How often are you using your traffic data to guide your content marketing strategy? If you are like most entrepreneurs I’ve worked with, the answer is never.
When you use a data-driven approach to marketing and content creation, you’ll know with certainty that you’re creating the right content, for the right audience, at the right time.
You can use the data to learn and understand more about your customers so you can refine your content strategy to give them the type of content they prefer to keep them engaged, improve your funnels, and advance your business goals.
Understand Your Target Customer With Traffic Data
The data will show you what’s getting hits, what’s being read, and what actions are taken. This is the audience you are currently attracting. But that doesn’t mean they are your target audience.
You must first understand who you’re trying to attract. This will help you understand if you are getting the audience you targeted, if the audience is actually converting (ie., making purchases), and if you are targeting the right audience overall. Conversions are usually the best metric to look at to determine if you are attracting the right people.
Once you understand the various populations and can spike out your customers, look at the demographics for buyers so that you get to know your target customer better.
Understand How Your Customer Travels Through Your Funnels
When an average customer answers one of your calls to action, how long does it take them to move through your funnel and buy your product or service? What are the steps the average buyer takes toward making a purchase? Are there any areas where you are losing more customers than you’d expect? Any areas they are getting stuck?
This is called behavior data and it’s crucial to understanding user flow, determining where to optimize, or where you may have a problem. Look at each step through the lens of ‘do these numbers make sense for this step’. If the answer is no, you know you need to dig in and see what should be changed.
Know Where Your Customer Likes to Get Their Information
It’s likely you have some customers who like content from your blog, your email list, and your social media – they may even like all of them, but which one is most popular for distributing information to your audience? Where do they prefer to get their information?
It doesn’t mean you stop using the other places, it just means that you must be sure to use the most popular more often. I find it even more effective to take this to the next level: which traffic sources generate the most leads/sales? I then spend more of my time on those sources.
I tell this story a lot but I worked with a client who spent so much time and money on trying to get more traffic from Facebook. When we dug into her data, we found that the majority of her traffic was coming from Pinterest, a platform she was not actively working to improve.
Know When Your Customer Likes to Get Their information
The data can explain to you the information about when your customer gets their information. When are they most likely to open the email? When are they most likely to visit your site? For some people, there is no trend. But for others, there are clear days or times that outperform others.
The more you can learn about when they’re visiting your site or taking the actions you want them to take, the better you can judge when you should be publishing the content or putting out the offers.
Understand How Long (on Average) it Takes Your Readers to Act
You likely have calls to action (CTA) in your content, whether that’s in email, on your blog, or elsewhere. Do you know how long it takes them to take that action? What their path to taking that action looks like? You can then use this data to improve your funnels and get them to act faster.
What to do with all of this traffic data information?
As you look at the data, ask yourself what is working, why it’s working, and what your readers are looking at and engaging with the most. Then you want to take that knowledge and brainstorm content that you can create that’s related to what they’re liking the most. This is key to creating a content strategy you know your audience will like – that is just one way you can use metrics to grow your business.
You can expand on topics that have done well previously, narrow a subject down further, put high-performing content into different formats, and create more content upgrades that make sense and get results.