Does Data-Driven Content Really Work?

Imagine for a moment that you work at a brick-and-mortar store. Now imagine two customers walking through the door, one just browsing and the other genuinely interested in buying a product. 

So, if you provide the right customer with information about your products you'll be more likely to make a sale. Conversely, if you approach the wrong customer, your information, and your sale, will leave through the door leaving you with simply wasted time. The thing is, you may never know which customer is the genuinely interested one. 

Although this is a simple example, it perfectly illustrates the point that you need to get your content in front of the right customer at the right time for it to convert. Fortunately, data-driven content marketing allows you to do this. It’s worth mentioning here, social media advertising is a very effective tool. 

In fact, 90% of Australian marketers use social media in their marketing efforts and 56% of them believe that social media is the most effective way to reach the right audience. It's no wonder that 61% of SMEs, which make up over 99% of all businesses in Australia, have been able to increase their sales through marketing on Facebook. 

Social media marketing is an increasingly competitive landscape and the cost of reaching customers is continuing to rise as more and more players enter the market. The importance of getting the right mix of message and audience has never been higher. Enter data-driven content marketing.

But what exactly is data-driven content and how does it work to improve marketing performance? In this post, we’ll look at these questions in more detail.

What is Data-Driven Content?

By this time you know that digital marketing is marketing where you use digital channels to create awareness about your brand and put your products or service in front of potential buyers. It's important to remember, though, that you need the right strategy for digital marketing to be effective.

And this is where data-driven content comes in. It's an analytic marketing strategy where you use data to optimise your content. Typically, you’ll get this data from customer profiles or buyer personas and then target the right audience with valuable content that's most likely to convert. 

To get this data in an efficient and cost-effective way, you need to test. Testing is one of the most important components of a data-driven content strategy, where you test different ads or pieces of content on different audiences. As a result, you’ll know what works and what doesn't, and then use this data to create your campaigns and inform future content creation. 

In simple terms, data-driven content is an iterative process of creating, managing, measuring, and improving content to shape your digital marketing strategies.

How Data-Driven Content Works To Improve Marketing Performance

It's simple, if you can't measure something, you can't improve it. So, for example, if you use social media advertising, say in the form of Facebook marketing and you place an ad on the platform without measuring and tracking its results, you simply won't be able to improve it if it doesn't work. This means you'll most likely spend your marketing budget on ads and content that don't convert or convert more expensively than necessary. 

Data-driven content allows you to refine this through gathering and analysing data relating to your digital marketing campaigns. In addition, you'll be able to: 

• Understand your audience better. Through data, you'll be able to understand what your audience likes, what they don't, their interests, needs, and goals. 
• Segment your audience. Through audience testing, you'll be able to segment persona groups based on the behaviours and interests of people that respond most to your test results. 
• Target the right audience. Once you’ve segmented your audience, you'll be able to serve different segments with the right content, enabling you to get the right message in front of the right people at the right time.
• Personalise more. In addition, you’ll also be able to personalise your messaging based on the specific needs and expectations of your audience and where they are in the buyer's journey. As a result, you’ll provide relevant and valuable content to your customers, which ultimately drives purchasing behaviour.

Traditionally, audience and message testing has belonged to those with the marketing budgets to support running multivariate tests. This gives an unfair advantage to those who can afford to run tests and typically leaves SME’s out of the game.

That’s where the Otterfish Test Centre comes in. It's a revolutionary new testing solution that takes A/B testing to a whole new level and gives you the insights you need to make your content more effective and your strategies more efficient. It gives you the ability to quickly iterate your content and the option of testing dozens of creatives on a single audience or testing a single creative on multiple audiences.

Otterfish will keep track of every ad, providing real-time updates and ranking the winning ad. This makes the process of finding the right creative or the right audience infinitely simpler than other platforms. Simply put, knowing what works has never been this easy. And when you know what works, you can invest your marketing budget where you’ll get the best return.

Otterfish Instant Creative allows you to upload your images and convert them into dozens of unique creatives in one click; that you can use in your campaigns. Ultimately, through this process of creation, testing, and iteration, you’ll ensure that your campaigns, and spending, are always optimal. 

What About Some Real-World Results?

Although the above benefits sound great in theory, we would be amiss for not giving you some real-world results that show the effectiveness of data-driven content in practice.  

For instance, relating to data-driven content in general, luxury wristwear manufacturer Aurum Brothers used data analytics to track the performance of its Facebook marketing strategy. It experimented with different creatives and audiences using multivariate and A/B testing. This enabled it to increase their monthly sales by 100% and they managed to achieve a 13-fold return on their marketing spend.

Relating to Otterfish specifically, even though real estate company The Professionals were boosting its ads on Facebook, they were still getting low traffic volumes to its site. In other words, it didn't have an optimal return on its investment. 

However, since using Otterfish with multi variant testing, they were able to identify which ads worked and which segment of its audience resonated with a specific creative.  As a result, it was able to increase its traffic by 350% for no additional spend. 

In Closing

When you want to use content as efficiently and effectively as possible and increase the performance of your marketing efforts and your return on investment, it's vital that you use data-driven content. Simply put, it allows you to gain valuable insights about your customers, their needs, expectations, and what they like.

In turn, these insights allow you to tailor your strategy to gain a competitive edge, attract more customers, and make more sales. 

At Otterfish, we can help you unlock the power of data-driven content marketing through Smart Ads™ leveraging the use of Instant Creative™ and multivariate testing. By using the platform, you'll be able to create digital content campaigns that increase your return on investment. 

To learn more about Otterfish and how it can help your business, visit our website for more details or to sign up for a free account now. 

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