Analytics can be a little frightening, but there is no way around it. Producing quality content isn’t simply about putting words on a page. It’s all about delivering valuable information that either solves a real-world problem for your consumers or keeps them entertained. But how do you find out how best to deliver value? This is where analytics come in.
You need to incorporate analytics into your content marketing strategy.
It’s effortless to create poor content. Many organizations produce blogs that should never see the light of day. But why? A simple reason is that they have not implemented content marketing strategies based on analytics. They have neither established clear goals or looked at the data from their website.
The goal of SEO is clear: to improve search rankings by utilizing the best SEO tools. But when it comes to content, few people think of the long run. Instead, they try to wing it. Creating precise content goals can be difficult. However, putting time into establishing objectives makes things better. With three simple steps, you can set and maintain content marketing goals that are rooted in analytics.
Step 1: Set up the right content marketing objectives
Setting goals for your content marketing plan allows you to have a clear objective. However, what kinds of objectives should you establish for your content? There are several kinds, so choose the ones that suit you best. If you haven’t established SEO goals before, start with one and work your way through a clear system to get started.
Consider Engagement.
Social media isn’t the only place where you can engage your audience. Making thought-provoking, helpful material and getting conversations started in the comments may help your business seem more approachable. Try not to end a blog with “what do you think?” or a closed question (“did this help?”) but instead inquire about user experience. If you’re writing about travel, ask people to tell you what they think is the most important thing they learned on their last trip, or something similar.
Do people know your brand?
Your brand represents something. Make it clear by producing content that links your products and services with the overall narrative. If you have one, use it.
A blog is a good place to teach, as any.
Use your blog as a platform to educate others about specific goods, introduce them to trends they should be aware of, or assist them during a process relevant to your industry. People will return to you if you’re a valuable source. They’ll also promote your material on social media. With this, you are not only keeping your users engaged but also getting free word-of-mouth promotion on the side.
Step 2: Understand your current position, and be honest about it.
Once you’ve established a goal, the next step is to figure out your current status. Understanding your current situation lets you set a realistic goal for the future. Let’s say you want your blog to encourage people to interact with each other on it. At the moment, you are only seeing 2 to 3 comments. A realistic goal would be to get at least ten comments before the end of the month.
You now know where you want to start, and you can figure out where you need to go from there. And even though the goal is simple, keeping track of the comments, it’s not easy, which leads us to step 3.
Step 3: Understanding the analytics
Let’s say you want to create a content marketing strategy for the education blogs on your website but don’t know what to do. You may want to increase the amount of educational material useful to your audience or create something entirely new. Take note of the phrase “that is beneficial.” Creating instructional material for the sake of it doesn’t work. Examine the educational content you’ve produced in the last year and see which ones performed well. Which ones are being ignored?
For this, you must consider the metrics for measuring. Clicks? Not really. Clicks are fantastic when people stay on a page, but time spent on that particular page is more significant in terms of value. You want to track users who remain on the site to investigate other options. Look at how many people bounce away from educational articles; the lower, the better.
STEP 4: Use everything you have learned
Once the time limit in a goal has expired, compare your data to your baseline. Use these to help you figure out how best to achieve your future objectives. Examining posts with the most comments and emulating what gets people talking can be helpful for the future. Study and create more valuable instructional material by looking at those that have the most time-on-page and branching off from them. It’s never a bad idea to pick up a popular article and expand on a specific subject in much greater depth, but make sure to link between the two so that your readers can locate them both.
The two most essential components of a content marketing plan are analytics and goal-setting. Create goals and use analytics to track your progress. Always keep in mind that the creation of quality content should be at the heart of your content marketing strategy.
