The Importance of Data-Informed Content Marketing

After surveying over 750 B2B and B2C marketers on content marketing topics ranging from the editorial process to competitive insight to SEO skills, the folks at Conductor reached out to me with a few stats and asked for my reaction to a few questions about data informed content.

First, I appreciate the ease of this kind of contribution and visibility on a topic that is such a good match for my expertise and experience.

Second, this is a very smart influencer content marketing approach. Conduct research and then ping relevant industry influencers for quotes to include in the report. Those influencers will then be inspired to share to their networks or as I am prone to do, publish my contribution here on LinkedIn.

Here are the two questions related to data-informed marketing. I've given my own reply but I am really curious what you, my LinkedIn network, thinks about these issues as well.

Why do you think so many content marketers don’t use data? How is it important to content marketing and what are some ways content marketers can use data to find real, actionable insights about their audience engagement and content performance?

38% of Content Marketers Rarely Use Data

New Territory: For many editorially driven content creators, using data is new territory. It's simply not in their skill-set to confidently use data as a part of their editorial process. Another common issue is a lack of access to data or formats without meaningful insight. Showing a copywriter a data dump from web analytics isn't very useful for example. Many content marketers simply don't have access to data reporting tools, analysts or have the skills to implement data informed recommendations even if they do. 

Empathy with the customer journey is one of the most important elements of content marketing. Understanding the journey from the customer point of view gives content marketers the perspective they need to create relevant, engaging content that inspires action like sharing and transactions. Data about a target audience and their preferences for information discovery, content formats and platforms for consumption and the messages that will trigger action is priceless to a content marketer. 

Analyzing data about actual customers to segment and create profiles can be very useful to inspire content creators about who they're actually writing for. Data can be turned into a persona that writers can relate to and in turn, create content that buyers will respond to. 

Targeting content is something marketers preach often, but don’t seem to do very often. Why is that? And why is aligning content especially important in content marketing (especially since it’s growing so rapidly)??

45% of Content Marketers Don’t Target Their Content

The spirit of content marketing: Creating useful content for a specific group of customers with the objective of influencing action is pretty much the definition of content marketing. I think many marketers intuitively target their content towards whatever information they have about the audience and often times, that's not much. In the absence of well-researched and current customer personas, targeting is superficial. 

Plan to win! Along with customer identification, mapping the buying journey is important for effective content targeting. That means a matrix of content planning and many marketers simply don't see how they can editorially manage something like 5 customer segments, each with a 5 stage buying journey.

Play the matching game. Aligning content to what distinct customer groups care about as they progress through awareness, consideration and decision is fundamental to creating a great content experience that delivers needed information to buyers and inspires sales. As more companies increase their content marketing sophistication and personalization of content, it's more important for companies to understand the importance of content that is targeted to specific information needs for specific groups of customers.

My contributions above were featured alongside Ann Handley, Joe Pulizzi, and Jason Miller in these two B2B and B2C content marketing books from Conductor, so be sure to check them out.

Interestingly, when the excellent Alan Quarry interviewed me at the recent Uberflip UFX2016 conference, his last question was about "what's next?". My answer was: data. More specifically, data informed storytelling and the cycle of iterative improvement that comes from: hypothesis, implementation and testing, monitoring and optimization. Here's that full interview:

THANK YOU for reading! Be sure to find my pithy tips, news and insights on "the Twitter" at @leeodden. If you like the photo above, it came from my Instagram account. Of course, I pay the bills by working at TopRank Marketing and do a little blogging at TopRank's Online Marketing Blog.