Big Data’s Impact on Content Marketing

The age of traditional marketing and advertising techniques is pretty much over no matter how much the old guard pretends like it’s not. Today, it’s all about businesses promoting their brands, products, and overall vision through creative content. Think of it as the new way to grab consumers’ attention, one that, in the right hands, can be more effective than the older methods employed for so many decades. That obviously leads to the question of how best to utilize content marketing. After all, poor content marketing appears to be prevalent among many organizations that don’t seem to understand the concept completely. This poor content adds little of value and gets next to no attention through some of the most important social media channels out there. Those businesses who truly want to get the most out of their content marketing will do best by looking at big data analytics. In fact, the impact of big data on content marketing could be revolutionary.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that good content marketing requires good content to begin with, and yet that very idea is one of the most difficult things to capture. What makes good content, anyway? Marketers will no doubt have different answers to that question, but big data has the potential to accurately define what passes for good content. The crucial element lies in data collected on the current and potential customers the business is targeting. This shouldn’t necessarily be something new for an organization, especially if they’re using that data for other marketing strategies, but analyzing big data from consumers means getting more than just hard statistics. Through sentiment analysis from social media and other platforms, businesses can get a concrete sense of what kind of content customers like to consume in the first place. Big data also helps in determining what motivates consumers, how they like content delivered, and what they respond best to.

The true key to success unlocked through big data is the creation of original content for content marketing purposes. Businesses are gathering data on their own anyway, and an effective use of this information is to convert it into original content, which can be used for a marketing strategy. That means specialized blog posts, infographics, handy videos, and anything else that has the potential to go viral. Even if original content doesn’t spread all over social media, it can also establish a company as a voice of the industry, one that becomes a thought leader for other organizations to follow.

There are plenty of examples of companies that have taken the big data they’ve collected and turned it into great original content marketing. They include General Electric, OKCupid, and Kickstarter. This can be seen in Kickstarter’s special report detailing statistics from data that they collected on their company. This is the type of content that draws eyeballs, in part because the infographics involved are well produced but also because it’s information that users can’t get anywhere else. Many companies simply try to repackage data from other sources, but the big data collected by the organizations themselves is unique. With that type of viral content, businesses can expect more traffic. Consumers simply see that content as providing value, and it in turn may even result in a stronger social media following, leading to more viral content somewhere down the line. It’s a factor that is too often overlooked by companies, especially when they can provide content that also includes a call to action for users.

With these types of big data solutions, it becomes clear that content marketing can grow in unprecedented ways. Big data can truly impact content marketing by boosting traffic, increasing visibility, establishing an industry voice, and promoting transparency for the organization. Big data enables organizations to tell engaging stories through data journalism, providing new opportunities for growth and expansion. Big data also informs companies on what type of content will be most effective for their marketing, whether it be broad. such as the latest fashion trends. or niche, like an insider look at hyper converged infrastructure. The overall impact big data analytics can have on content marketing is immense and overwhelmingly positive. Businesses not already using it would be wise to rethink their strategies.