Most of you are aware that James Mathewson and I have a new book out, Outside-In Marketing, which helps content marketers to use big data to improve their results. James and I have been gratified by the reception the book has received, including this article from Paul Gillin including a podcast with me.
You probably are familiar with both content marketing and big data as concepts, but maybe you haven’t considered how they work together. Content marketing’s goal is to attract people to your product, but without data, you are shooting in the dark.
Too many marketers are treating content marketing as a popularity contest. They judge their content marketing based on whether they are getting eyeballs–whether it goes viral. But we need instead to focus on content that is attracting the people who are most likely to buy from you, whether that is the majority of folks or not. Usually, it is not. Usually you are selling to just a subset of the population exposed to your content marketing.
The way to identify these people is by employing analytics. You need to focus on understanding who the audience is (using social media listening, search keyword analysis, and other techniques), which content those people are looking at (using social analytics and web analytics), and which content is actually creating new customers (through online and offline conversion data).
Don’t putter along randomly creating content and hoping for the best. Use the data at your disposal to target your content at the people who really matter.
