Have you ever taken a look at your website data? Bounce rates, percentages of sessions, outbound links and average time spent during a session are all but a few indicators that content marketers should focus on when analyzing content.
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Businesses that raise awareness through creating great content are headed down the right track to earning visibility, establishing thought leadership and building trust with prospects, but the golden ticket lies within the analytics. The bottom line is to use the insight gleaned in data to improve your content marketing and give your target audience that they’re looking for. That’s why we, your friendly content marketing experts, are here to help you dive deeper into your data so you can learn how to tailor your content marketing strategy directly to the needs of your audience, and in turn, improve your ROI.
Audience
Who is your audience? What are they interested in? How do they land on your website and where are they coming from? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, your analytics can answer them for you. The ‘audience’ reporting tab specifically within Google Analytics does a stellar job of providing intelligence into the characteristics of your audiences like gender, demographics, behavior, technology and mobile.
Utilize this tool to refine content ideas, messaging and even the images you use to accompany your content marketing. For example, the mobile overview details the number of visits to your site from a desktop, mobile or tablet device. If the majority of your users come from a mobile device, you’ll want to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile. Similarly, if you are targeting an audience of women and the majority of visitors to your website are men (as specified by the gender category report), you’ll further be able to tailor your content and visuals to speak directly to that audience.
Content
Now that you understand your audience on a deeper scale you can determine whether or not your content is gaining traction. Google Analytics provides a thorough report of overall engagement metrics for the most popular pages on your website; this aims to provide marketers with clear cut insight to what their audience is specifically interested in learning. For example, if you are a B2B marketing agency and your most popular content relates to social media marketing, odds are that is the top topic of interest amongst your target audience.
Lead Generation
Once you’ve begun to build momentum from your content marketing strategy, it’s time to talk leads. The entire purpose of marketing is to drive more leads in hopes of turning them into paying customers. Using all of the aforementioned analytics tools to deeply analyze your opportunities allows you to craft superior content on dedicated landing pages with eye-catching CTAs. Sit back, relax and let the leads roll in.
Retention
Successful entrepreneurs say retaining your customers is low-hanging fruit; therefore, understanding how to increase customer loyalty and retention is key to your content marketing strategy. By understanding the reasons behind your audience’s visit, you can manipulate your content to meet their needs. For example, if your visitors are searching for simple press kit or corporate history questions that are not answered on your FAQs page, it may be wise to update your FAQs to reflect those answers.
Successful content marketing is all about catering to your audience’s needs and providing information and resources to help solve their problems. But you can’t do that without a basic understanding of who your audience is and how they are already engaging with you. This is just the beginning phase of improving your marketing tactics with regards to the content on your website. The real benefit comes from digging deeper into the data and optimizing your website based on the analytics you gather.
Whether you dedicate a member of your team or outsource your content marketing analytics to another firm, be sure you are aware of what your marketing efforts may be costing you by taking a deeper dive in to calculating your ROI .
