So, you’ve made your New Year’s resolutions, and a simpler, more efficient, and more effective content-marketing process sits high atop the list. While you can’t replace your teams’ creative content production with software, the right content analytics tools can help you optimize the effectiveness of every piece of content you publish.
Here’s a list of 7 tools that your inner data geek is going to love, and some tips on how to get the most out of them.
Content Analytics Tools for Brainstorming Content Ideas
During the planning and content collaboration phases, you and your team should look at possible keywords and topic ideas through the lens of content analytics. Planning possible keywords, looking at your competitors’ top-performing content with an eye to go one step further, and discovering thought leaders whose insights complement your own – all go into the brainstorming process.
Content analytic tools can help you do more than guess how you can create better content than your competitors. They can help you define what content performs best for your competitors and find a way to exceed its quality.
1. Buzzsumo: Analyze Your Competitors’ Content
If you’re like most content creators, one of the first things you do when you research a topic is to find out what content has performed best for that topic. Buzzsumo, as HubSpot’s Alex Birkett points out, allows you to see all the numbers for content that’s already online, with the number of backlinks each piece of content has earned, how many social shares it has, and which influencers, if any, have shared it.
Not only will it give you insights into who are the main thought leaders in that topic’s niche, but it will also give you some benchmarks to measure your own content against. Create insightful content, and you might even catch the attention of one of the industry’s thought leaders.
2. Google Keyword Planner: Gearing Up Your Imagination
A great basic tool for getting your imagination in gear as you begin a project, Google’s Keyword Planner allows you to enter your topic and will spit back a ton of related keywords to help guide your thought process. Since its main purpose is to encourage ad buys for keywords, it also provides an important metric – the number of searches for that keyword per month.
Use these numbers to decide which keywords to emphasize in your content. Since Google now recognizes synonyms as well as exact matches, some of the resulting keyword variations might also have potential as secondary keywords or synonyms for your primary keywords.
3. Ahrefs: Taking Keyword Research to the Next Level
Once you have some ideas about what keywords you might want to use in your content, Ahrefs can take a deeper dive into the analytics to track the rankings of each of your planned keywords and analyze your competitors’ keywords on the same topic. This tool also allows you to look at your competitors’ sites, analyze their most valuable content, and tweak your content to surpass your competitors’ work.
Content Analytics Tools for Improving Existing Content
So, you’ve looked at the numbers and created a list of new content ideas that should perform well. Now, let’s shift gears and look at the content analytics tools that focus on existing content performance, and provide insights on ways to make it better. Here are some tools that can help you do just that.
4. Measure Content Performance with Google Analytics
The gold standard of content performance measurement, Google Analytics provides you with all the data you need to determine which content performs best with which audiences, as Content Marketing Institute’s Julia McCoy points out. We agree.
Not only can it do that, but it can also identify possible new markets through its demographic analysis. If you discover, for instance, that your content performs well among female millennials but you haven’t included that group in your target audience, you might want to include these audiences, too, in your targeted content strategy.
Google Analytics also can track how your content performs on social, measure your content’s engagement, and identify which content and topics your audience engages with more. This powerful tool can even differentiate among various types of engagement, such as sales, form submissions, and long-form content downloads. That way, you can identify which content performs best at different points along the customer journey.
5. Google Optimize to A/B Test Content Versions
A wealth of detail goes into every piece of content. Often, it’s one little change that can make a world of difference.
A/B testing allows you to test one version of a piece of content (webpage, post, email, etc.) against another. Whether you vary the title, hero image, or the call to action, it can make a huge difference in the outcome.
Google Optimize specifically allows you to set up an experiment to test one version of webpage to see how it performs against another. Using Optimize in conjunction with Google Analytics can identify how various pieces of content perform with which demographic groups. If you use audience segmentation, you can tailor which version each group sees to the version that performs best with each group.
6. A/B Test Video Content with Vidyard
With Vidyard’s superb video analytics, you can conduct A/B testing on your video content as well. Not only does it allow you to measure one version of a video against another, but it also allows you to “gate” videos – requiring your audience to submit contact information to see an entire video – an excellent strategy that can assist in capturing leads.
A Content Analytics Platform to Inform Future Planning
7. Track Your Numbers Across Platforms and Scale Your Efforts with DivvyHQ Analytics
A central part of a comprehensive content marketing platform, DivvyHQ’s analytics module gathers data from a variety of sources so you don’t need to hunt through all your analytics tools for the data you need. Having all the data you need in an easy-to-understand dashboard saves you the time you would otherwise spend jumping from tab to tab, or exporting a bunch of data into individual reports.
Not only that, but it also features automated reports so you can share all the good news with your C-suite. As the results roll in, you can use the results to bump up your content marketing to larger and larger audiences, knowing that your content will likely reach the right people at exactly the right point on their customer journey.
When you know where you’re at, you can have a better idea of what you need to do to gain a larger share of the market in the future. With DivvyHQ’s content marketing platform, you can rest assured that your content marketing efforts will become more efficient than ever before. Schedule your quick demo today – and mark one of your New Year’s resolutions as done.