Steer your content engine with data

Data is the catalyst that makes content instantly interesting.

There’s been a paradigm shift in the content creation space which is traversing from “explaining the concept” to “experimenting with the concept”.

To be precise, in order to make a content piece go viral, taking the route of “Headlines best practices and secret tips” is less preferred over “100M headlines analysis”.

Buzzsumo has been a power creator of such juggernaut articles.

Why do brands like Buzzsumo, Backlinko, GrooveHQ, etc direct a lot of their effort into data-driven content?

If you think it’s because of the desire to go viral or get a lot of backlinks, then you’re wrong.

Data-driven content should not be created with an intention of attracting a lot of backlinks or to get the PR spotlight. These are in fact only the by-products that would naturally happen if your content has immense value and an insane amount of insights.

The goal of this type of content is to help the audience with data-backed research and proven success formulas that they can readily implement in their work too.

This creates a symbiosis between the content creators as well as the audiences for two reasons:

1. It creates a win-win because audiences find value in the data and the brand gets a valued reader who can be nurtured into a potential customer
2. The brand becomes the go-to for the audience to learn about any industry-based topic/concept. The brand becomes a thought leader and the audience a mentee

Though the benefits of this content model are quite apparent, is this an easy feat?

Not quite.

What does it take to produce such content?

There’s a great deal of groundwork that goes into data-based content. But, before you hop on to the process of collecting, cleaning, filtering, and analyzing data, start with two questions before you dive into the cumbersome process.

1. What’s the objective of this article?
2. Who is it going to benefit?

These two questions will cover the entirety of the benefits of both sides — brand and audience.

So, what’s the process you ask.

You need to begin with the process of data collection — the primary method.

Primary data collection:

This is the process of collecting data from the source by the researcher which is further subjected to segmentation — qualitative data and quantitative data. While qualitative has more to do with elements that cannot be mathematically measured, quantitative is all about the numerics.

Sentiments gathered from interviews, online forums, groups, web chat, and more are qualitative data while forms, questionnaires, surveys, etc are quantitative.

So, once you know your objectives and your audience you can begin with data collection and set a threshold for the amount of information you want to collect.

Determining these would help you assess the number of days it takes to complete the process, the mediums through which you would be collecting the data, the amount of time that goes into structuring, cleaning, and analyzing the data, and more.

The primary data collection need not always be happening in millions and your content also needs not to be that comprehensive. Depending on your marketing goals and priorities, such experiments can be small-scale with a small data sample and slimmer insights too.

This is also valuable as the data and insights are still original and authentic even though the sample is smaller.

Also, note that primary data does not ideally mean sitting down to embark on a data collection journey. Sometimes, you may not be aware of the existing behemoth of information sitting in your systems and databases.

You can always pick them up and do some data wrangling to it.

This is still the data you own and hence slightly differs from secondary data.

Is there an easier path?

Though the primary research method is unfiltered and the best content to produce, not all of you would have that kind of time or investment needed for it. Depending on the objectives, scope, and resources you can choose between the two types.

So, data-driven content need not necessarily be research that is initiated from the scratch.

Enters secondary data.

Secondary data:

It means accessing data that is readily researched and available publicly. Here the only difference is that the data is already available, but you still need to analyze it further and make inferences.

What can you do with secondary data?

1. Just geek out and analyze the findings and take a counter-argument
2. Cite the research, present the numbers, and have a perspective
3. Agree to the insights of the research and share your point of view (weave a different story and uphold your voice)
4. Use it to emphasize your point

Now, whether it is primary or secondary, there are certain rules when it comes to working with data.

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Let’s go through them one by one.

Things to remember when meddling with data

1. Analysts: The process of data collection and analysis is a process in itself that has several stages right from data cleansing, organizing, and analysis. So, if the sample size is huge, it is better if you work with data analysts who can help you with the process.

Since this is a research-based content that is going to reach a wider audience, you must be confident about the process you take up and the insights you gather thereupon.

