Most B2B marketers today agree that content analytics should play a central role in their content marketing strategies. Almost 66% of CMOs reported making investments in data analytics tools to increase the performance of their digital marketing efforts, according to the CMO Survey.
Analytics tools let marketers learn about the ways their site visitors are engaging with their content, which helps them build content marketing campaigns that are more relevant and more likely to generate the results they’re looking for.
What is Content Analytics?
Content analytics is a series of practices, tools and solutions used to measure the way users engage with specific content in your online ecosystem. This can include user behavior on web pages, blog articles, social media posts and other forms of online collateral that generate audience engagement and drive traffic to your site.
Content analytics enable marketers to build a deeper understanding of the performance of their content assets, learning which types of content drive the most user engagement and using that information to build better, more engaging content marketing strategies.
The Importance of Content Analytics
Content analytics enables marketers to learn about the unique preferences and interests of their target audience. High-performing content can be analyzed to abstract the elements that are encouraging high engagement, and marketers can replicate those characteristics in other pieces of content to improve performance. Some of the page elements fit for analysis and optimization could include:
- Content type (including blogs, case studies, whitepapers or e-books)
- Subject matter
- Multimedia elements
- Calls to action
- Content hierarchy
Once marketers have the tool set to understand what makes their best published content engaging, they can optimize existing content on other areas of their site to boost site traffic and drive more goal conversions. They can also use that information to optimize future content marketing strategies and make them more successful.
Some of the benefits marketers stand to experience by using content analytics include:
- Enhance content performance: Sophisticated content analytics solutions enable you to dig deep into the detail of your digital content assets. Microanalyze specific page elements like titles, subheaders, content structure, calls to action and more to understand which ones are blocking goal conversions. A/B test different elements to maximize content performance and results.
- Develop personalized, relevant content: Successful content marketing is about creating content that your target audience finds valuable. To uncover the topics they find interesting, analyze the performance of your existing content (or the content of your competitors) to understand the subjects your customers want to read and learn about.
- Optimize high-traffic acquisition channels: An advanced email marketing and social media tool can help you understand which channels are driving the most traffic to your site. Use this information to optimize the highest performing channels to maximize traffic and customer acquisition. This information also helps you pinpoint underperforming channels and enhance them for better performance.
- Make smarter content decisions: Content analytics software gives marketers a complete analytical overview of the performance of the entire breadth of their content marketing assets. This can help them make data-driven decisions about the production, distribution, measurement and optimization of their content, eliminating mistakes and redundancies while making their marketing budgets more efficient.
Leveraging Content Analytics to Enhance Content
Content analytics empowers marketers to transform their content strategy from the ground up, enabling them to achieve the above benefits by making a few strategic adjustments to their campaigns.
Some of the ways B2B marketers can use content analytics to enhance their content include:
Conversion rate optimization
A conversion rate optimization audit is a complete assessment of the entire content structure of individual pages and assets to understand which page elements are blocking goal conversions. Content marketing analytics can be deployed to build a comprehensive understanding of the performance of each page in order to pinpoint those underperforming elements and optimize them for better performance.
For example, high social conversion rates coupled with high bounce rates from your website might indicate that your social media channels are reaching audiences that are mostly uninterested in your products. With that information, you might pare down your social marketing strategy and find a way to better identify a target audience that has more interest in your content or offerings.
Create a hard-hitting SEO strategy
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing specific elements of your web pages to increase their value and maximize the chances of ranking near the top of search engine results pages. It pays to earn that premium real estate. According to data from Backlinko, the top search result in Google receives an average click-through rate of 27.6%. Search engine optimization (SEO) is how you get there.
Content analytics can help you understand the keywords your pages are currently ranking for in search engines, which you can use to shape and guide your SEO strategies to increase your ranking and boost organic traffic.
For example, you might find that your homepage currently ranks in the ninth position on the search results page of a high-intent keyword relevant to your business. By making a few website tweaks (like increasing page speed, refreshing the content and writing more relevant titles) you might get your content to crack into the top 3 of search results for that keyword.
Balance your first-party data with other data sources
First-party data — or the data you pull from your own online sources — is valuable because it’s proprietary and highly specific to your current audience. However, it can also be limiting, in that it doesn’t allow you to gather insights about potential customers that aren’t currently engaging with your online collateral.
By supplementing your first-party data with second- and third-party information — data purchased from external parties about their own website visitors — you can gain a more comprehensive look at your potential customers. This can help you identify new business opportunities in untapped market segments you didn’t know existed, which can unlock significant opportunities to build new customer relationships.
Develop a better internal linking strategy
Content analytics help you uncover the assets on your site that are attracting the most audience engagement. This information is helpful because it clues you into the subjects and formats that your readers want to consume, but it also lets you identify the content that could serve as springboards for deeper engagement with your website.
Assess each piece of high-performing digital content and identify areas where you can strategically place internal links to other (possibly underperforming) assets on your page. This can help you maximize the value of high-performing pieces while driving additional traffic to assets that don’t receive the same amount of attention.
