How To Craft Better Content By Analyzing The Reaction Of Your Readers

Becoming a successful blogger is not free of challenges. Results are achieved with time and hard work on many fronts.

The first and greatest challenge is writing quality content: content that grabs the attention of your users so firmly that they will end up sharing their contact information with you just to receive updates.

However, once you get a lead, you are faced with a second challenge: actually keeping that lead.  

Just think how many times you have given out your email address to only regret it soon after.

More often than not, you end up receiving far too much content that is not entirely of your interest and that end up completely filling up your inbox… and there you are again having to cancel another newsletter.

In summary, the most difficult steps every blogger has to face are:

• Writing quality content that grab user attention;
• Turning leads into users; and
• Keeping users interested by developing a loyalty bond with them.

Currently there are many online tools that can help you obtain the results you are striving for. But in this post, I will only be discussing how to improve the content of your writing through three different analysis methods and how reactions are increasingly helping transform and engage users.

How to Improve Content Through Quantitative Analysis

As of today, analyzing your article data in a quantitative manner has become a crucial task to improve the content of your articles and move it in the direction preferred by your users.

“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming

To do so, you need to connect different pieces of information and get a clear view of how well your article is performing or how engaging a certain subject is compared to another.

There are multiple techniques to effectively analyze the performance of your article. Here are 3 of the most useful:

1) Analytics Study

By adequately tracking your blog through the use of analytics,  you will obtain a clear picture of how much your article is engaging users.

In order to fully understand content performance, bloggers must focus their attention on the following data:

• Pageview: the number of times a page has been viewed.
• Time on page: the average visit time on a certain page by the user.
• Bounce rate: the percentage of users who enter and exit from the page without any interaction and without viewing any other page on the website.

A good article performance is generally determined by a high number of pageviews, a high average time on page and a low bounce rate.

However, determining the exact parameters that define this data as good or bad depends on the purpose of the website itself.

For example, users who stumble upon your article through an engine search and do find an answer to their question, usually leave the page right after completing the read. Therefore, a high bounce rate is not necessarily a negative thing but it can definitely be improved by including, for example, more links that refer the user to other articles.

To learn more on how to improve said metrics you can read this interesting article on 4 Key Metrics to Better Understand Your Blog Posts Performance.

Among the tools that offer this type of analysis, some of the most used are:

• Google Analytics: definitely the most largely used tool, especially handy for its many graphs and visual data. It is also a tool that can easily be integrated to Content Marketing Platforms such as Contentools.
• Emojics: a tool that offers data monitoring combined with emoji reaction analysis, which can help you to understand your content performance more directly.
• Crazyegg: provides you with page heatmaps so that you can understand how users interact with your contact, or even the percentage of users who have viewed your entire article.

2)  Social Engagement Analysis

Social data analysis is crucial not only to develop effective strategies but mostly to understand the best way to interact with users.

The main elements to measure engagement in the social network world are:

• No. of Clicks on a post
• No. of Impressions  (the total number of views)
• No. of Shares
• No. of Comments

The most important KPI (key performance indicator) that should always be monitored, is the CTR (click through rate), which refers to the relation between the number of impressions and the number of clicks, in other words how many times the ad was viewed compared to how many times it was clicked.

In addition to the CTR, the CTOR (click-to-open rate) is also an important factor. In fact, distinguishing between number of clicks and number of users who click is very important. For example, if the same person clicks 3 times on the same ad, the CTR increases but the CTOR doesn’t.

These KPIs can also help you optimize your social channels by verifying which channels show the highest data, so that you can focus more on certain ones rather than others.

There are various tools that can help you monitor these metrics, among which Mention and Brand24.

These tools also use sentiment monitoring, which considers the degree of satisfaction expressed by users in their comments.

A sentiment analysis algorithm can help you understand if a product is viewed positively or negatively, based on the automatic analysis of the text of every published comment.

It is true that these algorithms are fairly “recent”, therefore their margin of error on idioms, context, or irony, still can’t offer much certainty in their results.

To learn more on how to improve your user engagement on social networks, read the 5 Aspects of Content Marketing That Can Help Your Social Media Efforts.

3) Reaction Analysis

Using the reactions on your blog to understand what piece of content are more engaging has proven to be a winning strategy to improve your articles.  

Did you know that you can actually track your readers’ reactions by using emojis? Since emojis were created, everything became much clearer at first sight, and emojis have in fact been classified as the new worldwide web language, due to their ability to overcome language barriers.

Just think about your Facebook wall! In a few seconds you are able to understand if the posted article is funny, sad, makes you angry, or makes you happy, even if it is written in Chinese. We can thank emojis for that.

To further understand how emojis are becoming a widespread trend, read this post on Forbes.  

The increase in the use of reactions is due to their engaging nature and immediacy in conveying user opinions.

Why writing “What a great article!” when you can simply click on an emoji?

This is why bloggers are increasingly interested in collecting feedbacks by using emojis.

In fact, after only 10 reactions, you can already understand:

• What emotions your article is producing,
• If you were successful in transmitting the emotions you intended
• If your users like what you wrote.

Quick to use and simple to understand: emojis make life easier for everyone

But how do you add emoji reactions to your blog? You can a tool like Emojics! Emojics is especially interesting because it doesn’t only allow you to make use of the insights that user reactions provide, but also help you personalize them with the emojis that better reflect the nature of your blog. That reflects in the personalization of your entire brand and increasingly engage your users who are more likely to leave their feedback using such fun and easy method.

When words fail…  Emojis speak!

Therefore, not only users can leave their feedback with a single click, but the results can be easily and instinctively interpreted, allowing you to understand the performance level of your content by analyzing the reactions to them and therefore providing you with a clear picture of who your users are, where they come from and what their preferences are.

Increase Your Conversion Rate Through Inbound Reaction Feedback

So marketers worldwide are now customizing interactions based on the emotions expressed by the reader.

For example, if your readers are happy or amused by your content, you can ask them to join your newsletter, whereas if they are angry you can ask them to leave you a comment or offer them a coupon code.

This method is not only unintrusive, since it doesn’t interrupt the reading of your article, but also helps you increase the conversion rate, by asking for contact information to users who have already expressed interest in your content and for private feedback to those who did not like it.

Use Reactions to Craft Personalized Content and Develop a Loyalty Bond With Your Lead

Creating a loyalty bond between you and your lead is the last, difficult step that any blogger faces.

More and more readers seem to expect that you actually be able to read their mind and send them only articles that interest them.

Since you have no such magical powers, what can help you solve this problem is the use of reactions which provide a complete map of your user’s preferences.

Through this data, creating detailed user segments based on the reactions that users leave, becomes in fact possible, allowing you to use marketing automation tools (such as, for example, MailChimp) to integrate preferences and  content and therefore send newsletters with customized content that can create an increasingly personal loyalty bond with your users.

In other words, you are able to identify your targets in a clear manner, without errors.

With this strategy, in fact, your users will never receive what they don’t like, but only what interests them!

How You Can Take Advantage of the Innovation Wave  

In conclusion, having a consistently clear vision of your data is crucial to increase content quality and improve strategies.  

Since in recent years, emojis have been revolutionizing interactions with users, being able to take advantage of this innovation wave through inbound reaction feedback, could prove to be a great strategy to improve articles, turn users into leads, and develop a loyalty bond with them by offering what they like best.

FABIOLA FARINA

Engineer & Founder of Emojics, a tool to collect feedbacks and leads through emojis | Previous employee at Cocontest Inc (backed by 500 startup, Draper vc) | Data Analyst at Accenture and Reply.