Improve Your Content Marketing with Digital Analytics: 3 Ways to Involve the Wordsmiths in Your Team

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Wonder how to embed digital analytics in your content marketing strategy? Involve your team's wordsmiths in the analytics workflow! As writers crack their brains to come up with the best copies for your socials, publications for your website, catchy phrases for your EDM—they must have insights on which copies made the audiences click, stick, and pick too!

 The same way you need to engage your designers in digital analytics to amp their artistry, here are insights and analytics that you can share with your content makers and why:

1. Social Media Trends

Which content clicked? Aside from the graphics, ads have captions and different themes. We are aware of the importance of tailor-fitting copies based on audiences, geography, and campaign phase; as analysts, we see the trends. But were your writers aware which copies they penned for decision influencers worked? Is it the one with humour, the one containing novelty, or the one on thought leadership?

Adobe Express identifies these current social media trends, you may use some to include in your engagement sessions. There’s more to your brand and comms team than word count. Highlight to your team’s wordsmiths the impact of their work and how to stay ahead of the competition. 

Data that you can share with them includes:

1. Messaging or theme with the highest CTR per audience- is it about sustainability, diversity and inclusion, brand innovations, etc?
2. Captions- which ones consistently intrigue the audiences to learn more, read more, or download your whitepaper or any offer?
3. Call-to-Action (CTA)- which CTA fits your audiences best, is it the high commitment, low commitment, or no call-to-action?

These data points may seem qualitative, but you can quantify it with numbers from your performance dashboards and Adobe Analytics.

2. Most Visited and Blogs that Convert

As you investigate your website analytics performance, do you see a pattern whether adding more text links or buttons on the blog site helps to make it sticky for the audiences? What topics interest your users most, is it educational, inspirational, promotional, newsworthy, or entertaining?

Below are three simple steps to investigate your blog publications impact and engage your content team:

1. Ask a copy of your team’s content calendar with all blog URLs
2. Create a segment of all these URLs in your Adobe Workspace
3. Start deep diving, here are the questions you should answer:
   • What are Top 10 articles with the highest total traffic?
   • What are Top 10 articles with highest Organic Traffic? (I recommended combining Direct and Natural Search) These findings suggest that these articles are most search engine optimised (SEO). Your writers then can brainstorm among their team on the elements that led to strong SEO performance of these articles, and use that as best practice for future articles.
   • What are Top 10 articles with the highest microconversions? (Include events such as File Downloads, Video Plays, and contact or newsletter sign up)
   • What are the Top 10 articles with has the longest average time on page?
   • Which articles brought leads for the business? And understand what do these articles have in common that convinced your customers to convert. With this, you can also help the team quantify the value of their publications.

These insights you’ve uncovered will be helpful to provide clarity on your company’s content marketing performance. You can further provide recommendations for business impact.

Example business cases you can derive from your digital analytics:

• Is there correlation between number of articles published per week and the volume of organic traffic to your website?
• Does your strong SEO performance impact your paid search performance and/or social media marketing efforts?
• Should your team increase the volume of articles published to improve SEO and organic conversions?
• Do you need to hire additional wordsmiths to support your proposed strategy?

3. Winning Email Subject and Copies

Lastly, the overworked strategy yet usually untouched analytics insights are understanding what is the winning email subject and copies that earn the audiences’ attention. Whether we like it or not, we are in the age of the attention economy. As LinkedIn explains, the world has become a lot noisier with more and more channels, marketing messages and content competing for your busy and distracted buyers’ limited attention. Getting someone’s attention is hard enough but holding on to it is even harder!

So how do you integrate your data and analytics expertise with your content team?

1. Understand which email campaign and theme received the most clicks and highest CTR? Which were the ones that didn’t and how to enhance?
2. Deep dive on the Email traffic from your website, find out which day of the week and time of the day is best to send emails to your customers. These insights are possible with the segments you can layer on top of each other on your Adobe dashboard. With this your content team will schedule your EDM campaign properly.
3. Lastly, establish connection between your Adobe Analytics and CRM tools to improve your email strategy and personalisation, and understand your email’s contribution to your customer decision and journey.

After doing these steps, it is possible to find out the sales conversions and revenue influenced by your EDM campaigns. And you can identify best practices and suggest optimisations for your team.

Example business cases you can derive from your digital analytics:

• Is there correlation between number of EDMs sent per week and the volume of direct, referred, or email traffic to your website?
• Did your EDM strategy generate any business impact such as marketing lead or sales conversion?
• Should your team increase the volume of EDMs to maintain engagement and further nurture the audiences?

These questions will remain unanswered unless you determine as part of your digital analytics expertise. Consider Adobe workspace like a mine to enrich your team and organisational goals. Constantly refine, find patterns, and transform it into actionable insights.