Fundamentals of Analytics

The fundamentals of content marketing analytics provide an effective framework to follow.

Good writing alone can’t make a content marketing strategy succeed. It’s imperative for businesses to work harder than ever if they wish to maintain an edge over the competition.

Content marketing analytics is a vital tool that can help inform businesses on the how and why of their content’s performance. If a business follows the fundamentals of analytics, it will be able to turn its data into actionable insights.

Know Customer Trends and Preference

Analytics are perfect for providing data-driven insight into consumers. If a brand wants to produce content that resonates with a target audience, then it needs to make use of analytics.

By using analytics, a business can answer questions like:

What products are selling best?
Which ads are generating conversions?
What message best attracts new leads?

When a business understands the preferences of its target audience and can predict trends, then it can adapt its content marketing strategy to be more effective.

Understand Product Development Trends

Analytics can study the past and present, as well as help inform decisions on future trends. By using data from analytics, a business can understand what product features its consumers want. From there, the business can take this insight to improve its products and better appeal to current customers, and also attract new consumers.

Understand What You Want to Measure

There are many different metrics a business can use to measure the effectiveness of its marketing campaign. A business needs to be aware of the problem it is trying to solve or the insight it’s trying to gain in order to determine which metric it should analyze and gather data on.

The key is to measure smart. The business needs to ensure that any metrics it decides on are goal-oriented. There needs to be a purpose behind marketing activities, which then informs which metric to use to see how well the actions are performing (some take a long time to become measurable).

Establish a Benchmark

Every business will have different measurables and define success uniquely. To meet goals (within a defined budget) and determine if they’re being met, an appropriate benchmark must be established. This will affect the type of data and metrics to be monitored.

A few of the most common benchmarks businesses use include:

Brand awareness
Conversion rates
Lead generation
Engagement
Customer retention
Sales
Unique pageviews
Bounce rate

Not every benchmark will be the right one to choose for a given situation. The business will need to decide the overall objective it is trying to achieve and then select a benchmark that will accurately measure how effective the campaign is.

Assess Your Current Capabilities

It is imperative that a business have a firm understanding of its weak points. By knowing what its weak points are, a business can then proceed to strengthen these oversights.

For example, let’s say a brand discovers that its highest customer engagement and lead generation comes from social media posts. However, it finds that it is inconsistent in its posting schedule to the social media platform. The business could then infer it needs to create a content calendar for social media.

Deploy a Marketing Analytics Tool

A marketing analytics tool should help give a holistic view of how successful or poorly performing certain campaigns are in real-time. Without data from an analytics tool, a business won’t know what it’s doing well, what problems it has, and what areas it needs to focus efforts on in the future.

There are numerous marketing analytics tools available. Nearly all of them gather data from a brand’s marketing channels and report on them.

A few examples of the different marketing analytics tools out there are:

Google Analytics
Optimizely
SEMrush/AHREFS
TubeBuddy
Data Studio

Some tools are free, such as Google Analytics, whereas many others require a monthly subscription. Also, each tool also often has a specialization. For example, Google Analytics is best for following website performance, whereas BuzzSumo is best at analyzing social media and trending topics on major social media platforms.

Always Start With the Fundamentals of Analytics

Analytics fundamentals are the foundation and starting point for any content marketing strategy. They give you an idea of where and how to start gathering and measuring data. If a business wants to be able to make informed decisions on their content marketing, then analytics is an essential factor.

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