10 Essential Tips for Data-Driven Content Marketing [Sponsored]

Thanks to AI, any marketer can quickly create a blog post, article, or other type of content in minutes.

But whether that content will resonate with your audience is another story — especially if you rely on keyword research and AI’s generic ideas to fuel your strategy. It might boost your search rankings but won’t necessarily build brand authority, create trusted connections, or result in a positive marketing impact.

To achieve all those goals through your content marketing efforts, you need a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs. You also need the right data, including insights on who is accessing your content, what they want to accomplish, and what content they’re engaging with most.

To help set you up for success, we’ve compiled 10 tips on leveraging data to sharpen your content marketing strategy. Follow these recommendations to create content that demonstrates your brand’s unique value and drives stronger marketing performance.

Tip 1: Go beyond basic demographics

Don’t rely solely on age, gender, or location data to inform your content approach. Instead, dig deeper with research methodologies that provide a clearer understanding of your audience’s behaviors, motivations, and preferences.

This can be accomplished with audience surveys, customer interviews, and social media listening techniques. Useful insights can also be gathered from your existing website analytics, customer feedback channels, and engagement history data.

What you discover can point you toward ways to optimize your messaging, targeting, and channel selection.

Tip 2: Focus on topics, not just keywords

Yes, SEO is important. However, chasing high-volume keywords won’t necessarily improve your rankings or help distinguish your content. Use insights from your audience data to create content that genuinely interests them.

Start by applying the information you’ve collected through the research techniques suggested above. For example, let’s say the data shows your target audience wants advice on how they stand to benefit from machine learning. You can fill that knowledge deficit with topically resonant content optimized to drive search traffic to your company’s website.

Tip 3: Align with sales and customer success

Your company’s sales and customer service teams regularly interact with members of your target audience, making them valuable sources to tap for content insights.

These organizational partners have direct access to insights like:

• Consumers’ frequently asked questions
• Common objections they encounter
• Behavioral trends and preferences they’ve observed
• How existing customers use (or intend to use) your products and services.

Ask them to share what they’ve learned through their customer conversations. Then, use it to inform your decisions on the topics and ideas to write about. It will help your content better address real-world challenges, and your internal teams can leverage that content in their outreach efforts.

Tip 4: Develop core content first

Choosing specific content types and topics can be overwhelming. There are millions of conversations you can create — how do you know where to start?

Take your cues from the learnings gathered by following the three tips above: Look at the data you’ve collected, narrow your topic list, establish who your target audience is, and create a blueprint for the overarching content marketing strategy you intend to use.

Start with content highlighting your unique value proposition and addressing your audience’s main pain points. Then, create supplementary content to support your overall strategy.

Core content can differ depending on how well-established your brand is. Newer brands should cast a wide net with content built to drive brand awareness. Brands that are already well-known or have built a strong customer following may want to prioritize bottom-of-the-funnel topics to connect with consumers ready to convert. 

Tip 5: Create a logical content hierarchy

Use website analytics to structure your content experience so it helps guide your audience through their buying journey. You can analyze data to identify common questions to create Q&As and how-to content, as people often search for answers and are more likely to resonate with your content if you provide helpful information.

Additionally, focusing on evergreen content — assets that have remained relevant over time and can easily be updated, according to your data — should be a significant part of your core content. Structure it to lead your audience to the specific content they may have shown interest in. Include Q&As, how-to articles, content clusters, and evergreen topics to funnel your audience into their particular interest areas.

Tip 6: Publish with purpose and update existing content

Your strategy should have a distribution plan that targets specific audiences for key topics. This will help your audiences discover the right content at the right time to impact their decision-making.

Know why you publish each piece and where it will be most effective. Continue to use this as a guide for future content.

The world of content is an ever-changing place — sometimes rapidly, too. That’s why keeping track of published content and periodically reviewing its performance data is just as important as publishing new content. You don’t want valuable information to just sit on your website, collecting dust.

As time passes, information in your content may become outdated, or audiences might demand new details on the topic. Address these issues by updating or improving underperforming content before creating new content. Minor updates can boost rankings and conversions.

Tip 7: Diversify and personalize content across the customer journey

Create different types of content for relevant appeal at each stage of the customer journey, from awareness to post-purchase support. That can include blogs, social media posts, infographics, and multimedia content formats. 

While demonstrating your expertise, don’t be shy about making your content a fun and interactive experience for customers. Creating content like surveys, personalized offers, quizzes, and events are great ways to demonstrate your brand’s expertise while also providing consumers with a fun and interactive experience to engage with.

Using a customer data platform (CDP) can help you deliver personalized content based on insights gathered through your customers’ prior browsing, engagement, and purchase behaviors.

Tip 8: Publish consistently and prioritize human resonance

Quality is key, but volume and cadence also matter. According to a HubSpot study, publishing 5-10 articles per month leads to a good ROI and helps you keep content relevant and site traffic consistent. This also continuously checks off keywords your audience regularly searches, further feeding into your SEO data.

Keep a keen eye on your ROI. This measure of your content performance can tell you how often to post and allows you to try out new ideas. Simply put, if some articles are more popular than others, you can decide to focus on creating more content around those high-performing topics.

Use AI for research and ideas but rely on human creativity for writing. AI is fine for research purposes, but it takes away the human aspect of content, so be sure to include well-written pieces that will resonate with your audience. Incorporate customer reviews, testimonials, and social media posts to add authenticity and credibility to your content.

Tip 9: Test everything

Use A/B testing to find what works best in your content, design, CTAs, and distribution methods. Test your layout, design, headlines and subheadings, and other pieces of content and see what impact they have on your organizational goals.

Tip 10: Centralize content management

Use a modern CMS to manage, publish, and measure your content performance across all channels. This will help maintain consistency and enable you to personalize content at scale.

Remember to adapt to the ever-changing trends in content creation. You’ll need to adjust accordingly to best reach your target audience. By following these tips, you’ll have a data-driven strategy for content marketing that genuinely connects with your audience and drives results.