6 Tips for Using Data to Create Dynamite Content

Every day, there are 2 million blog posts published online, exponentially increasing the already numerous information vying for people’s attention on the internet. How do you stand out with this enormous influx of new content? There are several content marketing methods to integrate into your strategy to increase your visibility and develop viral content.

One of the best content marketing strategies involves incorporating data into your content. This serves a few purposes:

• Establish authority
• Add credibility
• Increase social shares
• Answer questions
• Incite curiosity
• Develop relevant and tailored content

No matter what type of content you or your content marketing agency creates, whether 500-word blogs, 2000-word blogs, webinars, white papers, ebooks, social media posts, podcasts or anything else, it will be that much stronger if you feature data-driven content.

Why Data-Driven Content Matters

There is so much info online, and a significant chunk of it is filled with false or misleading information. Thus, any new leads will look at your information with a suspicious eye, curious as to the validity to what you say in both your promotional and informational posts.

What is the best way to demonstrate that what you write is valid and that you are a legitimate and credible business? Add statistics and other data to back up your claims. As an added bonus, you increase your potential to go viral, as well as boost your SEO rankings, since both users and search engines like data-driven posts. In a look into its own posts, Search Engine Journal found that 65 percent of their most popular posts were data-driven.

As with other content marketing methods, there are a few key actions to take to get the most out of this type of content.

Create Your Own Data

If you want to create completely original content, what better way than running your own survey or market research and then report the findings? Not only will you have something new to share, you will also find that other companies use your findings in their own data-driven blogs, which creates organic links to your original posting. This also provides a different way to engage with your customers and gain insight into changes you could make to boost your business.

There are plenty of tools that you can use to easily run your own surveys with your own customers, including places like Survey Monkey, Google Forms, or One Poll. When you develop your own surveys, make sure to provide multiple-choice answers for most of the questions so that you can more easily create statistics out of it. Although open-ended questions might help you learn and grow as a company, it will not provide you with measurable data that you need to create tables and charts on your blog.

Create New Information From Old Sources

If you do not have the time or resources for your own unique research, you can also find ways to cultivate information from existing data sources and turn it into your own unique content. There are several ways to take new looks at old and tired information, such as:

• Cultivating lists
• Comparing new and old versions of the same data
• Providing new interpretations

The data does not need to be new and exciting to develop content that is.

Be Selective in Your Sources

To get the full advantage of one of the best content marketing strategies, data-driven content, you must be careful about from where you get the data. When you search online for statistics and other information to back up your ideas, make sure that you pool from credible sources. Otherwise, you will end up hurting your credibility rather than helping it.

How do you know whether or not something is a credible source? Government agencies, colleges and universities, and world-renowned research institutions are good places to start. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals are other handy sources of trustworthy material. Well-respected newspapers and magazines are also typically good places to find information. You can also turn to the industry leaders of your field.

Make It Visual

In addition to — or instead of — writing a report on the data that you find, whether through your own market research or through sourcing other companies, create a visual interpretation of it. Visuals are a powerful component of content. In fact, when people hear something, they will most likely remember just 10 percent of it. However, if they also see a relevant picture, they retain 65 percent of the information they learned.

You can create a simple chart or table to illustrate your findings, or you can create an infographic that compiles several key findings from your own resources or others that you have found. You do not need to have a graphic designer on call to create these, either. There are several online tools that assist you in creating visuals for your blogs and web pages, including charts and infographics:

• Canva
• Sketch
• Silk
• Pktochart
• Fusion Tables
• ly

Add Some Character

Data-driven content works best when it informs readers why this information matters to them in an engaging way. You want to create something that answers a question that customers might have or informs them of something about which they are interested. Additionally, you want to incorporate some character and personality. If you simply list the data, you will more likely lose the readers within seconds of landing on your page, eliminating any potential leads. In cases where you are cultivating a list of statistics, you can still make it more interesting through using visuals or adding some text to explain the importance of the data.

Using Data to Create Content

In addition to using statistics and other data to provide support and credibility, you can also use data to help you discover topics that are relevant to your customer base and potential target audience. The first place to look is your own analytics. You might have hundreds of data points on a customer, especially if you integrate third party information and data from social media. With this information, you can have sufficient details to determine topics they might find interesting.

You can also look at Google’s keyword planner and other tools to see what information people search for on a regular basis. For more insight into the most common searches, incorporate social engagement metrics. With this information, you or your content marketing agency can cultivate your topics. Places like Quora, Reddit, and Yahoo Answers also provide insights into subject matters of interest.

Creating data-driven content assists you in establishing yourself as a credible source for information. You can establish authority in your industry and gain more shares. Additionally, you can mine information so that you create more relevant and interesting topics, which also helps you to stand out from the wealth of information available online. That is why it is one of the best content marketing strategies.