What would happen to your marketing ROI if you always knew the right content to create for your target audience? Predictive analytics provides valuable insights for many applications, and content is no exception. Predictive content uses a data-driven approach to identify popular content trends, optimize the creation process, and reach your customers in ways that resonate the most.
How Predictive Content Adds Value to Your Marketing Efforts
Better Market Segmentation
Many companies use a broadly-defined persona for market segmentation, but these profiles may miss the mark on the subtle differences dividing your audience. Predictive content insights let you narrow your focus on each type of customer, so you’re speaking to them in the most relevant way possible. Each piece of content you create should be targeted at a specific segment. As a result, while not every piece of content will appeal across all your segments, it will be true that all segments will find something valuable.
Effective Content Creation
You shouldn’t waste your resources on content that is not likely to perform well for your audience. It’s easy to fall into the trap of creating higher quantities of content, rather than discovering what works best for your visitors. When you use predictive data as the foundation of your content creation, you boost your overall quality and offer a more engaging experience for potential customers. Convince and Convert found this approach improved website traffic while cutting content production down by 77 percent.
Increased Revenue
Smart content targeting and recommendations increase opportunities for upsells, cross-sells, larger carts, and repeat buyers. Each customer touchpoint has relevant offers and information designed to boost conversions. The optimization provided by predictive content also plays a part in indirectly growing overall revenue.
How to Implement Predictive Content in Your Organization
Knowing that predictive content has value for your business is one thing, but actually implementing it is another. These strategies give you a solid starting point for seeing the benefits of this content marketing innovation first-hand.
Trending Content Tools
Many factors influence content popularity, from the time of year to your competitor’s inbound marketing tactics. Trending content tools such as Buzz Sumo show you high engagement content in your market sector. You remove the guesswork out of publishing pieces capable of making a real impact. The content workflow speeds up, which is useful for agile development methodologies.
Data-Driven Content Ideation
Generating enough ideas for your content marketing campaigns can be difficult. You don’t want to fall into the trap of repeating yourself, but working on new content ideas is difficult when they aren’t proven choices. Use Google Trends or a similar application to discover topics that your audience wants to hear about. You can be the first out of the gate when it comes to an up-and-coming trend, positioning your organization as a thought leader in the industry. You can also gain insight into new products your audience may be interested in.
Testing the Audience
Every audience is unique, so you also need to pay close attention to the way your visitors react to the content. A piece that goes viral for your competitors may fall flat with you due to subtle differences in your ideal customer segments. You have many elements to test, such as the length of the post, its structure, the way you monetize the piece, and the pictures or videos used to accompany the text.
Split testing content goes beyond looking at the pieces with the most page views. Examine the likes and shares on social networks, the overall bounce rate, the on-page comments, leads generated, conversion rates, and the off-site links pointing back to the content. Once you build up enough performance data, you can hone in on the attributes that work best, as well as understand the factors that influence these numbers.
Predictive content lets you gain much-needed visibility into the digital content that works best for your audience. Whether you want to find the best articles for lead generation or a guide optimized for turning lookers into buyers, predictive innovations bring you the insight you need to succeed.
How The Sterling Woods Group Can Help
We work with clients to build a content strategy that leverages the power of analytics. Want a free 30-minute consultation? Contact us at info@sterlingwoodsgroup.com.
About the Author, Rob Ristagno
Rob Ristagno is the founder of The Sterling Woods Group and partners with companies to drive rapid digital revenue growth. Prior to creating Sterling Woods, Rob served as a senior executive for several niche media and e-commerce companies. Rob started his career as a consultant at McKinsey and holds degrees from the Harvard Business School and Dartmouth College. He has taught Product Strategy at Boston College.
