We Adapted Our Content Calendar and Strategy based on Audience Activity
As we laid out our plans for the launch of our new brand and website, we decided it was essential to revamp our content strategy. The single largest focus of our rebrand was our desire to better utilize our website analytics to ensure we are connecting in the most efficient and effective capacity with our target audience.
In the era of big data and cloud-based information, everyone remains laser focused on the importance and value of data. We at Hero Creative fundamentally believe in our process and the value of innovative solutions to grow our business and help impact the community. We will never abandon any aspect of our creative process for the trend of becoming overly analytical with our focus.
With all that being said, our vision for Hero Creative demanded a more concerted effort to track and monitor our traffic for the betterment of our ongoing business strategy. This blog will discuss a few strategies we’ve embraced to optimize the outflow of our content.
As indicated in some of our recent blogs, we had to go back to the drawing board in order to streamline the content we were using to represent our clients and brand. As ubiquitous a term as research has become, our initial phase of knowledge gathering was the most crucial starting point for building our new strategy. Familiarizing ourselves with new legal regulation on different marketing strategies allowed us to build a larger perspective of the roles of different businesses within the industry, and specifically identify what we want Hero Creative to grow toward.
Another tactic we embraced as a company was the organization of our content calendar around utilizing Google Analytics data to establish the best windows of time / days to share our content across our website and our various social media channels. We were able to outline the highest traffic periods of users visiting our website by comparing the relative trend between recent / short term site activity data and long term / archival user traffic data to cross-check the validity of assumption when it comes to peak visitor timing.
For example, we were able to empirically verify that we should not be pumping out business related content on weekends or seasonal periods where people are disengaged from work for measurable stretches of time. A fairly obvious example, but our site data supported our hypothesis, and as a result we tailored Hero Creative’s content strategy toward successfully achieving the largest consumer reach for our content.
The next tactic we implemented to ensure our data analytics could be most valuable was to apply a filter / exclusion rule for our office IP address and personal networks, which we frequently access. This exclusion filter removed all of our internal company site traffic from counting toward our Google Analytics account. This is a no-brainer because we needed to not dilute our overall data with our personal traffic of the Hero website. This safeguard we put in place verifies that our data is (and will continue to be) only representative of our target audience and does not need to be deciphered any further than our regular management of our Analytics account. As already stated above, data must be accurate in order to maximize its potential for business growth. This step forward encapsulates our company’s insistence that our data will always be factual and relevant.
As far as individual metrics and tools that we frequently monitor go, we tend to focus on specific metrics that correlate to various formats of content. For example, we hone our data analysis surrounding blogs and longer form pieces of content into metrics that indicate that our content is genuinely being consumed. Metrics which generally demonstrate this include: Views per Page, Avg. Time Spent on Page, Entrances, Exit %, and Bounce Rate. Most content and digital marketers are all too familiar with a “bounce rate” (when a user enters and immediately exits a page without interaction), however, this metric can be very indicative of a user’s satisfaction and / or their relevance with the blog content.
The last and most interconnected feature of Google Analytics that is helping us constantly improve our content strategy is the referral traffic and tracking features that are linked to our social media accounts. The most recent example of this is our latest social media endeavor, frequently engaging and updating our Hero Creative Team page on Dribbble with our passionate new designs, project updates, and more. Dribbble represents an exciting opportunity for our designers to engage on an individual level and share their favorite creations with a burgeoning designer community.
Feel free to explore our latest visual content posts over on Hero Creative’s social platforms (Instagram) (Dribbble)