How to Use Analytics to Help Build Content for the Next Month
Content is pretty magical. When used properly, it can help you grow brand awareness, engage with your target audience, bring in new customers, and so much more. There are tons of places you can share your content, too, from social media platforms to blogging sites to your own website.
When it comes to creating content, how do you know what to make? A helpful practice is to turn to your analytics. The data surrounding your existing content can show you what works and what doesn’t, and help you create more strategic, effective content for the future
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How to Use Analytics to Help Build Content for the Next Month
Understand your goals
Before your start creating content for next month, it’s important to understand what your goals are. Do you want to grow your following and help people get to know your brand? Do you want to drive people to your website? Do you want people to subscribe to your emails? Decide what your content goals are based on what your overall marketing and company goals are.
Then, consider which Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, you need to track to understand whether or not you’re reaching your goals. For example, if your goal is to grow brand awareness, you might look to social media stats like reach, impressions, and follower growth.
Once you know your goals and KPIs, you can start to plan content that will help you reach your goals. A great step in doing this is to look back at the analytics of your existing content. Which posts are performing well based on your KPIs? What is it about these posts that are making them perform well? Use this data to inform your content creation strategy for next month.
Look at Engagement
A great way to determine what kind of content you should create is by looking at the engagement rates of your previous posts. When your audience likes, comments on or shares a post, it’s usually a good indicator that they found the post to be valuable.
When looking at the posts with high engagement rates, what stands out? Is there a specific topic that your audience seems to love? Is a certain type of content performing best, such as videos or infographics? Does a specific Call to Action, or CTA, seem to be most effective in getting your audience to interact? Take note of the topic, type, and other elements of these high-performing posts, then create content with these same elements. Basing your content creation strategy on your analytics will help you create content that resonates with your audience.
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Consider the Platform
In addition to looking at which posts are performing best overall, pay attention to which posts are doing best on each platform – they may not be the same. For example, your post on LinkedIn that shares a specific blog post may be doing a better job at getting people to click through to the blog post than your Instagram post that directs your followers to the link in your bio. Alternatively, your funny video may be getting higher levels of engagement on Instagram than it is on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has a more “professional” tone, Facebook and Twitter are great for a mix of informative and entertaining content, and Instagram and Pinterest are highly visual platforms. Often times, different post topics and types perform better or worse based on the platform where they’re shared. Pay attention to which posts are doing well on each platform to help you decide what to post in the future.
Additionally, it can be helpful to use Google Analytics to determine which social media platforms are driving the most people to your website. If increasing website traffic is your goal, this can help you decide which platforms you may want to focus on the most.
Understand Your Audience Demographics
Where does your audience live? How old are they? What are their job titles? What are their hobbies? Understanding demographic information about your audience can help you determine what content to create. For example, if your audience is mostly located in Florida, is content about icy winters going to resonate with them?
When planning your content, think about your audience and what information is going to be most helpful to them, and what stories are going to be most entertaining to them. Knowing your audience can help you plan and create content that resonates with them and will lead to greater engagement.
Analyze Search Data
How many times have you searched on Google to find the answer to a question or more information on a specific topic? I’m guessing a lot. Plenty of other people do this too, which is great news for you as a business owner. When you use Google Search Console, you can see what search terms people are using to find and click through to your website. If you have a search bar on your website, that’s another great place to look at analytics and see what your visitors are interested in finding. Both of these give you a clearer understanding of your audience’s pain points, topics of interest, and more. You can then use this information when creating content for next month.
For example, let’s say your company is in the health and wellness space. You look into your analytics and see that a lot of people are searching for “benefits of self-care.” This tells you that knowing the benefits of self-care is important to people and may be a topic worth creating content about. You could start by creating a blog post that discusses the benefits of self-care, then break that down into multiple social media posts. You could even record a video of yourself talking about the benefits of self-care. Now, you have a variety of content for next month that addresses a topic you know your audience cares about.
Looking at your analytics is a great way to see what works and what doesn’t. Then, you can do more of what works. Don’t have time to create your own content? Analyzing data not really your thing? Not a problem! At Healthy Dash of Social, our team is here to help with all things digital marketing, from content creation to account growth to social media management and more. Visit our services page to learn more and book a call with us.
