Making informed decisions rather than depending on a hunch or throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks can help you create content that engages your audience.
You should concentrate on data-driven marketing and how it can assist you in gathering, analysing, and applying data to your content.
Continue reading to find out the best methods to use data before, during, and after the content creation process if you’re out of blog post ideas and unclear of how to include it into your writing.
Using data for content creation
How to Use Data to Create Content
Let’s think about the right use of data before, during, and after the content creation process.
Using Data Before Creating Content
Marketers shouldn’t develop content without first considering the facts, just as no one starts building a house without first estimating the cost.
Data insights will assist you to decide what kind of content to develop, for whom to make it, and in what format to provide it.
Before you begin creating, consider some of the various ways you may use data.
Carry Out Keyword Research
Knowing the topics you want to cover or the keywords you want to target is the first step in producing any kind of content.
Finding out what people are looking for online is essential since one of the main objectives of content development is to engage an audience. You may gain useful insights (statistics) about these requests through keyword research.
Analyzing the search purpose, whether it’s informative, navigational, transactional, or anything else, is essential while performing keyword research.
Choose Your Audience
Imagine preparing the best burgers in town and then attempting to market them to a vegan clientele. Similar to this, even your finest content might produce just average results if it isn’t seen by the correct audience.
You can identify the right individuals with the aid of data. You can also eliminate assumptions about your audience and the people who read your content by using data.
Data can provide information on your target audience’s age range, hobbies, emotional triggers, and preferred social media platforms.
To learn more about your audience, you may utilise Google Analytics, customer surveys, or another social media analytics tool.
Pick the Best Content Format
You can use statistics to determine your audience’s preferences for content formats after learning more about who they are and what they seek for online.
Will they read a blog post? Twitter thread or watch videos like those on TikTok? Instagram Reels?
Where you focus the majority of your content development efforts will depend on the data, which will help you maximise your return on investment.
Using Data While Creating Content
Now let’s talk about how to leverage data for content creation.
When used properly, data may give your posts new life and meaning. This does not imply that you should insert spreadsheets right into your postings. Instead, consider how to ethically provide the information in a way that strengthens your argument.
You may give readers a post that will stick with them long after they’ve left the website by contextualising data and utilising it to support your thesis. Here are some storytelling strategies to take into account when include statistics in your posts.
Prove Your Change
Using statistics to show change over time is the most potent narrative approach there is.
In the example above, the number of deaths are weighted against the number of recoveries. Red dots of various sizes are used to represent the number of deaths over time in each geographic region.
Why It Works
In addition to adding weight to the conversation, demonstrating a noticeable changing trend (whether it be a sharp decline or improvement) may also elicit an emotional reaction from your readers.
Show Disparity
Data on its own might be ineffective. But if you put a set of facts into context to draw attention to inconsistencies, you have a compelling story.
Why It Works
You may emphasise gaps that result in unambiguous calls to action by demonstrating disparities between perception and reality or between two sets of data.
Display a link or correlation
Make sure not to infer causality when demonstrating a correlation between two events. Make it clear that you are merely demonstrating how two things are related and not establishing a direct causal relationship.
Why It Works
Readers can choose more wisely what to do in the future when data is used to demonstrate the relationship between two or more diverse things.
Show scale
Scale visualisation is a superb technique to leverage data in content development.
Why It Works
Scale can assist you in giving your articles or posts perspective. Which of your datasets can be adapted to this kind of visualisation? How can you illustrate the extent of your influence?
Data Use Following Content Creation
You’ve seen how data can be used both before and during the production of content. Now let’s talk about how data can still be used even after your post has been published.
Make Published Content Better
Finding chances for content refreshment is a great method to use data “post-content production.”
You may find content that needs to be updated or refreshed by looking at data from tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which can show you content that has been steadily losing traffic over time.
Run a content audit to find the best-performing pieces of content from the archive that can be used or reused for other marketing channels.
Analyze audience participation
After posting a piece of content, there are a ton of metrics you can monitor to see how your audience responds to or engages with it.
For instance, Google Analytics can be used to determine how long people spend on particular articles. To monitor your audience’s clicks and mouse movements on a webpage, you may also utilise additional technologies.
Final Reflection
There you have it: nine straightforward yet efficient methods for incorporating data into various stages of article development and content creation.
Even if you’ve never utilised data in your business before, the techniques described in this article are simple to use, and there are a variety of tools available to you to help you make the most of data.
