In this data-driven world grabbing the attention of readers, journalists and links are one of the hardest jobs. Your content must be eye-catching, exciting and unique. Data journalism one of the best and easiest ways to create content that stands out from the crowd. Content with data and statistics makes it interesting, newsworthy and shareable. And it also helps to bring more traffic to your website. A data-oriented content can drive traffic to your website also.
Be The Source
Creating your own data is not an easy thing. If you able to create your own data, people will want to link back to the place they cited. Using Google Trends and Google Consumer Survey, you can search for trending topics and build your own data.
Pick Your Topic
Google Data doesn’t always ensure good content. You have to figure out how to tell a story using data. First, you need to decide what the content is about. When researching about topic, you should use Google Trends and BuzzSumo. These tools are built for researching and exploring trends.
Gather Your Data
The most important thing about creating a data-driven content is actually find the data. While building content with your own data, you should remember that more in quantity doesn’t mean you’ll achieve your goals. You need a good content to achieve your goal.
- Conduct Surveys
Surveying is the go-to place for collecting information, to get statistics and data that you specifically focus on. Think carefully before asking questions. You want to get best results possible to generate a variety of angles for you to use in your content. Make sure your question should support the story and limit the number of open-ended questions you ask. Include a variety of demographic questions which answers given with the details about the respondents.
- Ask Your Community
Do you have your own community or fans? If you work for a bigger brand and have forums where they discuss a range of topics. Many businesses also have a large database of customer contact details to which they send newsletter on a regular basis. You can send them questions on a regular basis to understand their desires.
- Use Your Own Data and Reports
Many SaaS companies don’t realize that they’re sitting on amount of data. You have some analytical tools to track success of your own website and marketing efforts. These tools can give you useful insights and data to create a content marketing strategy. Google Analytics is a good place to know your consumer demographics such as their age, gender and location, what they buy, what device they use and more. You can also carry out your own tests and experiments to generate data and insights that will generate data and insights about your industry and your customers.
Search for Interesting Angles
Once you have the data, you’ll analyze which angle you want to give your story. Analyzing data isn’t always easy. That’s why try and highlight any key points in your content derived out of the data. Remember, once you have the strong data with you, you’ll be able to segment your results demographically. This will help to find a range of local angles you can pull out for your content based on gender, age, location etc.
Visualize Your Data
Presenting data is the key to the success of your content. Visualizing data is the first step of making your content engaging and shareable. But data visualization is not easy. Ideally, you should work with a designer to visualize your data. If you don’t have an access to a designer then you can work with a data visualization tool. Once, you’ve created the visual you should add relevant content to make it a story. You should make sure to make content which is responsive on mobile and tablet devices.
How to Structure Your Content Support Activities
If the content is truly a unicorn, you need to do all the supporting staffs around that content. The structuring process should start collaborating with the PR team to create a strategy. PR teams develop high-quality link opportunities.
Then you should conduct manual outreach to industry blog to create back links and guest blogs.
Partner with other companies on a webinar to discuss data.
Create a blog post series to give further context to data and optimize for new search items.
Utilize the data at presentations.
Recreate the data in nfographics, charts, and graphs.
Don’t Have Any Data?
Don’t have any data to collect? Don’t worry. There are plenty of sources you can use and combine to make a whole new data set. You can get access to data from Pew Research Centre, Wikipedia, Google Scholar, The Office for National Statistics, and Reddit’s Data is Beautiful subreddit. You can also get data at Google [keyword] market research, or [keyword] data sets.
A great content don’t have a shelf-life. You will see spark at the beginning and even after 6 months of its publishing. Data-driven content always works because you create something that people want. If your research is done right then you should have a powerful piece of content.
