- October 22, 2015
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Use Data To Visualize Your Content Strategy
When looking at a laundry list of numbers and stats, raw research data appears both overwhelming and abstract. Let’s face it: big data can be a dry subject. That’s why putting it into a more relevant visual context is so important.
Data can be your ally when used to support your content marketing strategy and sell your ideas up your organization’s chain of command. Lisa Copeland of the Content Marketing Institute offers a ready-made template to give your data more context and relevance by putting it into a more digestible format.
Copeland refers to the template as a “multichannel content marketing planner.” Essentially a spreadsheet, the planner helps you literally align your target audience with content ideas. The template allows you to visually organize how you are telling your brand story to each audience, as well as the timing and channels being used.
The content marketing-planner template follows each step in the content creation process:
- Curate content and conduct interviews with subject experts.
- Review data reports, research, and insights.
- Analyze your site to find under-performing pages.
- Summarize and share your findings.
- Brainstorm content ideas.
- Complete the content planner.
- Gain approvals from stakeholders.
- Create editorial guidelines.
- Schedule your content on a calendar.
Take care not to bore stakeholders in your company with piles of raw data. Rather, organize it so that your reports are meaningful and persuasive. Try plugging in your data where appropriate into Copleland’s template to show exactly what type of message will work best for each audience across each channel. Then use the planner as a tool to help gain approval for your strategy, as well as for continuing content development.
For more ideas on how to use data in your content marketing efforts, review our previous posts “How to Tell Brand Stories with Data,” “Woo More Customers with Relevant Targeted Data” and “Small Businesses Reap Ginormous Benefits with Big Data.”