Use Your Data or Lose your Reach w/ Brian Piper

Full Transcript:

Hello. My name is Brian Piper. I’m the Director of Content Strategy and Assessment for the University of Rochester.

I’ve been doing content strategy and optimization since 1996 and spend most of my time focusing on data analytics, content marketing, and search performance.

Today, I want to take a minute to talk about your content data. If you put out content, on your website, podcast, social channels, videos, basically, in any digital format, you’re missing opportunities if you’re not looking at your data and using it to find insights.

Of course, looking at your data won’t be useful if you don’t have a documented content strategy connected to clearly defined business goals. Your strategic goals will determine your key performance indicators or KPIs, and let you know what it is you need to be measuring.

Looking at your data and creating reports and dashboards without having your strategic goals identified is like driving in your car without a destination. It’s great to go out on a beautiful day and just drive around, but we don’t do that very often because we usually have somewhere we want to go.

Your KPIs are the road signs and mile markers along your journey that will let you know whether or not your content is moving you in the right direction and how close you’re getting to your destination. Once you know what you should be looking at, you can figure out how to reach your destination more quickly.

You need to start off by establishing baselines with this data so you know where you currently are. You can look back at your historical data to see how far you’ve already come and how fast you’re moving towards your goals.

You need to really understand your audiences and all of your channels. There are lots of different roads you can travel to reach your destination and lots of people you can talk to along the way but you have to know which kinds of people are on which roads and what questions those people have so that you know what information to give them to convince them to get into your car and come with you.

Those are the first steps. If you haven’t firmly identified your goals, KPIs and audiences, you won’t know if the data that you’re looking at has any importance or relevance for reaching your final destination.

Once you start looking at your data, you want to look for consistent patterns and anomalies. Those are the things that will help you figure out what’s working and what’s not working.

Is there a particular time of day or day of the week where a particular channel performs better? If so, start scheduling your content for that period.

Do you see a spike in traffic or engagement after posting a particular piece of content? Do other pieces of content with similar topics tend to drive more traffic as well?

You also want to look at your data over time. Are you driving more traffic this month than last month? Or than last year at the same time?

You should also keep a record of changes you make to your channel or to existing content to make sure you know why your data is different. Did you change the description of your social channel? Did you optimize a particular piece of content for search? Did you update your website template and improve your page load speeds? It’s important to know what you changed that may be affecting your content performance.

It’s important to look at your data regularly and monitor all your channels but it’s even more important to be able to identify the insights in your data and make changes to your content strategy in order to get the most out of each piece of content and provide true utility to your audience.

To learn more about content strategy, search optimization, data, analytics, or Web3, feel free to connect with me on linkedin or twitter, I’m brianwpiper on both channels. You can also send me an email directly to brian@brianwpiper.com or just google me. I’m always interested in connecting and collaborating with new people. Thank you.