Data informs results-driven marketing, as both the content the user sees and how they interact with your site and messaging across digital channels. The secret sauce is using intelligent data to create a more relevant, engaging and personalised user experience.
You can use your search feature, and other engagement touch-points to collect metadata about each content type (publication, update, report, white paper) and serve more relevant results which can be easily filtered by the user. This way you link content of similar topic or interest to get more traction across your site.
So how is this done?
Content based on user interaction
Tracking how a user interacts with content is elementary. Metadata will tell you what they’ve recently viewed and responded to, where they’ve similar or broader interests, and whether they’ve shared or interacted with this content.
Using this data you can give more weight to their content of interest as well as present similar or related new content.
Content based on similar users
Many sites use cross-promoting, which could be ‘people who viewed this also viewed…’ where promoted content is based on what the user is currently viewing. So this helps you to profile users to promote content based on their interests, as well as those of similar users.
Content based on referrer
This works best with content that drives traffic through a targeted campaign. Whether you’re publishing the content on your blog and promoting it on social channels, or delivering it via subscriber based email communication, assumptions can be made about the type of user they are based on where they’ve come from, down to the specific link(s) they’ve clicked to get to your site.
Consolidating content and data
This approach to using data to optimise content for a better user experience can be very effective in increasing engagement. The more data you collect, whether through general data, cookies, or user-accounts, the more personalised, and relevant your content, generating better leads and conversion rates.