Content marketing can be an extremely successful tool to optimize brand awareness, website traffic, and conversion rates. 97 percent of brands generate positive results from content marketing, and 69 percent will increase their content spend in 2023.
But with all the online content, your business needs a strategic, relevant approach to stand out. One effective way to do that is by incorporating data into articles, blogs, and other written content. Let’s explore why leveraging these metrics is crucial to inform—and ultimately improve — your content marketing efforts.
Compel Readers to Click and Dwell on Your Content
The average human attention span is 8.25 seconds, so your content needs to hook the target audience immediately. Whether it’s an article, e-book, or social media post, using data can attract and retain the consumer’s interest. A well-placed statistic in the headline or meta description (i.e., “25 percent of families are planning a summer road trip to…”) will help catch the eye and generate a click. Moreover, expanding on that metric in the content provides accuracy and credibility, which will compel your audience to continue reading.
Ensure the Main Points Are Easy to Scan and Digest
Not only will including quantitative data make your content feel more credible — this helps it come across as more reader-friendly, too. With numbers and statistics, you can distill complex information into a concise, skimmable format for consumers to grasp quickly. Long-form text can feel tedious, but when you break up paragraphs with visual charts, infographics, or bullet points to underscore key metrics, the content is easier to scan and take in. Google also favors articles that structure data in this way, thus boosting your content’s SEO rank.
Make Calls-to-Action More Influential and Persuasive
Placing a numerical value statement in a blog post or e-newsletter’s CTA will entice readers to take the action you want. This tactic, called social proof, appeals to the human instinct to follow along with the crowd so as not to miss out, explains online marketing influencer Neil Patel. So, for instance, if your CTA reads: “Join our community of 5,000+ subscribers and sign up for our email list today,” this metric invokes a need to belong. The phrase “Join X others” could increase conversion rates by as much as 1400 percent.
How Data Can Level-Up Your Content Marketing Plan
Featuring concrete data in a piece of written content is a simple and conclusive way to establish trust with the target audience—but that’s not the only function data serves. Tracking analytics around consumer behaviors, online trends, SEO visibility, and content performance will deliver real-time insight into what currently works versus what still needs improvement. Based on those metrics, you can then fine-tune as necessary. Here are a few examples of how effective data collection will inform and optimize your entire content marketing plan:
- Understanding Your Audience: Consumer data analysis helps you create an audience persona to match your customer demographics, search histories, brand interactions, purchase decisions, content preferences, and other online behaviors. This will make it easier to personalize your marketing efforts at a granular level and formulate a content strategy around what interests them.
- Search Visibility and SEO Value: Without a solid SEO ranking, even the most expertly written content will be lost in the depths of the internet. But when you track SEO metrics, you’ll see which keywords, topics, or queries your audience is looking for so you can tailor content to align with their search intent. This elevates the user experience and boosts visibility in Google’s SERP.
- Content Ideation and Creation: One of the hardest parts of any content marketing plan is consistently brainstorming fresh, unique, relevant, and timely subjects to write about. Fortunately, data collection is a goldmine for content ideation. If you keep close tabs on industry news, social media trends, customer feedback, and more, you’ll uncover topics that resonate with the target audience.
- Monitoring Content Performance: Writing content is only half the battle—you also need to measure its performance. Data such as website traffic, page views, clicks and shares, bounce rates, and conversions will indicate how successfully a piece of content met the needs of consumers. This will help you maintain an edge over the competition in a fiercely saturated virtual landscape.
Harness the Power of Data in Your Own Written Content
Numbers are crucial in all aspects of content ideation, creation, and even distribution. So, harness the power of data to enhance your overall writing, pique the reader’s attention, maintain trust and credibility, and boost your marketing success.
