How Does Big Data Affect Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Save

10/6/2021Updated: 10/6/2021

Content marketing has become increasingly common nowadays. Brands today understand that their consumers want something more from businesses—they want value and engagement. A great way to do that is by creating and publishing various forms of content.

But how can we be sure that the content we are creating will interest our viewers? The digital age today means that businesses have a diverse set of followers. That makes it impossible to manually collect and process such large amounts of data to gain valuable insights.

That is where Big Data comes in.

Big Data allows brands to develop data-driven content strategies designed to cater to their consumers’ needs and interests. Moreover, combining it with AI will enable companies to collect large sets of consumer behavior data and help them extract valuable insights from them.

Before we get the relationship between Big Data and marketing, we first need to understand the idea behind content marketing itself.

Content Marketing—Why is It so Popular?

Content marketing, as the name suggests, is the practice of creating and spreading quality content. The purpose is to inform and engage the readers and bring them to your business by cementing yourself as an authority on the topic. The benefits of incorporating content into your marketing strategy include:

It allows brands to define and establish their audience and draw their attention to the company’s offerings.
It allows you to establish yourself as an authority that provides the content of value to its consumers. That helps boost your brand recognition and builds a relationship based on trust with the audience.
Compared to other marketing techniques, creating and publishing content is relatively cost-friendly. While it may take a little time to make an impact, once your content offerings expand, you can quickly attract a large audience.

A content marketing strategy plans to create your audience by creating and publishing consistent and informative content that solves the consumers’ problems.

The idea behind it is that a consumer that looks to you to solve their problems is far likelier to make a sale.

Conventional marketing practices tend to annoy people nowadays. For example, ads on TV or online are seen as intrusive and negatively affect the online viewing experience. However, by providing a novel way to market your services and products to enhance the experience, content marketing has made its mark as the go-to marketing technique in 2021.

3 Ways Big Data Can Benefit Marketers

There are three segments of data that are of use for a content marketer—customer data, financial data, and operational data. Obtained from different sources and stores in various locations, this data can be hard to analyze without the help of specialized tools. That is where Big Data comes into play.

Customer Data

It contains all the necessary information about your target audience. It includes the consumer names, email addresses, social media handles, purchase and browsing history, and other general information. Additionally, it also contains important insights such as audience interactions, time spent on-page, and information gathered via surveys and questionnaires.

Financial Data

It can help you evaluate your content performance and optimize your content strategy accordingly. Also, it includes data such as the number of sales, number of conversions, revenue generated vs. the cost of marketing, etcetera. It might also contain any publicly available financial data from your competition, such as their pricing plans.

Operational Data

That contains the operational metrics of your content. It includes factors such as your search engine rankings, click-through rates, and more. It helps you figure out how well your content performs on the web and make the required tweaks to optimize your strategy further.

Using this data, you can generate insights on developing a great marketing strategy and making any tweaks necessary along the way.

How Does Big Data Enhance Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Big Data is the name given to the large amounts of information and insights generated by users online. A click, a swipe, or even a hover is all part of the data used to gain insights on user behavior. Businesses worldwide can use those insights to adapt their services and offerings, as they tell us how consumers act and respond to a given scenario.

This data also consists of the consumer likes and dislikes, which can help target the right customers by the businesses. Using this information, brands can focus on creating content, and optimizing their offerings for their ideal consumers. Let’s look at a few other ways Big Data can help us build a better content marketing strategy.

Define and Understand Your Marketing Goals

Before you start developing your content marketing strategy, you first need to define the goals of your marketing campaign. By specifying these goals, you’ll create a set of guidelines to help you develop the perfect marketing strategy.

To do that, you first need to understand the needs of your business. Next, you need to define each area that could use the marketing insights gathered from user data. Once you have determined these areas, the next step is to use Big Data analytics tools to gather the required information. That will help you pick the necessary insights to find the solutions to those improvements.

Big Data can expose the hidden patterns and trends in the data. As a result, it helps you develop more robust marketing plans for your business.

Understand Your Target Demographic

Developing your marketing strategy around your customers is what every business needs to do. Big Data can help you do that by providing relevant insights into the likes and dislikes of your target consumers.

Understanding your consumers is necessary for a business to ensure that their content is related to their interests. There are many ways to use Big Data to your benefit for this purpose, including:

It can help you identify the various segments of our target audience. Moreover, it can provide you details about their interests and preferences, helping you create content suited to their interests.
By analyzing the user interaction data for your content, you will identify and improve the user experience issues within your content.
It also allows you to identify trends and develop projections for the future through user interactions, which is necessary for a good marketing strategy.
Boosting Conversion Rate

Content marketing aims to guide a consumer through the sales funnel and convert them into a customer. To help you improve your conversion rate, Big Data can help you identify the correct content types. That will help you create content targeted for different purposes, from topics meant to educate to those intended to convert.

A few insights that could be of use here include:

Logging a user’s interaction with your content
Logging the amount of time each user spends on your content
At what point does the user convert

This data can help you optimize your content and increase your conversion rate. By understanding the consumer’s behavior, you will identify the factors that lead to conversion, and implement them within the various copy-writing examples you produce.

What you need to understand is that conversion depends entirely on the quality and relevance of your content. Big Data can help you ensure that all your content is appropriate and relevant to its purpose in the sales funnel.

Improves Customer Retention

A content marketing strategy doesn’t just improve your conversion rate. It also helps you retain existing customers by providing quality content that interests your readers.

However, finding suitable topics to engage and retain existing customers might not be so easy. Choosing content that interests your existing and potential customers requires that you go through large amounts of data. That is something that is exactly what Big Data was made for.

Big Data can help you retain customers by:

Processing important customer metrics like click-through rates, time spent viewing the content, the number of returning customers, and more. That can help you understand the topics and types of content that interest your users, which could go a long way into helping you retain your existing customers.
Moreover, it can help you identify the needs of your customers’ satisfied and unsatisfied segments. That will help you create better-targeted content to satisfy the needs of all your customers.
Enhances Your Account Visibility

Content marketing serves another vital purpose besides attracting and retaining your customers. It also helps to establish your presence in the market by creating content that boosts your visibility.

For your content to do that, it needs to be entertaining, informative, SEO optimized, and most importantly, of interest to your readers. Using Big Data, you can:

Analyze your competition to understand what interests your potential customers and which distribution channels would yield the best results.
Evaluate each channel to identify what type of content would suit it the best
Identify where your links might have the best chance of reaching your potential customers, using big data analytics to assess your competition.

Conclusion

The bottom line of this entire article is that Big Data is necessary for your content marketing strategy today. Helping you analyze the gathered data allows you to make informed decisions to improve your content’s impact.

Creating content for your customers is quite tricky today. First, businesses have to create content that speaks to several customer demographics. Big Data provides a little clarity to that process by generating valuable insights to help you attract and retain your customers.

Now you know how Big Data can benefit and improve the content marketing process. That means that you are now ready to use that knowledge to create a strategy that helps you stand out and establish yourself as an authority in your industry.

By Amtul Rafay