Data has been central to marketing strategies in the last few years with good reason. Data can provide accuracy, security, and personalization to help achieve marketing goals more effectively and efficiently for better ROI. However, it’s easy to forget when we talk about data that we’re also often talking about the customer – a person.
The customer as the central puzzle piece
In order to run successful data-driven strategies, brands need to have a detailed understanding of the users they’re targeting their products and content at. That’s why first-party data is extremely important.
The information that customers provide to marketers represents the relationship and experience they have with your brand and your products in a very accurate, detailed and personal way.
With the phasing out of third-party cookies and stricter regulations around personal data privacy, first-party data has become even more important. Therefore, the more sources of first-party data marketers have available, the better for strategy.
The question is how to use this data to create better brand experiences for customers to keep them engaged and increase sales. Here’s when data-driven content comes into play.
Organizing your content
Creating brand experiences from scratch is unnecessary if you already have information from past interactions with your customers. In the words of Exchange Wire, “there’s no better predictor of future customer actions than past customer actions.”
The best thing you can do is leverage your existing content and organize it to build better brand experiences with your customers.
However, measuring content performance has always been complicated when compared to, for example, advertising campaigns. How can you organize and evaluate content performance? One word: metadata.
“Content metadata is all the descriptions or attributes of the content itself, whether a webpage, image, product listing, video, audio, or other pieces of content that are stored in centralized repositories within these enterprise solutions.”
Michael Shearer via Claravine
The goal of content metadata is to describe and organize your content so you can use it to analyze its messages and performance and, later, create content strategies and personalized brand experiences.
Some of the attributes you can include in your content are:
- Client
- Buying stage
- Content type
- Media format
- File size
- Language
- GEO
- Industry
- Vertical
- Product line or brand
- Category
- Tags
- Publication and expiration date
- SEO keywords
The attributes can be quite detailed and exhaustive. The more complete and intricate your descriptions are, the more precisely you will be able to target your audience to offer them a more personalized experience.
For instance, you can target users that are in a specific buying stage in order to offer them relevant content to push them to the conversion. Such tailored user experiences are already commonplace, and customers expect to experience personalized offers or brand messages.
How to create data-driven user experiences
Create a buyer persona
You need to build a customer profile to identify your users, to describe them and understand what their motives and goals are. That’s why first-party data is crucial. It’s the primary source for creating precise and customizable user experiences.
Use content metadata to analyze your content
- Map your content inventory in order to find coverage gaps. This means points in your users’ journeys that your content is not currently supporting. A robust analysis is vital to build a base for your future content strategies.
- Analyze your content performance. This will help you identify trends and generate insights about which elements are the most impactful in your users’ brand experience.
- Identify which content can be “recycled.” Content creation can be very time-consuming, so clarifying which assets can be used again can help you save time to invest resources in other important projects.
Use the extracted information to target customers via data-driven content
The last step involves creating new data-driven content that will meet your users’ needs. You can do that by covering those gaps your content is not supporting but which are important steps in your customer’s journey. Alternatively, repurpose existing content.
A mix of the right keywords and relevant content will allow you to target your customers at the right moment and in the right places, improving your brand experience as well as your conversion rate.
This is not a simple process. However, using data-driven content can be highly rewarding and will help take your brand experience to the next level.
What is content metadata useful for?
Metadata allows you to describe and organize your content so you can use it afterwards to measure its performance and extract insights.
How can I build brand experiences with data-driven content?
First you need to create a buyer profile of your users. Then you should analyze the performance of your content in order to find what’s missing and what can be improved. Finally, you can target your audience and create better brand experiences for them.
