Many already know what makes a website successful: reader engagement, low bounce rate, social shares, and conversions. And that often leaves you in a sad state of affairs, doesn’t it? You try blogging from personal experience, provide valuable insight, and do everything you can to spread the word about your posts but…you don’t get a good enough response.
Publishing more often doesn’t work either. So how come sites like Moz, CoSchedule and Content Marketing Institute (CMI) receive such high traffic on their websites? People swarm to their posts, share and talk about them on Twitter, etc., and constantly go back for more. What’s their secret?
Well, there’s no secret. They just publish data-driven content – posts that merge scientific research and data with subject matter expertise to provide an authoritative answer to people’s pain points. While an opinion or argument can be subjective, data is mostly objective. People can’t really question numbers. If the data tells you that the upcoming iPhone’s battery life is superior to its predecessor’s, it’s hard to argue against. It’s then up to the visitors to decide what to do with that information.
What Actually Is Data-Driven Content?
Much of the content you see on web pages is experiential, which means it’s mostly geared towards sharing personal advice and stories with the hope that it’ll make a difference in people’s lives. And while it works in most instances, people might be looking for more authority and credibility before they decide to implement the ideas presented in this type of content.
That’s where data-driven content makes a difference.
It’s a content approach that focuses on the creation of well-researched blog posts that address visitors’ problems or the issues close to their heart by offering solid proof and backing claims up with updated research, fact-checked data, and scientific findings. Why publish this form of content? The primary reason to do so is that it helps you be seen as an authoritative figure.
Referencing relevant case studies and citing number-drive research tells people that you understand certain information and are willing it to share it with others to enrich their knowledge. Plus, people also perceive that opinions backed by data are more believable, which is why many of us naturally believe in science, associating charts, infographics, and other graphs with it.
Steps to Craft Data-Driven Content Pieces
1. Come Up With A Title
Even if you have access to top-notch data, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to produce good content. It’s important to know how to use the data available at your disposal to tell a story. But before anything else, you have to decide what you’ll be posting about. Also, the choice of the topic could depend on whether you’ve already thought of a newsworthy story or whether you have access to pre-existing data.
When researching potential titles to cover, you can use like BuzzSumo and SEMrush. These tools are tailor-made for discovering trends and researching data-driven topics. The title should communicate who you’re addressing as you won’t be writing for everyone out there. Also, it could be a how-to piece, a question-related title, a reason-why title, or a direct title. For example, a great data-driven title could be Success Story: How Stacy Increased Her Social Shares by 220% in 60 days. Titles like these will pique curiosity and get people to click on the title to read what’s inside.
2. Collect Data
Gather data from research information from reliable sources or it should at least come from something that has been cited in a reputable journal or research paper. The most reliable data comes from proprietary research. It’s unique to the researcher and no one else has the same information. No other person will have insight into your customer preferences, support queries, and other internal states, for instance. You will need a data analyst to deal with all of the data you’ve gathered. A data analyst takes care of compiling, cleaning, and transforming all your raw data into helpful and meaningful insights. They can also provide additional support in terms of data collection.
In addition, you could look for data for your content in the following places:
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Community
Do you have a personal community of fans? How about sending them a questionnaire or quickly asking a few questions? If you have a forum where people discuss a broad range of things, this could be a great place to look into for titles that you’d want to develop content around. If you have a database of customer emails, you could ask people to fill out a form. For those with a large social media following, they can use Twitter and Facebook polls for gathering data.
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Publicly Available Information
Resources like Guardian Data or Zanran (known as the search engine for statistics and data) offer people access to free information that they can integrate into their content. In terms of academically sound information, the best resource is ResearchGate. It’s a big social network that enables research associates to upload papers of their own and allows anyone to see their work. Other than that, you can access a lot of from the research engine for academic papers: Google Scholar.
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Publicly Available Information
Resources like Guardian Data or Zanran (known as the search engine for statistics and data) offer people access to free information that they can integrate into their content. In terms of academically sound information, the best resource is ResearchGate. It’s a big social network that enables research associates to upload papers of their own and allows anyone to see their work. Other than that, you can access a lot of from the research engine for academic papers: Google Scholar.
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Analytics Tools
Several firms don’t realize the quantity of data they already have. You might already have analytics in place for measuring the success of your efforts. These tools could give you handy data and insights that you can integrate into your content. A good place to begin is Google Analytics. It gives you the option to see different demographics including visitor’s gender, age, location, purchase behavior, devices they use, the industry they work in, and more.
3. Seek Interesting Angles
The next important step is to determine what you want to educate people on with your content. Also, you should identify whether people actually have the problem that you’re trying to address. You could do this in several ways. For instance, you can analyze customer service and support tickets to see the most common issues experienced by your audience. Likewise, you can monitor any question your target demographic has posted on Quora. It may also be a good idea to examine sales inquiries; this can help you check what issues your leads face when they begin searching for your services and products.
Identifying real problems in this phase can help you create more focused content pieces. Also, it’s important to know why the people you’re addressing the need to read the data-driven post in the first place. This allows you to verify whether you’re addressing a practical problem rather than one that only you think people are interested in finding solutions for.
4. Present Your Findings
Lastly, how you present your findings will be a key determinant to your content’s success. The first step to making the content share-worthy and engaging is to visualize your data, but doing so isn’t quite straightforward. Ideally, site owners should work/collaborate with a designer for data visualization. If you don’t have the budget to hire one, you can use a data visualization tool to get the job done all by yourself. Always consider how you want people to consume your content and ensure that it is responsive for those small screen devices.
And while you’re at it, highlight the stats that support the title you want to use and “click to tweet” any compelling insight so that visitors can easily share it on Twitter. It’s also a good idea to set up pivot charges as well as use conditional formatting to discover correlations between multiple data sets. Also, once you have strong data available at your disposal, demographically segment that information. This should help you discover local angles that you can reference in your content based on proximity, gender, etc. This is perfect for pushing out to local publishers and PR agencies for additional coverage.
Over to You
Creating data-driven content should take some time, but it’s something that works in most instances because you published something that people want. If your research is spot on, you’d soon enjoy a surge in search traffic courtesy of your powerful content piece.