2. Erroneous information: Without cleansing your data and hopping onto the analysis part would result in faulty insights. Hence, it is important to double-check if your data is free of errors and accurate to the best potential.

Some common mistakes to avoid:

1. Reaching out to the wrong audience for data collection
2. Data entry errors like repeating data, inaccurate data, outdated data, and more

3. Refresh: Data has the quality of becoming stale over a period of time which means that your content and the research that went behind it may go obsolete. But, this does not mean that all the efforts that went into creating the content piece need to be irrelevant.

With a bit of data refresh, you can always make the content relevant as time moves. All you need to do is refer back to your data and identify if there’s too much that’s gone stale, if so you can weed out the chunk, replace it with fresh data, or simply change the numbers.

This has a huge traffic potential if you simply add the term [updated] to your well-performing article’s title.

4. Privacy: You may want to be very careful about the data you have access to. If you do not have the consent of the recipient to whom this information belongs to, refrain from publishing content about it.

Take the necessary privacy measures to perform this activity.

Now that you know the methods of data collection and the precautions to follow, next would be of course writing the content and promoting it.

Let’s see how you can elevate the success of the research-based-data-driven article.

How to amplify the reach?

Creating data-driven content is a task in itself. All the research and a fitting narrative to elevate the findings have to lead to the content becoming a huge success. But, you cannot sow seeds without promotions. Here are some ways to promote your data-driven content:

1. Newsletters

If not for anyone, your blog subscribers are those who enjoy your content — so much that they stay subscribed to you. If your subscriber count is high, you must definitely slip in your data-driven article in your newsletter. While you are doing this, make sure that you highlight the numbers, create a solid hook, and ensure that the email is compelling enough to have a high click-through.

Here’s an example of Neil Patel’s newsletter that promotes the article with an interesting snippet content and a compelling CTA.

2. Social media

Another channel to promote your data-driven article would be through social media. You can plan a campaign series wherein you create hype and get the audience excited about the insights you are going to share. You can also set a launch date for your article and then launch it so that there is a continuous buzz.

You can also invest in ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn if your content piece has a hyper-targeted audience. This will help you get momentary traction (relevant audience) to your content during the launch.

3. Teaser video

Your promotion activities cannot always be just about texts and your article thumbnail. Instead, what would really get the attention of your audience is a nice teaser video that gives out the highlights of the research revealing some numbers and an insight or two.

You can then redirect the viewers to the actual article with a nice CTA. You can create attractive 2d animation videos for this purpose.

4. Influencer outreach

If your brand is relatively new, then you can take the influencer route to help you get the word out. All you need to do is identify influencers, preferably micro-influencers if you are a new brand, and reach out to them.

Getting them to agree would be the difficult part. But, what can make this happen is the quality of your content. If they see a good fit for their audience they would be happy to share it as a social media post or even link to it in their pieces.

You can also partner and amplify reach through co-branding. Here is an example of how Hubspot and Chatfuel launched an ebook together.

5. Exit pop-ups

Your homepage is the pillar page of your website with probably the maximum traffic. So, why not utilize it? You can create an attractive pop-up with a good two-line and a clear CTA. This will help in directing at least a good chunk of your website visitors to your article.

This is an example of a guide from Backlinko that is promoted while the user is about to exit the website. There is a good chance of this popup placement getting a lot of traffic to the article.

Wrapping Up

The primary goal of the data-driven content is to be helpful to the audience by synergizing the reach and value quotient.

However, another critical piece is that,

Data + Insights = Valuable information

But,

Data + Insights + Presentation = Better reach

Just data and insights would not make the cut, in order to have better reach, you may also want to be mindful of how you present the data. You must tell a story and make the narrative very interesting and use charts, graphs, videos, and images to support your article. This makes it more engaging and share-worthy.

If you think of your piece as the one that everyone who writes about the topic is going to refer to, you must also focus on the aesthetics.