We’ve all heard the phrase ‘Content is King’, however this implies that content sits at the top of the digital food chain and I simply don’t believe that to be true. The actual power behind a successful content strategy lies in the data and insights that have been mined prior to the content being created. Sure, it takes time (and considerable thought) to plan the creation of a data-led content strategy, but any king of the jungle will tell you it pays to put in some serious thought before going in for the kill. If you need more rationale about why it’s so important that you place data at the heart of your content strategy, here’s 11 reasons for you to chew through. What’s more, because I’m feeling creative today, I’ve packaged them up into a neat acrostic blog format to make them as digestible as possible.
Discoveries – You may think that you know the type of content your audience want to consume, but usually if you analyse your company and industry data, you will unearth some interesting discoveries that will lead to new and fruitful content ideas.
Accessible – Free tools like Facebook Audience Insights, Google Analytics and Answer the Public mean that there’s a low barrier to entry when looking to obtain data to inform your content strategy.
Tangible – By looking at data that reveals how your current strategy is performing you can create very definite and measurable KPIs for your future objectives.
Action – By obtaining data-led insights you will become empowered to take confident actions towards improving the ROI of your business using content marketing.
Insight – Almost any question can be solved using data, if you know which tool to utilise to answer it. Just be sure to ask meaningful questions in order to obtain insightful answers that can be put to good use.
Success – The key to successful marketing involves asking the right questions, then drilling into data to obtain actionable insights to apply to your strategy. If you are failing to plan this in, then you should plan to fail!
Knowledge – The product of successful data mining is knowledge and we all know knowledge means power, so pop your hard hats on and get data mining.
Information – We live on The Information Highway and it’s growing exponentially bigger day by day with the progression of technological innovations such as the Internet of Things. Avoid getting stuck in traffic en route to your destination by staying focused on the answers you are looking for in all that data.
Necessary – Data supporting your strategy will equip you with the necessary information to justify your content plan to your boss. Your plans, decisions and actions will be supported by facts, not fictional hunches which is a no-brainer.
Give it a go! With all this knowledge under your belt, what’s stopping you from mining data to obtain some fierce insights that put you at the top of the office food chain.
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