You invest a lot in content to drive business. But is your content ticking the right boxes for customers? Remember, today’s buyers are self-reliant; they are harder to please because they are well-informed and won’t settle for the same old stuff that goes in the name of marketing.
Most senior marketing leaders realize their content must be engaging, but they are unsure what that means. They rely too heavily on in-house talent or freelancers and become frustrated when the promised value doesn’t materialize. So, it’s crucial to understand what engaging content means so you can deliver it to your target audiences.
For example, suppose your approach to content creation involves producing periodic one-size-fits-all pieces that can be modified only to a limited extent and using marketing metrics to cull insights about consumers’ past behavior to evaluate current campaigns. In that case, you are driving on the wrong side of the road, and modern content marketing is headed in the opposite direction. You must develop capabilities to create messages and content in large volumes, monitored by performance analytics, which you can adjust from time to time.
Hiring 'whole-brained' agencies
Winning marketers are those who are willing to think outside the box and use data to move closer to consumers. If your in-house content team is uncomfortable using data and analytics, hire an agency with data-driven content producers and experience designers. Whether in-house or outsourced, today’s content creators require a broader skill set with a balanced mix of left- and right-brain skills.
According to McKinsey’s research, companies that integrate data and creativity grow revenues twice the average S&P 500 company. While an agency produces the content, managers measure the output and track performance, and a combined effort brings results.
Why are data-driven content producers critical?
It’s logical: Marketing metrics look backward, while data and analytics look ahead. Marketing metrics stress consumers’ past behavior to evaluate current campaigns, and it’s not always a good fit. Customers are paradoxical entities that can be fixed in patterns and go off the grid. So, predictive metrics are crucial to mapping their behavior. Data analytics (real-time or near-real-time) help:
- Anticipate unmet consumer needs.
- Identify opportunities that you never knew to have existed, and
- Reveal customers’ pain points.
Data analytics also help predict the best next action to take, including commercial messages and engagement. You can plan the right content mix to educate and deepen customer relationships, build communities, cross-sell, upsell, and retain consumers.
Read the article, how to create personalized content at scale, to know how modern marketing rewards you handsomely when you deliver a world-class personalized customer experience, and convert that into profitable growth for your organization.
Mental bondage
Ideas and numbers have always faced off in marketing. Creative directors, designers, and copywriters believe – and want everyone to think – that creativity forges emotional bonds with customers, and using data and analytics ruin the magic. However, the reality is that creativity and data are not adversaries; they are complementary.
The best marketers are only combining the power of human intuition with insights garnered from granular data, but they are also integrating this powerful combo across the marketing value chain. It begins with brand strategy, customer experience, product development, pricing, media, and creative development and ends with content. It is the trajectory of today’s marketing; this is how you must produce content and how you drive growth and ROI.
Company's bottom line
Companies using the combo of data and creativity boost their revenues twice as the average S&P 500 company. If you employ this combo in your marketing strategy, you may not see your creative output as world-class or iconic, but you will see your efforts as engaging and unique. By achieving 10+ percent growth, you will feel like a core contributor to the creation of brand equity.
How to meet customer expectations?
Mining for insights from Data analytics (real-time or near-real-time) will help you unearth customer interests, intentions, unmet needs, precise pain points, and triggers. It is the secret to improving content experience. Make this a part of your day-to-day process instead of using analytics as isolated, adjacent elements.
Share consumer insights and data analytics
Keep insights and data analytics an in-house marketing function to give your internal team complete control over its work product. Rapid experimentation, testing, and learning with new campaigns and designs are critical, so share your customer insights and data analytics with your content-creating agency.
Measurement
It is relatively easy to track the results of direct-response channels such as email and search engine marketing. But a holistic measure of online and traditional media and the degree of campaign success due to creative content and messages requires mashing up existing technologies and approaches.
A media mix allows you to track both online and traditional marketing channels, helping you follow all the touchpoints to address across a customer’s journey. Additionally, advanced machine learning can combine the two and use an adaptive model to forecast the impact of shifts in marketing spending.
What next?
Engage with your audiences in new ways and use storytelling to create more immersive brand experiences. Heighten consumer engagement with data-driven content and personalized experiences across all channels. The success ratio of data-driven storytelling is legion. So, stop repurposing content and campaigns from traditional channels and focus on digital-first content, or you will not be able to taste the results pie.
Discard past patterns and embrace new realities. Analytics is a fantastic window into people’s behavior which points to where your imagination needs to go. In the best case, it can even inspire your creativity.
Read the article, integrate creativity, analytics, and purpose to drive growth, to know how 7% of companies that strategically unify creativity, analytics, and purpose are delivering at least 2.3-2.7 times the growth of their peers.
Leading marketers have understood it. Now, it is your turn.
We can help you develop a brand story, message, storytelling, and buyer personas, build personalized marketing strategies and create strategic content.
