Content Marketing: Content is King and Data is Queen.

Kessler is co-founder of Velocity - a UK-based B2B marketing agency.

We had a really interesting conversation last night at the Weber Shandwick Data Salon # 4 discussing the evolving role of data in content marketing at their offices in midtown Manhattan.

It was fun to start the event with an open-ended question: “What is content marketing?”

Responses ranged from SEO / SEM to story telling, from “clandestine sales”  to “paid not earned media.” In the end – there was no clear consensus, so I offered the Content MarketingInstitute definition:

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

In the face of vastly diminishing returns from traditional marketing / advertising investments, content marketing is being seen as a viable and necessary element in the modern marketing mix.

The observation was made that tech-savvy consumers are great at avoiding traditional advertising, so the marketing paradigm has shifted from “promotion” to “attraction” or inviting a conversation with customers / prospects using content marketing.

But how does a marketer know if they are producing relevant and engaging content, or remarkable content * – content that is worth noticing and remarking upon – sharing on social media / commenting / bookmarking?

*  [As defined by pundit Seth Goden in his classic book “PurpleCow”]

This boils down to how content marketing is approached: Is it the art of great content story telling or the science of using data to track which content best engages and converts prospects against predetermined business objectives?

Content and Data (left to right).

It’s likely to be both – so the notion that “Content is King and Data is Queen” was put forth and sparked a lively conversation. Data can certainly track user engagement and helps optimize subject matter, writing style and delivery venue based on how it is received. But astute audience members pointed out that does not necessarily foster innovative and highly creative content that will in fact get noticed, read, shared and ultimately impact consumer behavior.

One salon participant – who identified herself as a creative in the design field – pointed out that lots more people read her blog content if it is unique, innovative and creative… this was a blinding glimpse of the obvious.

So what's the big deal with content marketing?

I pointed out that it appears that many Fortune 500 companies don’t understand nor appreciate the full potential value of content marketing based on learning from a qualitative research project I am currently conducting on behalf of a leading global business publisher. This conclusion is drawn on the apparent lack of interest on the part of senior CMO level executives, and ad-hoc budgeting and project management approach most firms appear to be taking for content marketing programs, with often-tepid data analytic performance measurement.

The discussion went on the focus on the need to treat content marketing as on-going customer relationship management program, or in essence a friendly and useful dialogue that improves the perceived value of the company sponsoring the content, versus a one-off / ad-campaign like effort.

And like any smart marketing effort, the content marketing should be tied to clearly defined business goals against a well-defined target audience, with a desired end-outcome or “conversion.” This could be as simple as capturing contact information in exchange for information to actually selling a product or service as a result of content marketing driven engagement.

Well defined analytic framework.

The data measurements come in the form of web analytic data - ranging from overall and unique site visits to “bounce rates” and identification of web traffic sources. Some firms measure improvement in brand awareness / familiarity and “favor-ability” of their offerings. Savvy marketers work to attribute inquiries, leads and actual sales to their content marketing efforts.

So it looks like content marketing will continue to be a combination of art and science for the foreseeable future, a blend of remarkable content creation and smart data-driven analytic analysis on the back-end.