Content is King But Data is Queen

The sum total of your marketing efforts falls in two buckets: the content you create and the leads you are able to generate. Everything hinges on content so the old adage, "content is king", rings true. But the longer I work in marketing, the more I begin to think that if that is true, then "data is queen".

Your content doesn't have two legs to stand on if the data points to it performing less than industry benchmarks. Email service platforms provide A/B test data so you know which subject lines will result in higher email open rates. Google Analytics tells you which of your pages are the most popular and need the most TLC. You can also find out which pages have a higher bounce rate so you can work on improving content to make it more engaging so people stay on longer and visit more of the site before leaving. Facebook gives you predictive analytics for the reach and clicks you can expect for the dollars you've invested based on the audience characteristics you've selected. Video platforms will tell you at which point viewers started dropping off (giving you a sense of how long your videos should ideally be).

I could go on. The point I am trying to make is that analytics are hugely important. I receive confirmation of this every day but one example stands out more than others. The chart below shows the results from two campaigns, one on Google, the other on Facebook, that we were running in support of a go-to-market strategy at GACS. Both sets of ads directed users to a special campaign landing page.

From the data you can see something quite telling. Users coming from Google spent 1 minute and 35 seconds more on the landing page than users coming from Facebook, who only spent 34 seconds on the site. Also nearly 80% of those users coming from Facebook bounced off the site (means leaving after viewing one page) compared to nearly 28% of users coming from Google. Without this data we wouldn't necessarily know which investment yielded the best result. We have a hypothesis that Google results will be better because search intent is strong whereas social ads are more disruptive. In the end, based on these results, I recommended to our leadership that we spend more on Google ads than Facebook ads.

Since people were spending significant time on the site, I wanted to know, where exactly were they going? Were they doing what we hoped they would do? That's when I turned again to Google Analytics and pulled a user flow map for the visitors coming to the landing page. I was thrilled with the results. It turned out that users went from our landing page deeper into the site, going first to more admissions-focused pages then turning to our company's about us pages. This was a win. Were this not the case I would have adjusted the landing page, changing the call to action buttons (colors, placement), reworking the page layout, changing the visual assets, whatever it would take to get them where they needed to go in order to make a decision about joining the organization.

Ladies and gentleman, I rest my case. Without data, I would be lost and would not know the effectiveness of my content. And so I bow down to the queen for she is the one I rely on for guidance every day.