Making Money On-line: How Do Digital Analytics Change Content Marketing?

Monday, 30 March 2020

How Do Digital Analytics Change Content Marketing?

Content marketers face many challenges when it comes to making their content stand out in a crowded content space across all channels. Plus, content marketing also must do a better job when it comes to segmenting and personalizing the content. But, keyword optimization isn’t going to effectively address either of those challenges.

Enter digital analytics. Offering a competitive advantage, this data-driven marketing tool has been proven through various research to enhance content marketing results. Digital analytics is possible through various types of available software that does the data collection.

Assess Content Impact

Digital analytic tools like Google Analytics enables you to gauge how your content performs and engages or where it may miss your target. For example, Google Analytics provides data on the impact your content has on conversions. Google Analytics and other tools like heat maps provide further evidence of what content captures the audience’s attention.

There is also the need to understand how your content impacts search engine results. Google Analytics offers a way to examine search traffic trends over a designated period of time. Doing so can help improve how you develop a SEO content strategy while also tracking previous ranking performance, which may also reveal larger shifts in audience interests or pain points.

Improve Personalization Efforts

The first way that analytics changes content marketing is by enabling a greater level of personalization within the content. Having so much information about your customers well beyond basic analytics like gender, age, and location means you can write directly to them and their needs.

It’s previous customer interactions that now direct what content to share in regards to a product or service they bought. Now, content can be directed to those customers about what they specifically bought and how they can get more value out of it. Additionally, the analytics also tells you what time of year they bought so you can plan content for them around the same time to encourage reorder.

Receiving this type of personalized content can make a comfortable feel more like the brand is interested in them as individuals. In turn, this can deepen brand loyalty and create more positive customer experiences.

Heighten Channel Visibility

Digital analytics and data-driven marketing also change the impact and visibility of your content across channels. The analytics determine what content is working on what channel and when. Prior to this capability, marketing teams had to essentially guess what might work in terms of a promotional campaign. They couldn’t know for sure if a revenue boost came from a particular campaign or if it was some other factor.

However, with digital analytics, they know for sure. The analytics can pinpoint each engagement and correlate directly with a particular content-driven campaign like an ad, video, blog post, or email blast.

Effectively Follow the Customer Through Their Purchase Journey

Digital analytics also helps marketers track customers throughout their purchase journey—from initial interest and research to active shopping ad through the purchase process. Because of today’s multiple channel options, that journey looks very different and can even change from transaction to transaction. There are more online and mobile channels than ever before where the purchase journey could be influenced, altered, or even cancelled.

Insights are provided thanks to digital analytics tools, such as website cookies and click-through rate (CTR). This tracking system helps marketers understand what’s working and what they need to improve across the entire purchase journey. The data insights also help to create a more detailed customer profile from all the purchase behavior. From there, marketers can improve how they develop a uniform, satisfying experience for each customer across all channels.

Forecast Customer Behavior

Perhaps one of the most intriguing things that data analytics enables is the ability to forecast customer behavior so content can be geared toward that predictive behavior for greater engagement and sales. Digital analytics enable marketers to leverage audience profiling data to predict customer wants and needs so that targeted content can be created to influence those purchase decisions.

It’s the equivalent of knowing what customers want before they know they want it. This capability to craft that inside-knowledge content can serve as a definitive competitive advantage.

Not the Whole Story

Although digital analytics can’t uncover everything to help improve content marketing campaign results, it’s an effective tool that has been an immense aid to the marketing effort. And, with the introduction of more digital analytics powered by artificial intelligence, more things like brand perception and more details related to SEO impact will help further shape content marketing.