Marketers need numbers to prove their campaigns are paying off, but they can also use numbers for immediate changes to proactively improve results.

Industry: Home furnishings
Content: Weekly blog content
Highlights: Using analytics to find the content topic sweet spot

Numbers might not always be your best friend. You may not be a math master, yet you still have to use them to prove the content you’re putting on the web is worth the time and money you spend on it. There’s a lot of value in those figures, when they’re telling you the story you want to hear and even when they’re not. One Brafton customer used its content analytics data to evaluate current website performance and also to gather real-time information about what topics were in demand at the moment.

Looking at numbers for proof of results

 

When the B2C home furnishing company started with Brafton, its blog was seeing steady traffic. However, it wanted to get more people to the site to read its articles and learn about its products and services. Three months after it began publishing a steady stream of blog posts about decorating tips, home trends and furniture care tips, it saw blog visitors increase three-fold.

New visitors increased 26 percent month-over-month.

The blogs posts were catching eyes in search results and bringing in an untapped audience because the number of new visitors increased 26 percent month-over-month. Plus, the people coming to the site were staying longer and doing more once they got there. Given these numbers, it was clear the content marketing strategy was working. It was bringing more people to the blog section and the site as a whole, but there were still opportunities for improvement.

Looking at numbers for marketing inspiration

For one, the client’s strategy team wanted to make the site stickier. It’s great that more people were coming to the site, but it’s a new challenge to get them to stay there and click through to multiple pages (where they can buy products and services). So they looked at the metrics to see what content was behind the biggest results and identified characteristics that could be brought to other pieces.Marketers that look to analytics for trends will see when content strategies are paying off.

It became clear that blog posts with how-to information were the most popular and contributing the most visits to the site. Once the strategists keyed in on this detail, they altered the client’s editorial brief to include more of these kinds of stories. It will quickly be able to see if this slight shift is paying off in longer on-site sessions and more conversions, and the company can further refine its strategy for success.

Numbers aren’t always easy to face, but they can’t be the enemy in content marketing. They must be the motivation to always improve a strategy for better results.

Lauren Kaye is a Marketing Editor at Brafton Inc. She studied creative and technical writing at Virginia Tech before pursuing the digital frontier and finding content marketing was the best place to put her passions to work. Lauren also writes creative short fiction, hikes in New England and appreciates a good book recommendation.