How to use data to improve your content

Having a data-driven approach to your creative & content strategy isn’t a new concept, but how can you ensure that you’re getting the most out of the data you have available to you, and how do you utilise more data that may be hidden somewhere in your organisation?

In this blog we’ll walk you through our top tips for aligning data & creative teams and show you how to feed data into every part of your creative process, in order to elevate your business.

1. Understand your audiences different motivations

The strongest audience personas speak to the different “why”s that each customer segment has, not just who they are in terms of demographics or interests. By investing in things like sentiment tracking – i.e. understanding the emotional response your content ignites and the reason for that – you’ll understand how your audience really feels, not just what they think. This is a much clearer indicator of how they will ultimately behave, and therefore what you can do to help guide them towards a purchase.

Ask yourself:

What are the different motivations that will drive your customers to convert?
How do the people with that shared motivation behave online?
What are their shared interests?
What type of media do they consume and how do they consume it?

By using data to answer these questions, you’ll create more meaningful audience personas, which will enable you to create more relevant content / creative messaging for each of them.

To be truly effective, this data & research has to go beyond surface level. That requires time, investment, and usually a whole heap of information that has to be understood and brought to life. This means once your data team has the information, they must then be able to effectively visualise their insights and tell the story the data has uncovered – without boring everyone with endless stats and statistics! We’ll come on to it, but this is why your data & creative teams need to be working closely together, so that they understand how best to communicate with each other.

2. Spot the hidden gaps

Most often people use data to identify what is working and double down on that. Whilst this absolutely should be part of the process, it’s also a sure fire way to stifle creativity. How often have we heard brands stick to what they know because, well, that’s what’s working? There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but eventually what works now will stop working and that’s when you need to be ready to adapt.

There’s a few different ways to use data to spot the hidden gaps:

Work out who your content isn’t reaching. Is there an important customer segment that just isn’t engaging as much as the others? If so, use your competitor analysis and focus groups to research the kind of content they are engaging with and find a way to authentically add that to your content strategy. Better yet, use this new insight to try and find a gap or a new angle that will not only reach those customers, but also make your brand stand out.
Identify your customers’ pain points. If you’ve created data driven audience personas based on motivations & conducted detailed competitor analysis, then you’ll understand exactly what the shared pain points of all customers in your industry are, as well as the unique pain points for different customer segments. Once you know what these are, you can use them to create content that addresses the issues and helps guide the audience whilst educating them on your products or service.
Be open to niche applications. Sometimes customers will use your products or services in ways that you wouldn’t expect. Just look at the humble SMS message – most phone companies thought this would be a niche and rarely used feature when it was first introduced, and yet it quickly gained popularity once in the hands of consumers.

The niches that your data reveals might not be your primary or largest audience, but if they are engaged and your product solves their issue then they could become incredibly loyal. For example, we worked with a supplement brand who focused on the health & fitness space. Their audience was predominantly women in their 20s & 30s but then we started to notice an increase in purchases from women in their 40s & 50s. By researching and digging into the data, we found that these women had discovered the supplement as a way to alleviate perimenopause symptoms. So, we leaned into this previously hidden audience and started to create more content around managing perimenopause, which in just 4 months led to a 67% uplift in sales.

3. Trend spotting

Sometimes the “hidden gaps” have been there all along, but other times they emerge as part of a new trend. The challenge with trends is that if you’re not paying close enough attention, then by the time they hit their surge, it’s already too late to gain a competitive advantage (or at least, it’s much more difficult to do so). You need to be consistently where your audience is, analysing what they’re saying, how they’re responding to things and what’s happening across different platforms. You also need to be keeping an eye on what’s bubbling under the surface and what’s simultaneously happening in broader culture.

One way to do this is to regularly create a list of potential emerging trends (before they take off), using social listening tools & predictive analysis (as well as things like Google trends, your 1st party data, market reports etc.), and brainstorm ideas for these. Not only is this a great creative thinking exercise, it also means you’ll be ready to capitalise the moment a new trend starts to show signs of momentum, whilst your competitors are still yet to spot what’s happening.

If your brand operates internationally, don’t forget to do this on a local level and look for market nuances.

4. Bring your data & creative teams together

The best and simplest way to use data to improve your content is by fostering an environment where data and creative teams regularly interact, share what they’re doing, teach each other their processes and work to build great content together. And we don’t just mean sharing thoughts in the weekly updates meeting. They need to be fully aligned behind the same goal, understanding the role they play and the role their counterparts in other teams play. Only when truly engaged and fully connected as part of one larger team, will they naturally start to share ideas and insights together.

This goes hand in hand with investing in creative analysis tools that everyone has access to, and teaching everyone how to use them properly. Performance metrics are a good start when it comes to creative analysis, but they will only tell you how your creative assets/content performed. They won’t be able to tell you why it performed that way. By investing in things like eye tracking technology, heatmaps, sentiment tracking and focus groups, you’ll start to uncover the answers to why certain creatives & messaging out performs others, and will allow those learnings to be passed from different creative ideas to another. But remember, the why rarely comes from looking at quantitative data alone – you need to be speaking to your customers on a regular basis.

5. Finally, test & learn…

It’s the obvious one, and should go without saying, but it’s always worth the reminder. A test & learn approach should be built into every aspect of your campaign cycle and you should be running constant data analysis & feeding it back into the machine. One of the biggest mistakes I see is brands not leaving enough time to get the learnings from one campaign before starting production for the next, and then allowing the learnings from the initial campaign to get lost somewhere in the ether.

The easiest way to test new content ideas or messaging is to run it on one platform first, and then roll it out. Paid ads are a great place to test new messaging and CTAs, as you’ll usually be able to test more variations at once and get statistically significant results faster. But, make sure your teams are sharing these insights so everyone can build from them!

Of course, this is also where AI can help speed up the process, testing multiple content & creative variations at scale. The important thing to remember here is that AI can only work with what is fed into it, so make sure you have good quality, relevant content and you have your campaigns structured in a way that will allow you to properly test your different hypotheses.

Summary

It’s likely that you were already using some of these tips, but hopefully we’ve encouraged you to think a little deeper about how you can have an even more integrated approach.

A final thought to remember whenever you’re looking at data & creativity:

Data can only tell you so much, and it’s easy to add bias (consciously or not) to data so that it tells you what you want it to. So, don’t become so wrapped up in the data that you lose your creativity. Sometimes you have to trust that a good idea will work, even if you don’t have data to back it up (yet!).

If you know your audience and your industry, then trust your gut and don’t be afraid to take calculated risks. Data should be a guide, not a rulebook.