Improve Your Marketing with the Help of Content Analytics
Any business that constantly produces content shouldn’t act based on assumptions that can’t be backed by data or analytics. Guessing or assuming what your audience wants to read or how they will react is likely to have poor results.
Content analytics allow publishers and marketers to identify trends and opportunities that help them understand their audience. With this, data-driven decisions can lead to increased engagement.
Identifying Trends
The question you need to answer is whether you can recognize trends in your content that can help you reach your goals.
There is a lot of data nowadays that can be analysed, but can quickly become overwhelming. Below are some examples of how to approach content analytics.
Top Stories
Know what articles have the highest traffic. There will usually be topics that generate the best results that your audience is most interested in. Similarly, certain authors generate better content than others.
Elements like “Recommended Articles” at the bottom of posts contribute to people staying on your website longer and will give you an idea of the readers’ interest in certain topics.
Content trends in this context go beyond the content itself. It’s not solely based off the virality of the topic, but everything else that helps the virality of an article.
Identifying these trends is critical to understand what your audience wants to read, what type of articles let you achieve your goals and who the best person to write them is.
Top Distribution Channels
If analytics tell you that most of your shares are taking place on messaging apps such as Telegram or WhatsApp, this represents a good opportunity to create a Telegram group with your audience to distribute content directly to them.
If your posts on Facebook get to gain a lot of attention, generating traffic and bringing in new users, you can start automating your posts to reach a larger audience at the best times.
Top Geo-Locations
Looking at data analytics, you might find that posts are more popular in countries you might not expect. This can be extremely helpful for your strategy.
Use Google Analytics to see where most of your visits are coming from. Even more so, you should identify in what parts of the world your content is being shared.
Best Times to Post
When do your posts normally get the most attention?
This is an established metric that most publishers care to look at in order to strategically plan the distribution of their content. Moreover, knowing the best hours for publishing can also help when distributing stories with the help of journalists and media outlets.
Having an accurate timing schedule for when to reach your audience allows you to automate the distribution of your posts as well.
