Don’t fly blind. Have a strong analytics system that provides you with what is happening now so you can maneuver.
In the old days, we could meet with people face-to-face and share the information we had with them. From there we could watch their body language to gauge how interested or turned off they were. We don’t have that privilege any longer in the connected economy.
People still engage, but it happens in much different ways. If you observe most people, they check their phones often. Many times, they are reading email or visiting sites online from mobile devices and tablets.
During any given work day, people are working in front of a screen. They have their browsers open often working between applications and visiting various websites looking for information, getting entertained or updating their social media.
If you do not observe or analyze what is happening, then you are guessing what is important and what is working on your content marketing system.
Analytics systems have been around for a while. They provide us with insight into user behaviors on web pages. Google Analytics is popular and used by many businesses, large and small. It is one of the tools we use and recommend. However, the information is confusing and not dialed into what is happening in real-time. It is hard to dial into a specific visitor’s behavior.
For our clients, we tie in information from analytics with email behavior. The metrics help us understand what visitors are doing and how long they are engaging certain content. It is their digital body language that helps us to understand what content is relevant and how to drive further engagement and calls to action.
Without such a tool, it would be like flying without instruments at night. You can’t navigate as well. You depend on the feedback to know what is happening and how to maneuver.
Once you can see how visitors are interacting with your content, then you can start guiding your overall strategy to further position your expertise.
We like to continually iterate and see how certain calls-to-action work with targeted content.
Furthermore, we can see what is distracting or not useful and eliminate it. This creates a cleaner and more focused experience for readers and subscribers of our clients’ content.
If you are not tuning in with analytics, then consider making it part of your overall content strategy. You have to know what people are doing and be able to make intelligent and speedy changes based on relevant data.