In 2024, the top spots on the search engine results page (SERP) have already been claimed, and the most successful keywords are already in use. Many essential SEO best practices have been implemented by B2B content marketers, leaving limited conversations to explore, and discovering new angles or keywords becomes more challenging, particularly within the B2B space. However, there are still unexplored opportunities with the potential for innovative strategies and fresh perspectives.
One approach to creating content that actually converts and engages your prospects is to delve deeply into data.
By utilizing content marketing analytics tools, data, especially when combined with analytics, can help you learn:
- What kind of conversations customers would like to see
- How to optimize performance
- How to improve customer engagement
These insights are vital to making data-driven decisions. On that note, let’s move forward to understand how you can leverage data and analytics to take your content to the next level.
How to use data and analytics to improve content performance?
1. Use social media listening tools to know which topics to focus on
If you’ve already covered the “What Is” and “How to” topics related to your keywords and don’t know which topics to focus on next, then you might benefit from using social media listening tools to get insights into the conversations customers are having about your brand and your industry.
These tools are especially helpful in uncovering customer pain points and finding customer preferences — both of which can assist you in not only finding the topics you should write about but also the angle you should take with your content.
For example, it may be that you’ve already covered the topics and conversations your customers are having. Still, because you didn’t know their exact pain points and challenges, the content you produced didn’t seem relatable to them, which is why they didn’t convert.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to leverage social media listening tools, you can also try conversing with your customer-facing teams (such as sales, support, and research teams).
These proactive interactions help you understand the topics and doubts your customers often bring up.
For example, Tailor Brands, a company specializing in branding and design solutions, uses data and analytics from these teams to optimize its content performance.
From there, they apply data to create detailed customer personas, which guide their content strategies. This approach allows them to tailor their messaging and content to the specific needs, pain points, and aspirations of their target audience.
Using this data-driven approach, Tailor Brands was able to gain 30 million customers. So, when in doubt, take a data-backed approach.
2. Use lead scoring models to know which ICPs to target
Lead scoring models basically give you more contextual insights about your ideal customer profile (ICP) and tell you which leads are likely to convert based on the way they interact with your brand.
Brands like Breadcrumbs, which specialize in lead-scoring models, use a point system to identify which leads are ready to convert and which ones aren’t (they also have a free Co-pilot tool on their website, which you can leverage).
These lead scoring models also help you analyze patterns among your most converting customers and tell you which channels they prefer to communicate on.
Based on this, you can personalize your content marketing campaigns and/or double down on using channels where your leads come from.
You can also use lead scoring models to segment your leads to send them relevant content based on where they are in their journey.
For example, you can send hot leads bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content, such as case studies. Warm leads will get middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) content, such as ebooks. For cold leads, send them top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content, such as blog posts.
3. Use A/B tests to improve content performance
To truly get a grasp on your content marketing metrics, A/B tests are crucial.
With the help of A/B tests, you can glean insights into how different aspects of content and design perform. For example, you can consider testing:
- Content structure
- Headlines
- Use of emojis
- Tone and style
- Content length
- CTAs
- Content topics
- Colors
- Offers
- Subject lines
- Page layout
- Use of images
Real-time data collected through these tests will help you understand key aspects like session duration, conversion rate, and audience behaviors. With Google Analytics, you can also set up a custom dashboard to monitor these key metrics.
Once you’ve created different landing pages and/or URL variants for split tests, you can distribute those among your network with the help of social media, personal websites, email campaigns, SMS messages, and other content marketing efforts.
These tests will eventually tell you how different aspects of your content perform, and based on those insights (like the average time on page), you can optimize your content to ensure you get better engagement and ROI (return on investment).
If you often conduct multiple A/B tests, you might benefit from having business process automation (BPA) in place, which will help you schedule your posts and distribute your content automatically.
4. Use heat maps to understand how visitors interact with your content
Using heat maps can tell you exactly how customers engage with your content and how they analyze page layouts.
For example, experts like Carlos Silva recommend writing content with short introductions and paragraphs when you find that customers consume content in an “F-shaped pattern.”
It also helps to add context and examples to each section.
For example, consider adding your CTAs in the middle of your posts (such as where the heat map shows as red) so your readers don’t miss them and are much more likely to convert.
This is just one example. If you use heat maps for your content pieces, you might discover different insights altogether, which won’t only help you with your content structure but with the entire design layout of your website.
5. Use different platforms to understand how to personalize content
Oftentimes, when looking to improve your content performance, you may rely on the opinion of the masses or even end up assuming what your customers want.
However, a better way to go about this is to leverage the power of tools like emails. This way, you can have one-on-one conversations with your customers and find out what they really want.
Email marketing is a powerful tool that allows you to benefit from personalized interactions with your audience.
In fact, email strategists often use these tools to directly ask customers about the content they’d like to read, in which segment they’d group themselves, and if they have any suggestions for their brand.
Here is an example of what you can do from an interview with Samar Owais, a pro email strategist:
6. Use SEO tools to find your competitors’ content marketing strategy
Another way to improve your content performance is to keep a close eye on your competitors and track the topics they produce content on, the SEO strategy they have, the backlinks they’ve gotten, the companies they partner with, the keywords they target, etc.
But let’s be real. It’s unrealistic to keep track of all your competitors (or even know who all your direct and indirect competitors are), and that’s where content marketing tools like Ahrefs and Semrush come into play.
With the help of these tools, you can unlock detailed reports about your content gaps, backlink gaps, and content opportunities and see what kind of content pieces worked well for your competitors, why, and how to replicate them.
This includes insights into their business objectives and business goals, helping you to further strategize.
7. Use CRM tools to find content ideas and customer interaction patterns
Finally, use data to your own advantage and improve your content performance by using CRM (customer relationship management) tools. These tools record thousands upon thousands of customer interactions and will help you:
- Segment your audiences into different groups
- Personalize your content marketing campaigns
- Create interaction patterns, which can assist with content ideation and improving your performance
- Track content performance
- Map your customer journey
- Understand your audience better
- Create different customer personas (that you might not be aware of)
- Manage your content calendar
- Get customer feedback
- Distribute your content
These are just some of the pointers, but CRM tools are a goldmine of analytics, and if you take your time to delve into your own data, it’ll surely bring you impressive results.
Note: Add legal notices to your company’s blog
While adding legal notices to your company blog may not improve your content performance, it’ll help you build credibility and trust with your audience, especially if you’re advocating for certain things.
For example, you might make recommendations about solutions or give advice on finances, laws, or medical issues. But if you make the wrong recommendations, even unknowingly, it could affect you, which is why legal notices are here to save the day.
Here’s an example of a legal notice on PandaDoc’s blog:
You can avoid the hassle of writing complex legal jargon using a free terms and conditions generator to create legal disclaimers for your company’s blog.
Improve your content creation process with Planable
If you’re using data and insights to create fresh content for your website, you have a heavy-lifting task on your hands, which is exactly why you shouldn’t do it alone. Tools like Planable can be a game-changer.
With Planable, you can create content, review and edit it, approve it, and publish it in the most engaging and interactive manner. It basically helps you organize content creation from end-to-end touchpoints (and boosts your organic traffic).
You can collaborate with all your team members on Planable, approve posts and see what they’d look once they’re live, and get feedback from your team.
If you want to learn more about Planable, you can try it out for free.
