Using Data and Research for Your Content Marketing Strategy

^Content marketing in the form of research directly from your company can highlight the real benefits of your product or service as well as address the needs and pain points of your target audience.

You can create original research for your company by talking to your customers and your target market. If you want your original research to be strong and have the ability to turn prospects into customers, there are a few things you need to consider.

Choosing the Topic

Before you start creating your research-based content for your brand, you need to choose the topic and devise a clear goal you want to achieve. Obviously, the main goal of your research is to provide informative insights to your target audience. However, you also want to have a clear picture what you want to discover through the research or survey and how you want to use that information. For example, do you want to find common challenges your target audience faces or do you want to see the results they’re getting from your product?

You want to avoid overwhelming people by asking too many questions. By choosing a topic with a clearly defined aim, you can keep the questions focused and to the point. As a result, the content you create from your research will be more focused as well.

Collecting Information

Next, you need to decide how to collect information for your research and who you’ll collect it from. You can start with the list of your customers and your email list. Further, find a way to collect the information that is convenient and non-invasive for them.

One alternative is to create an email survey. An email campaign is effective when you have a particular group of people that you want to survey. For example, if you want to ask your customers who purchased a particular product, with an email marketing service you can easily categorize your email list and filter the responses. In order to get data from a broad range of people, you can create an online survey for your website.

At the same time don’t forget that you might also have valuable information from your website analytics or data from your live customer support conversations.

Create a Story around Your Data

As you create your content based on data, keep in mind that people aren’t really interested in reading data. Instead of just providing data and numbers, add a compelling story that keeps readers engaged. The addition of a story will help your audience connect the dots with the information and allow them to better understand how they can benefit from your findings as well. A great way to create a story around the data is with case studies.

A case study can highlight the challenges of one of your customers and shows proven results of how your product or service helped them solve that problem.