it, you are no longer guessing.

Data driven content marketing means knowing exactly what your audience is looking for using all the available web analytics tools, and then tailoring, formatting, and timing your content accordingly.

The easiest real-world example that comes to my mind is the way modern email marketing services allow you to create segments based on the behavior of your email recipients.

One day you send an email campaign to all your recipients.

Then you wait for a week. MailChimp (I use MailChimp, you might be using another service) tells you how many people opened your message from your entire mailing list.

You send a new message to only those people who opened your previous message, the new message completely tailored according to the previous message read by them.

This is data driven marketing.

Analyze data to improve content marketing strategy

Analyze data to improve content marketing strategy

How to use data driven content marketing to grow your business

Before we proceed, let me be clear: data in itself means nothing. Data in itself is just a collection of numbers.

It is when you analyze the data and draw intelligence out of fit, it begins to have some meaning for you.

So, basically, the actual form of content marketing that you should be focusing on is, intelligence-driven content marketing, but, since all this intelligence is derived from data, let’s just stick to data driven content marketing.

Data is everywhere. Google Search Console gives you a treasure trove of data. Twitter gives lots of data. You can get good data from LinkedIn. Facebook, sure. Most of the contemporary email marketing services. There are numerous third-party tools that can go through your existing content and tell you what sort of people are mostly consuming your content.

So, how does data driven content marketing help you grow your business better than the usual, haphazard content marketing?

Data driven content marketing helps you channelize your efforts and cost towards a more productive and meaningful exercise.

Creating and publishing quality content takes effort and money, right? Wouldn’t it be great if you knew exactly what content to publish rather than simply go on publishing whatever comes to your mind and then hoping that some of it will generate business for you?

You feel bad that you publish 50 blog posts and only 5 of them get you the results that you seek.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you become stingy when publishing content. You cannot start gathering data from the word go. It may take you many months before you have some decent data to analyze. And, this data cannot be gathered if you don’t have enough content to analyze.

Initially, you will have to depend on your intuition, on guesswork, on research that is not data-based, but, as you publish greater amount of content and as that content generates greater amount of user feedback, you will have plenty of data to play around with.

Data driven content marketing isn’t as “nerdy” as it may seem initially. In its simplest form, it means using the intelligence that you can derive out of the data that you have, to create, publish, and distribute your content.

Why publish content for people who are never going to appreciate it?

Why not publish lots of content for people who have a use for it, who are looking for it, or who may need it in the near future without even realizing it? And the good thing is, you have access to that needed intelligence.

Even if you are simply using Google analytics you can get lots of information about the people who search for your content on Google and social networking platforms.

The Google Search Console also tells you what sort of devices people use to access your content and where most of your visitors are situated.

Data driven content marketing primarily has two stages:

  1. Post-publishing-distribution content effectiveness metrics/data
  2. Publishing-distribution of new content based on the metrics/data gathered above

Gathering and analyzing data after you have published and distributed content

How do you know the effectiveness of your content?

To know the effectiveness of your content you need to have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.

Suppose you have published a new case study on your website. You want people to download your case study. Since it contains valuable, useful information, you want people to first sign up for your newsletter and then download the case study.

Many people sign up for your newsletter and then download your case study.

What was the purpose of publishing the case study? Was it to encourage more people to sign up for your newsletter updates? Or was it to convince people into doing business with you?

Sometimes businesses publish e-books and case studies just to use them as an incentive for their email subscription.

If this is not the case and you have published the case study to reach out to more people and explain how you deliver your product or service, you can try something else.

After a couple of months, you allow people to download your case study directly without having to sign up for your newsletter.

What do you observe after two months?

Are lesser number of people subscribing to your email updates? Are more people downloading your case study? Are more people contacting you for work than previously?

The data will tell you and then accordingly you can publish your subsequent case studies and decide whether you want to offer your next case study as an incentive for email subscription or you directly want to allow people to download it.

A sidenote observation by the way: I discourage my clients from using an incentive for subscription. People should download your case study, e-book or white paper simply because they want to access the information. In the same vein, people should subscribe to your updates not because they want to download your case study, e-book or white paper but simply for the valuable information that you will be giving them.

Coming back to the topic, you can use a keyword research tool to know whether the keywords and search terms you are trying to target are actually used by your target audience or not.

Often my clients demand content for which there is no demand. They waste time, money and effort on chasing shadows.

Even if you don’t want to use a third-party tool, you can use the Google Search Console to know which keywords and search terms are driving traffic to your website or blog the most, and then tailor your content accordingly.

The study and data analytics of your existing content can tell you about:

  • How many people visit your blog or website?
  • What is your bounce rate?
  • How much time on an average your visitors spend on your individual blog posts and web pages?
  • How many comments do your blog posts attract?
  • How many times people share your content on their social networking profiles?
  • How many inbound links your content attracts?
  • How many leads content generates within a particular time frame?
  • What is its conversion rate?

Publishing and distributing content according to the data you have been able to gather and analyze so far

Remember the key to a successful content marketing strategy is providing the right content to the right audience at the right time using the right channel. Yes, lots of “right”.

Your data will be able to tell you what content your audience prefers.

It tells you what format is most suitable to the needs of your audience.

The data will tell you on which days of the week your content is accessed the most.

The data will also tell you through what channels (your blog, search engines, website, external websites, social networking platforms, mobile apps) people access your content the most.

For example, my content analytics tell me that most of my traffic comes from search engines with occasional spikes from LinkedIn. Almost zero traffic from Twitter and Facebook.

Does it mean I should try harder to improve my search engine rankings further and create more visibility on LinkedIn, or should I ignore these channels and focus more on Twitter and Facebook from where my traction is almost nil?

Depends on what I want to achieve, but this bit of information can certainly help me decide and carry on my content marketing accordingly.

What sort of data you should pay attention to for a successful data driven content marketing strategy?

Here are a few things you can look out for when trying to figure out what sort of content you should publish and how you should market it.

  • How do customers react to your existing content?
  • What format of content – blog posts, web pages, case studies, newsletter updates, images, videos, white papers, e-books, social media updates – is preferred by your target audience?
  • How do people mostly discover your content?
  • What keywords and search terms people use when they are able to find the content that you have? Or the content you are planning to publish?
  • What sort of content your competitors are publishing and what is the degree of success?
  • How does your content perform vis-à-vis generating leads and more business?
  • What changes do you notice when you alter the way you publish your content?
  • Does your audience prefer long content or short content?
  • Particularly for your business, does quantity work or quality?
  • Do people access your content mostly on desktop or mobile?
  • Should you focus more on paid media, owned media or earned media?

Frankly, these are just random questions that come to my mind when I’m writing this. Every business has its own unique data and user behavior patter.

It’s not that suddenly you have to change your content marketing strategy and start worrying about data. If you pay close attention to a few metrics and then try to create content accordingly, you are already using data driven content marketing for your business. If not, you should perhaps, from now onwards, start paying close attention to at least the Google Analytics data to know what sort of traffic your content is attracting.