An effective content marketing strategy must include insights from a multitude of online channels including blogs, social media and emails, among others. Extracting insights from social media communities such as sentiments, locations, preference helps you gain a rich profile of your customers.

For retailers, content analytics include tools for real-time insights to users, brands and supply chain to bolster online businesses. With the rapid growth in retail, companies are often grappling with content management across hundreds of e-commerce platforms. According to a source, content analytics is on the rise and about 75% of the enterprises evinced that it offers real business insights.

However, before making the blueprint of a content analytics strategy, an organization needs to consider the following things.

Who is your target audience?

The first step towards the development of your content marketing strategy is to know who would be your potential customers along with the demographic breakdown by gender, income, region, age and marital status.

Media Preference:  How geeky are you?

The next step is to identify where your customers spend most of their time searching or buying your products. It can be a blog, twitter or something else. Then, you can search Google analytics or related web tools to track the incoming sources. A good content monitoring tool which captures keywords and phrases will help significantly in product development and tracking customer user experience. According to talkbusinessmagazine.co.uk, about 56% of the companies use Google analytics to know the traffic sources while a further 40% use it to blend the same with other analytics tools.

… Are you spying on me, huh?

After identifying your target audience and establishing an effecting tool, organizations need to track or rather say spy customers for their preferences using search histories, keywords or focus on metrics that is suitable to you. Many organization use algorithms to combine the current search of customers with the previously used search. The best examples is when we use amazon to shop anything, the website also gives you a winning combination of products you may also like to buy. This is the romance and power of your previous product searches and you thought it is by change, no way boy. In business terms this is known as customer-centric marketing.

In Conclusion

One cannot deny the fact that the online retail industry is in relatively early stages of adopting content analytics and is proliferating faster than anticipated. An effective content analytics strategy will provide a fillip to the organization's revenue through brand awareness, increased customer retention and loyalty and will give the best ROI with a small investment. As consumers are more hooked to shopping via mobiles or computers, the use of analytics in predicting their trends will be a boon for retailers in terms of sales and would be instrumental to the growth of the sector.