Data Driven Content Marketing – iAcquire Meetup

Tonight (March 20th) Distilled NYC is co-hosting a meetup in conjunction with iAcquire, another search agency here in New York City. The topic is Content Marketing vs Content Strategy.

My talk is on data driven content marketing. We believe that in order to know what content to create, you need to first know:

  • What content you have;
  • How that content is performing
  • What content your competitors have
  • How their content is performing

I will post the slidedeck this evening once the event has finished and I get back to my computer, but I built out a spreadsheet to give away to everyone. I figure I’ll give it away here and explain how to use both for the meetup goers as well as for all of you who read this post on its own.

Download the spreadsheet here.

Data-Driven Content Auditing

The first step before you do any work is to figure out what your goals are from the campaign. Why are you creating content and how are you going to get buy-in, and therefore budget, to create it once you have figured out what you need? Lucky for you I presented on this at SearchFest in February –

Your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) could be many things, including:

  • Links
  • Traffic
  • Leads
  • ??

Settling on what you will be measured on first is the key to a successful campaign, or future successful campaigns as you learn and do better campaigns each time.

Pull Data

Once you have your goals in mind, you know what kind of data you need to gather. I always recommend gathering:

  • URLs
  • Content type or category (ie “Infographic” or “Marketing”). This can give insight into the kinds of content they create that you do not, and if it works for them.
  • SEOmoz Metrics for the site/page (Domain Authority, Page Authority, possibly Trust)
  • Number of linking root domains
  • Social Metrics (Twitter, FB, Google+, etc)
  • Traffic (for your own content) from Analytics

This data will be gathered from a multitude of places, including but not limited to:

Graph and Action

To keep all the data in one place, I’ve provided a spreadsheet here that you can download and use to audit up to 3 competitors and their types of content. Also, please customize it as you need (as it is impossible to meet everyone’s needs) and share with the class what you have done if you think it will be useful.

Here is a preview of the sheet:

excel-sheet

 

You’ll be given some charts as well to help you see visually what is working as well:

category-or-type-graph


You can download the spreadsheet here.

Here is my presentation from the meetup:

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