One of the biggest pain points today is finding relevant data. But there’s a possibility you’re leaving unsourced data on the table – data specifically around your products, services, and content, which could provide beneficial insights. If you’re planning to stay competitive as the content marketing space becomes even more saturated, then it’s time to closely start examining the ways you’re mining data, and how to use it more strategically.

The good news is there’s already a resource available to you that can provide you with greater insights around your content: your customers. Your customers are your best source to receive valuable, high-level data points about the effectiveness of your content. Read on to find out how customers can help you create data-driven content through resources already available to you. 

The Customer Journey

A simple place to start is ‘customer usage’. Mining what products and features your existing customers are already using through their customer journey can provide you insights into not just what products are performing well, but why. 

For example, you can examine which products your customers are most excited about, and potentially where the drop-off is for underperforming products. Perhaps it’s a product customers no longer think is relevant, or it’s a product they feel has too many options, in turn leaving them feeling overburdened. By figuring out the exact reason for the drop-offs, you’ll be able to develop new ways to upsell, keep the customer moving through their journey, and highlight features on products they potentially haven’t considered. Additionally, identifying these pain points gives you the opportunity to create new content that connects the customer to your products, such as helpful tips or blog posts highlighting new features. 

The Power of Polls

Polling customers may seem like an obvious move, but it’s certainly an underutilized tool in an organization’s content marketing arsenal. Polling customers via social media, your website, or other marketing platforms can provide detailed insight into what they want and when they want it. There are dozens of marketing platforms that you can utilize to poll your customers, depending on which business space you occupy. 

If you are a customer-facing brand, for example, a simple Instagram poll might do wonders for your next product rollout or marketing campaign. If you are a B2B business, a LinkedIn survey or a Twitter poll might be more efficient at capturing customer sentiments as they’re happening.

Regardless of your approach, getting started with polling your customers is a valuable way for your customers to speak to you directly about what is working within your brand, and what isn’t. 

Capitalizing on Your Search Keywords 

Google is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to SEO, keywords, and where your company ranks in searches. However, there’s a way to use it to your advantage that goes beyond general SEO. 

To start, you should ask yourself a few key questions about keywords relevant to your brand. If you were to search the keywords often used to describe your company, where do you fall on the list of results? Is there an opportunity to expand on those keywords directly on your site, or when Google crawls potential blog posts or other content? And if you pay particular attention to the “related search” at the bottom, you can gain insight into what customers are searching for in the same general area, and capitalize on that by providing even more context with your content. 

By honing in on the “related search” options, you can target the concepts and ideas customers are searching for within your market, and use this knowledge to create more targeted content for your audience. 

Metadata for Existing Content

The metadata around the content your team has already produced is another extremely useful place to measure what your customers are actively responding to. Beyond measuring the pieces that do well, it’s important to find out the why behind that success. Whether it’s a social media post, customer case study, blog post or white paper, it’s essential to find out which types of content perform well, and with which customers. 

For example, you can get a deeper understanding by measuring which pieces perform well against each other, which headlines and authors perform the best, and what the well-performing assets have in common with each other. Which pieces are the ones customers reach the end of? Which ones hold customer attention for longer (all these findings can be seen on the Knotch dashboard)? Asking these questions will help you to develop pitch-perfect content moving forward.

The Future of Content Marketing Data

Using your customer activity to your advantage as you continue to shape content to fit their needs is as beneficial to you as it is to them. By creating more personalized content to suit your customers, you’ll keep them engaged with your products and services, and continue to provide them with the content they’re looking for while driving your company’s business goals. 

As you examine the tools you’re using to source customer data and use it to drive additional content campaigns, it’s important to focus on the ones that help you save time, energy, and money so that your efforts provide you results in real-time. 

Knotch’s Content Intelligence platform can help you capture feedback, visualize the user journey, identify pertinent keywords in your high-performing content, examine metadata, and more – all in one, simple-to-use place. To further your content journey, request a demo here.