Data is the backbone of effective digital marketing, and content is not just king; it is the entire royal family. When you combine both, you get one of the most formidable and effective marketing strategies ever.
Businesses worldwide, especially SaaS businesses, have discovered that smart, measurable content marketing is the key to achieving their business goals. Hence, you would realize that the businesses who have cracked the content writing code are not the ones that are still groping about in the dark.
Instead, they have solid data backing their content marketing decisions; hence, they have seen a remarkable improvement in the effectiveness of their strategies. But, of course, you could do the same too.
How can you get started, though? Below, we highlight how qualitative and quantitative data can improve our marketing strategy. We’ll start with the basics first.
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What is a SaaS content marketing strategy?
SaaS content marketing is a unique content writing format that involves writing about how people can solve their problems through a given software. It helps strengthen your SaaS brand by creating awareness, driving consideration.
Great SaaS content marketing establishes your brand as a thought leader and offers your audience resources to help them navigate your product and solve their problems. It also helps to generate leads and ultimately convert them to customers.
An effective SaaS content marketing strategy takes an indirect approach to help you reach new customers. While some of your other marketing approaches might be more sales-focused and direct, content marketing cushions your brand message in helpful content that they are likely to seek out by themselves.
It positions your brand to become the obvious choice in the customers’ minds when they eventually make a buying decision.
Increasing the bottom line through content marketing and analytics
Like the other forms of marketing, the ultimate reason for content marketing is to increase the bottom line. But, of course, because content marketing takes an indirect route, you cannot expect conversion within a short period.
However, by using data-driven content marketing, attaining the following marketing goals will become more achievable than ever. The following are the main marketing goals for SaaS and other businesses:
- Creating brand awareness
- Educating your target audience
- Building brand credibility and thought leadership
- Generating leads
So, you do not need to wonder to determine that you are indeed on your way to meeting your goals. You can also stop racking your brain over calculating the time needed to convert the people who interact with your page? This is where analytics comes in.
When you use analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Semrush, Moz, and Kissmetrics, you can easily track your marketing goals. For example, it is easier for you to know if your audience is engaging with your content or if your content is engaging enough to make them take the required action.
Analytics tools have goal tracking sections that help you define your goals and identify what you need to do to achieve such goals.
The best part is that it is much easier to create a structure around your content marketing with the proper tracking process and goals. Then, you can simply plan, create, measure, optimize and repeat.
This is much more advisable than wondering every day what you should do with the content that you create.
How can analytics improve your content marketing?
Every day, internet users generate vast amounts of data. With every click, swipe, and scroll, they make buying decisions and brand choices. You can ensure that your brand takes advantage of this data generated to improve your service offering.
Analytics help you improve your content marketing in different ways. We explore these ways below.
1. Understand your target audience
One of the first steps you need to take before you undergo any marketing endeavor is understanding your target audience. Analytics helps you to know who exactly is reading your content and helps you optimize for them.
With analytics, you can get insight into your audience’s mind. It helps you answer questions like:
- What are their likes and dislikes?
- How do they feel about your content?
- What are their patterns?
Several metrics exist to help you figure this out. These include time spent on a page, bounce rates, amount of traffic spent on your website, etc.
When you start to analyze the data generated by people who have visited your site, you can figure out what demographic resonates with your content. Then, if you feel like you should target your content towards another set of people, you can optimize further to attract them.
Analytics opens up a whole new world for you and takes the uncertainty off identifying your target audience. You can get access to specific information such as your audience’s age, profession, location, pain points, etc.
2. Improve your conversion rate
Data from the content you put out can help you determine what sort of content helps you convert the audience. It does this by monitoring customer visits, finding out how long they stay within the purchasing cycle and when they convert.
This comes in very handy to uncover important audience behaviors. With this information, you can do several things, from improving the format of your website to content format.
You could also use this information to tweak your overall content to improve your conversion process. One of the best parts of analytics is that it is ongoing. You can monitor activities and improve accordingly.
3. Increase retention rate
What’s better than conversion? It is definitely retention. Gaining a returning customer reduces the cost of your marketing by a considerable amount. For years, content marketing has been a sure way of retaining customers.
However, having the right data improves this process by miles. Analytics helps you determine what kind of content helps you get a customer to make a repeat buying decision.
You can use analytics to segment your customers into one-time and repeat customer segments. You can then work on creating more of the type of content that helps you get faithful customers.
Analytics can also help you collate key metrics such as click-through rates, returning customers on the site, time spent on pages, etc. This helps give insight into the customer’s mindsets and their reason for returning or not returning.
You might find that your content only speaks to people who already understand what your product does and want to go deeper. With this knowledge, you can create content that speaks more to their pain points.
4. Improve visibility
One of the first things that content marketing does for your brand is improving your target audience’s visibility. When done right, it can also establish you as a thought leader within the space that your brand and product exist.
Imagine being able to increase the visibility of your brand exponentially more than you already have. That’s a possibility that analytics gives you when combined with content marketing.
With deductions made from the right data, you can learn how to expose your content to a larger audience than you could without analytics.
Analytics helps you do several things, such as analyze competitor content and use that information to boost your own marketing efforts. You could also improve Search Engine Optimization when you have the right kind of data.
With analytics, you can predict where to place your content to get the proper visibility, what links will perform better, and what content will resonate with a more significant part of your audience.
5. Measure the impact of decisions
Most importantly, analytics helps you measure the impact of the decisions you make to make better ones in the future. For example, if your website has a slow site speed, analytics helps you find out the impact on your audience.
With that information, you can go back and optimize your site speed. This applies to the different content marketing decisions that you make.
For instance, if you created a long, boring piece of content and analytics flags it as less engaging, you can improve the quality of content on that page.
The fact that you can measure the impact of every content marketing decision you make takes guessing out of the game. It also helps you focus on what works and drop what does not for you.
If you’re reporting to a superior, it also helps you back your decisions with facts. You can walk into a meeting and propose a strategy that you know will work. You would agree that this makes content marketing much more effortless.
In conclusion
Analytics is as important to content marketing as the content it measures itself. Many businesses are realizing this and are optimizing their content marketing strategies to make room for analytics. As such, they have seen exponential differences in their marketing results.
The days of churning out content without any form of data-backed information are far behind us. Now, the only formula that will move the needle substantially will be combining the creativity of great content with data.
You, too, can improve your SaaS content marketing today by adopting analytics along with your creative content and start seeing a considerable difference in your results.