Marketers are expected to come up with brilliant ideas for content creation that meet the needs of a brand audience and prospective customers, but ideas alone won’t convince a stakeholder to invest in your thinking or ensure that your target audience will engage with your brand. As creatives, we need to show that our ideas for content creation align with the needs of our target audience, and this is where data comes into play.

We can use data and research all the way through content marketing strategies in the following stages:

Strategy

Data can help in all areas of your content strategy, such as identifying buyer stages, content formats and content performance, but particularly in keyword research and topics. It’s important for creatives to understand the most searched for keywords and topics that their audience is interested in. There are a number of great tools you can use to help with this process, including:

Google Keyword Planner: the tool allows marketers to quickly retrieve an overview of the relevance of single search terms as well as whole product categories and brands.

Buzzsumo: helps users determine the hottest trending topics for the area you want your client’s brand to own from a thought leadership perspective.

For example, in a recent piece of content we created for Vouchercloud, we analysed the key trending words around Christmas, and we learned that John Lewis was a huge talking point but how do we link the two brands? You can see how in The John Lewis Christmas Advert Music Formula.

Content ideation & creation

Once you’ve researched the keywords and trending topics that are relevant to your audience, it’s time to start thinking about content creation and introduce the ideation process into your strategy. But before any brainstorm, make sure you undertake further preparatory work ensuring you bring the data insights from the keyword and trends research, as well as asking the brainstorm attendees to think about a few ideas in preparation for the creative meeting.

The preparatory work allows the brainstorm to be structured and to be based on strong data about the audience you’re trying to engage. You can take a look at Datify’s free e-book on data and content marketing strategy for more information. The book explains the Idea-Generation formula in detail, which can otherwise be broken down into: data + creativity = great ideas.

Evaluation & analytics

It goes without saying that data is also integral to the evaluation process after you’ve created and promoted your content too. It’s so important to consider the performance of each piece of content. Doing so will allow you to evaluate the relevance of your ideas as your campaigns develop and your content marketing efforts become more sophisticated.

As a creative, you need to consistently generate winning ideas for your clients and their brands, so relying on data to help you do so within all three of the above stages will help you deliver successful content marketing campaigns. Data helps you engage with and understand your target audience on a much deeper level, so if you use data correctly, you’ll be able to interact with them on a deeper level too.

 

By Paddy Moogan, co-founder of Aira

 

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