What CMOs Need to Know About Data Informed Content Marketing
Driven by trends in lower performing advertising and changing consumer behaviors, many marketers have embraced content with the majority of companies adopting the practice.
According to CMI and MarketingProfs 2017 Content Marketing Benchmark report, the most successful B2B marketers spend an average of 39% of their marketing budget on content marketing and 39% plan on increasing spending in 2017.
However, even with the promise of greater marketing performance through content, organizations are challenged to produce a variety of engaging content on a consistent basis and there are a few key reasons why:
What’s missing in the content marketing success equation where clarity is not so clear, commitment is not in full force and most companies think their success needs improvement?
A study by Forrester reports that companies only analyze 12 percent of the data they have available.
While there are numerous resources available from platforms to best practices, many marketers implement a sizable percentage of their content creation efforts based on something other than data. A 2016 study by Conductor found that 38% of content marketers rarely use data and 45% of B2C content marketers don’t target their content.
When it comes to content, creators are traditionally more art than science and using data to guide editorial planning is still not an advanced skill for many companies. In many other cases, content creators don’t have access to analysts to interpret data in a meaningful way or the tools and training to do it themselves.
Despite these obstacles, an international study by GDMA and the Winterberry Group, found that 80% of respondents believe customer data is critical to their marketing and advertising efforts. Top digital marketing executives agree:
For some companies most of the available data to direct content creation comes from a variety of sources. There is value in understanding customer preferences through different data sources. In particular, an understanding of customer preferences for information discovery, consumption and interaction while looking for solutions are key. This kind of data insight helps reach some of the top goals marketers have for using data including a better customer experience and optimizing performance of campaigns.
Beyond the opportunity for better marketing and personalization, data informed content experiences are expected by customers. The use of data to create and present the right content for the right audience at the right time is something customers experience on a daily basis and for brands that don’t it can create a disadvantage.
It can be tempting for marketers to approach data informed content marketing practices purely through applied tactics, without attention to operational considerations. A holistic view from a marketing strategy standpoint as well as how it applies organizationally can create efficiencies for implementation and performance optimization.
As far as we’ve come with content marketing, many companies still take a brand-centric, some say ego-centric, view of content. When empathy with the customer information journey is not front and center of content marketing planning, there is no motivation to collect, interpret and apply data. Senior marketing executives must make an effort understand this disconnect and implement change and resources in their marketing to leverage insights from data to create better customer experiences.
The role data plays in informing more effective content should focus on goals and measurement, successes and failures. It is the age old approach of scaling what’s working and discontinuing what’s not. That starts with having clear objectives documented for the contribution content will make to marketing and the key metrics used to track performance.
