The 5 Best Books & Resources for Data-Driven Content Marketing

Building a content marketing and SEO strategy isn’t necessarily simple, but it is worthwhile. The best content marketing and SEO practices aren’t just relevant to your organization and your industry—they’re highly personalized to your target audience. Both the content and the way it’s packaged and delivered should be tailored to the users that you want to service. How do you make this happen? Through the use of data and metrics.

Content marketers have a broad set of relatively affordable data collection tools at their disposal right now, but it’s not enough to just use the tools and collect the data. You have to be able to take that data and turn it into actionable insights that can inform a long-term, data-backed content marketing and SEO strategy. With those objectives in mind, the following are some of the best books for content marketing and SEO, with a specific focus on data.

1. E-Book: A Practical Guide to Data-Driven Content Marketing

This free e-book from SEMRush it is a great resource for content marketers looking to provide their clients with truly valuable, service-driven content. The e-book walks you through all the stages of creating a data-driven content and SEO strategy, from the research and planning to outlining your success metrics. This guide is a great tool, whether you’re a marketing strategist, content creator, or an editor.

2. Book: The Big Data-Driven Business: How to Use Big Data to Win Customers, Beat Competitors and Boost Profits

This book, by Russell Glass and Sean Callahan, gives a good general overview of the potential uses of big data in business. A lot of content marketers may be comfortable with the content aspect itself, but much less so with the idea of data analytics. That’s where this guide can become a great resource.

The book takes real-life examples and shows how they’ve applied big data in their marketing.

What’s great about this guide, aside from the real-life examples, is the fact that it provides an overall view of the role of data in today’s business world that can be applied throughout different areas of an organization.

3. Class: eCornell’s Data-Driven Marketing Ivy League Certificate

There is a multitude of online courses that you can use as a way to boost your understanding of data-driven content marketing and SEO best practices. One great option is available from Cornell University, and it’s called Data-Driven Marketing.

There are six subsections within this certification program. These focus on measuring customer preferences, segmenting and targeting audiences, and using data to position a brand. There are also courses on how to manage the lifetime value of customers and optimize your digital advertising efforts through the use of analytics.

4. E-Book: Data-Driven Content Marketing

The name of this e-Book succinctly sums up what it covers. It’s written by Hana Abaza, who’s the head of marketing at Shopify Plus.

The core message of Data-Driven Content Marketing is that data isn’t optional. It’s required as a way to inform all of your content marketing and general marketing decisions in the modern era. The book goes on to highlight the fact that you can’t just wing it with data and content marketing. You need a process in place to know what works and what doesn’t.

Actionable takeaways from the e-book include the gathering and use of data for content creation, but also how to measure your distribution process and channels.

There are a lot of other great resources out there, but the books, e-books, and courses named above are foundational and realistic in their approach giving you a good way to start using data to fuel your content and SEO decision-making.

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