Use Data To Create Content

We’ve been writing more frequently on this blog about using your data to drive your marketing. To take this line of thinking one step further your data can go beyond informing only your marketing but also the content you create.
While ‘Content Marketing’ is definitely a current buzzword, once you’ve started to try to create or procure content you realize it takes work. Besides trying to be relevant content creation can be easily followed by the dreaded writers block. Here are a few ideas to help integrate your marketing AND your content with your data:

Research

Companies typically invest in research, and oftentimes within different areas of the organization – not just marketing. While marketing often houses much of the research in regards to the brand and customers, it is imperative to trail breadcrumbs of how this data is used by different departments, as often this will unveil other key data sources connecting to the brand and customers, such as keyword (organic and paid) reporting, usability testing, surveys, ethnography, and interviews, to name a few.

Customers

There is nowhere better to start to engage customers than with the data you already have on customer habits, patterns, and preferences for both online and offline behaviors. Some of this is wrapped up in research and analytics noted above, but including things such as backed sales consumption data, email campaign performance and triggers, call center logs, etc., are all great sources for content.

Competitive

It is important to know what is happening with your competitors via websites, marketing creative and media presence, social platform presence, press releases, white papers, webinars, conferences, or anything that can ensure you are armed with information to understand the main strategic pillars for their content strategy and how or why this may change over time. Then this understanding of their strategy can be applied against your company’s positioning against the competition.

Testing

No matter what your role is within an organization, embracing a culture of testing is necessary to allow your business to change and evolve with consumer preferences and advances in technology consumption/capabilities. Change is inevitable; the more an organization can be embraced rather than opposed, the more you have the ability to be responsive to the needs of consumers.

(via Clickz)

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