Writing Right: Using Data to Drive Your Content Marketing

by | Apr 25, 2016 | Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Content marketing has proven its worth, bringing in three times more leads and costing 62% less than traditional outbound marketing (Hubspot). Despite these stats, a recent NetProspex and Content Marketing Institute whitepaper found that 85% of B2B marketers said they couldn’t connect business value to content. The study went on to find marketers still struggle with the practice, citing “creating content that engages” as a primary content marketing concern (Marketing Data: Vitamin D for Your Content Marketing).

Discerning your content’s reach and impact is a challenge, but there is a solution: data. Collecting and analyzing the right information can be the cure to your content marketing ails. So, open up the lines of communication with your data management team and start patching together the many ways analysis can drive your content marketing.

Validate Personas

First, develop your buyer personas. This requires looking into the roles, beliefs, problems faced, and behaviors of your core audience groups. Once you have established personas, cross-check your work against your company data. Collaborate with your data management team to identify who is viewing and interacting with persona-targeted content.

Identify and Fix the Gaps

Determine if the results from your validation exercise match with your personas. If you were targeting IT managers but came up with C-level execs, make some changes. You can adjust what you’re writing, or tweak your personas. Create a regular system for identifying and fixing these gaps.

Prioritize and Leverage Interactions

Pay attention first to those personas making – or influencing – purchasing decisions and serve them first. Think about the interactions between each, and adjust your content accordingly. For example, if the project manager is one making the purchasing decision but they listen to what the account managers have to say, you may want content to target both in some segmented manner (say a 60-40 split).

Use the Buyer Journey

Sales managers know the buyer journey well, including the many small decisions a prospect makes before coming to the big “to buy or not to buy” question. Content marketers need to know this journey as well, creating content to match it and capture data along the way.

Track for Success

Gauging content efforts in a major problem for most marketers. Start tracking now: get your baseline, set a goal, and start measuring. Chances are you’re already doing this with sales prospects, so just get sales and marketing talking and measuring together.

Go Beyond “More”

Content marketing success is about more than just gaining traffic – it’s about bringing in the right traffic through better-qualified leads. Utilizing data to hone your content through validating personas, matching content to the buyer journey, and intentionally tracking results will significantly beef up your leads. The boost in business from better leads transforms content marketing from a “nice to have” to “have to have” component for your business growth.

At NuGrowth Solutions, we do more than write about marketing data integration: we practice what we preach. To best serve our clients, we bring best practices in capturing and analyzing data to serve marketing and sales efforts simultaneously. In our years of experience, we know sales and marketing integration brings a fuller prospect and client picture, increasing business success.

To find out more about how NuGrowth can help your business harness the power of data, contact us at 800-966-3051 or fill out a short contact form today.

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Author: Chuck Rue

Chuck Rue is the Manager of Marketing Automation. He has developed extensive skills in CRM management, marketing automation, and website development that allow him to coordinate how these essential tools work together for clients and get actionable data to sales reps as quickly as possible.

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