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How to use data to create better content for your customers

content for customers

Flying blind is not smart work. In a long bygone era, you couldn’t help but rely heavily on guesswork in any business process or function. Today, you have various software products doing the math for you. Guesstimates and gut feelings have become outdated factors in decision making. Today, data rules. Information is easily accessible enabling you to dig out trends, analyze demand and supply, identify opportunities and threats, and predict future trajectory. 

Technology has opened up everyone’s eyes to clearly see and understand what works and what doesn’t. 

Talking specifically about the marketing function, customer data is being leveraged at every stage of the customer journey. Creating exceptional customer experiences with personalization has become the norm.  Owing to how easily one can collect and use customer demographic and behavioural information, content marketing services providers are supercharging their marketing campaigns for success.

Why marketers are turning to data-driven intelligence

Marketers today extensively use inbound marketing to attract, nurture, and convert leads. This requires them to make intelligent use of data that they are able to collect from their customers. 

How a customer interacts with a certain website, what actions they take while browsing, and how many times they visit a certain product, all these insights on customer interactions are available to experts at an inbound marketing agency. They utilize automation services and marketing intelligence to run campaigns that bring high engagement and sales.

Because data-driven content marketing has proved its power when it comes to culling out insights and information, nearly 40% of content marketers have made up their minds to invest in it. But, before you take the plunge, note that solely data won’t help you win the content marketing battle. Using it intelligently, and creatively, is the key. 

So, how do you utilize data to create ‘better content’?

Left on its own data won’t get you anything. You need to use this data and information to spin content and communication that speaks well with your target audience. There is so much that content marketing service providers can do with all that information that customers leave on your website while browsing your category pages, filling up store feedback forms, or when registering for online contests. 

For example, you have a marketing intelligence technology. It records data of those who subscribed to your starter plan. You observe that the age bracket of these users is about 26-35 years and they come from the media industry. Using this data, you can run smart account-based marketing campaigns creating content that is personalized to their goals. 

If you are further able to identify the most used ‘channel’ by this segment, you can further optimize your campaigns to run on that particular platform, say, Facebook in this case. As a result, the end customer will be super delighted with the kind of relevancy and context you bring into your engagement and selling strategy.

Ways in which you can utilize to create better content for your customers throughout their customer journey are unlimited. Let’s take them up one by one. 

With data, you can create more search-friendly content

One of the biggest advantages of utilizing data is that it gives you the hang of how customers ‘search’ online. And, once you know what the customer is exactly looking for, you can fulfil their needs better. 

For example, a content marketing services provider can use data about how people look up electronic products on their search engines. This will help them make clever use of keywords to nail the number one or number two spot on Google.

In the process, you can also focus on creating content that is highly relevant, free of any discrepancies, and absolutely matches the search parameters for your target audience. That’s what a quality search experience means for your customers – being able to find the exact product in seconds, without even having to click open a single tab.

Consider this. A person prioritizes his mobile phone needs on its camera quality. The search query, in this case, would be ‘Mobile phones with the best camera’. Here, the keyword is ‘mobile best camera’. 

Are you creating content that ranks for this search query? Because if your mobile phone has a great camera and photo functionality, you must aim to make this quality discoverable on the internet and to the right audience base looking for it.

With data, you can create rich content for all customer stages

Not all customers buy in the first go. You could be selling an analytics solution that a lot of businesses are interested in. They visit your site, and even request demos, but don’t convert. That’s not because they’re not interested in what you offer. It’s simply because they either aren’t as aware of analytics or are not purchase-ready. 

There are different stages of purchase decision making. And, this entire process from awareness to sales, can be tracked as well as accelerated using data-driven content marketing.

Let’s consider a customer who has visited the pricing page of a SaaS product. Your marketing intelligence tells you that the search type was ‘Direct search’, and the visitor spent at least ten good minutes on the pricing page. Visitor recordings on your website show that the scroll depth of the page for this visitor was 80%. 

All this data gives you a clear picture of how close this visitor is to making a final purchase decision. He is almost ready to buy. Just that once he leaves your website, he might do some comparative research.

You have all the data, and as a marketer, your immediate job is to start nurturing this lead to buy from you. Your next move should be emailing this lead with your ebook about ‘product feature use cases’ with a big bold CTA that shouts ‘download’. This is how you create ‘relevant’ content for leads who are almost ready to buy.

With data, you can create content optimized for customer location

Running a discount on your subscriptions when your target market is on a break, is definitely not a smart move. Marketing intelligence saves you this disgrace and also your resources. If you’re a technology solution or a SaaS product, you need not worry about making such wrong decisions. 

Even the simplest of tools like Facebook insights will give you insights into the location of your target audience. Google Analytics is widely used to dig up demographic insights.

location dataBased on this location data, you can serve them content in their language, and promote it as per the time of the day in that geographic location. 

It’s extremely easy to create local landing pages for customers from a particular region. You don’t need to have any coding knowledge or pro-level designer skills to put up a neat and optimized landing page.

With data, you can tailor content based on customer intent

Why does ‘Netflix and chill’ work for almost everyone? Because it’s super easy to search your favourite series on the channel, in no time! Also, you can be absolutely sure that the recommended series by Netflix will be to your liking. You won’t regret watching it halfway through and then dismissing it as rubbish. 

So, if you watched ‘Stranger Things, Netflix knows you’ll like being notified about the next sequence. If you finished watching the series, Netflix knows ‘Science fiction horror’ works for you. This way, you get recommendations that you absolutely intend to interact with. Netflix uses data from your watchlist to curate and recommends fresh content to you, ensuring they rope you in as a loyal user. 

Spotify has also nailed how to tailor and personalize content based on customer intent. The app uses listeners’ year-round music data to create personalized playlists at the end of the year.

With data, you can create content in the right format

Blog posts don’t work for everyone. Not all people like podcasts. Some will never click open a whitepaper. The point is – you can’t keep creating content in a format that your audience doesn’t have an appetite for. 

Dig up your analytics and see what type of content gets the most visits and has a lower bounce rate. You can also retrieve data about which content type is being shared the most on social media. 

What if the Slideshare posts that you created out of an old blog post are pulling in huge traffic? This shows that your audience prefers snackable pieces of information and that’s why they are flocking to your Slideshare content format. From this data, you would know that you need to focus on turning more of your blog posts into Slideshare posts from now on.

Wrapping it up

From understanding who your target users are to how they behave to what their pain points are – every piece of information can be dug up using marketing intelligence. A content marketing services provider’s only remaining job is to spin out the right kind of content that resonates well with the customers and to serve this content on the right platforms. 

Sounds easier said than done? 

Let us help you analyze customer data and create content that actually converts for account-based marketing. 

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