How Data can be Useful in Content Marketing: Let’s Hear from the Experts

The term “content marketing” is fairly new to the industry. It’s “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action,” according to Content Marketing Institute.

When first considering this marketing strategy, which is being used more and more by leading brands, you may ask yourself: what type of content is “valuable and relevant” and who makes up my “clearly defined audience?”

The answer lies in the data.

I’ve reached out to five different marketing professionals about how they think data can be useful in content marketing. Here’s what they had to say:

Hector Hernandez, Chief Digital Officer, McCann Worldgroup

“For content marketing, as well as for any other sub-discipline of digital marketing, the availability of data in real time is what defines its enormous potential to outperform any other traditional marketing action.

However, data by itself is just that: a potential. It needs context and purpose.

My recommendation for professionals who want to work in digital marketing, is that they learn to connect and interpret the data to obtain actionable insights, generate working hypotheses and reach clear conclusions.

Less talking about "data" as something abstract and more training in how to use it.”

Georgina Gonzalez-Robiou, Assistant Vice President of Marketing & Communications, Baptist Health South Florida

“At the core of any solid, sophisticated and disciplined marketing campaign is data. Data should help define, refine and optimize digital content marketing initiatives. The more you layer data, the closer you get to the true optimization of resources.

The goal, the joy, the amazing thing about a digital medium is the ability to successfully target a persona you have created by analyzing your consumer data, third party data about consumption trends, among others. The more data, the better, as long as it leads to intelligence that drives your planning, placement and measurement.

A good analogy for digital versus more traditional mediums is the difference between employing a sharpshooter or launching a grenade. Data enables that sharpshooting ability.”

David Hondal, Alumni Relations Special Events Coordinator, Florida International University

“Data is extremely useful in digital content marketing because it can help identify your target audience, trending topics, and customer preferences. A data-driven approach when creating your strategy can help you avoid wasting resources by trying to connect with the wrong audience in the wrong places.

It is also important to not only know what your audience is talking about, but whom they are listening to. Data can be used to leverage influencers by locating the proper partnerships to achieve the greatest success for your content.”

Georgi Pipkin, Director of Communications, Baptist Health South Florida

“Analyzing data in digital content marketing can be extremely beneficial to help businesses and organizations better understand their customers. Data can help identify target audiences, and trending topics or conversations happening online. At times, analyzing this information also helps identify groups of relevant influencers that you may want to target during your digital marketing campaign. In sum, the analysis of data behind a campaign can help to pinpoint the successfulness of it, why and how the audience interacted with it.”

Marissa Masso, Marketing and Public Relations Specialist, Baptist Health South Florida

“Data is useful in digital content marketing because it can help you define your target audience. Defining your target audience is an integral part of developing a content marketing strategy. Once a marketer has identified who their target audience is, they can focus their message to ensure that the marketing strategy is effective.”

So, what does this all mean?

It’s clear data can be extremely useful for defining the target audience(s) for your content marketing campaign, among many other things. Honing in on target audiences, gathering demographic, behavioral and even psychographic information about your target audience can help you determine the type of content you develop, what channels to execute on, when to publish content, and MORE!

By using data to drive your content marketing strategy, you can make a real impact on ROI. Combine it with an equally strategic paid media campaign, and you’re rolling with the world’s leading brands.

Like what you're hearing? Check out my last blog post.