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It is said that knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
In our industry, a brand's voice is its content. It's a way to communicate not only what your brand values, but also what you know. Advertising, LinkedIn, blogs, podcasts, short videos… all the channels and media your brand speaks to.
But how do brands listen?
The answer is data. Similarly, brands listen through data.
This is like the modern business ear and is the core of marketing. Data can reveal transformational opportunities for brands, and for that reason alone, data is extremely valuable.
However, with so much information often unwieldy, marketers can easily get lost in the noise and miss what they need to hear.
Brands have access to vast amounts of data. But without a taxonomy (aka classification of that data), it's not as useful as it could be. So how can marketers hear data more clearly and use it to optimize strategy and make better decisions?
Just creating content is not enough, so listen to your audience first
Content creates connections, but data finds matches.
Brands often create new content over and over again without taking a deep look at what effect the content is having on their audience. That's completely wrong.
Especially in the age of AI, it is becoming increasingly easy to create large amounts of content on an unprecedented scale. But all this content is useless if you don't pay attention to engagement.
That means you need to ask what people are looking at. why? And for how long? And how did they get there?
These are just some of the questions you can answer with your existing data to foster meaningful connections with your audience. Data explains how your audience interacts with your content, what resonates and what doesn't. It also allows brands to ensure they get the right message in front of the right people.
That knowledge enables personalized and customized content strategies across a variety of platforms, shaping future content initiatives and ensuring that all the content you produce is relevant to your target audience.
And customization is the key to building a deeper connection with your audience.
put data into practice
By understanding audience preferences and behaviors, brands can deeply engage and incorporate modifications to suit the preferences of diverse audience segments so that end users feel heard and understood by the brand. You can deliver content that resonates with you.
There is a truism that cannot be ignored.
First, don't create content for your next campaign without first looking at what worked in previous campaigns and what drove engagement, and using that as a starting point. By listening to your data, you can build on strong content to create even more effective content.
Another reason (and here's where it gets a little complicated) is that you can't expect people to see the raw data. If you want to have a chance of getting anything good out of it, you first need to organize the raw data.
There is a lot of digital information in the world. But more data doesn't necessarily mean a brand will be more successful. Rather, the data you already have is sufficient. It just needs to be better organized.
And no, it's not a glamorous job to do. That's not why people become marketers. But it is fundamental and important to effective modern marketing. When data is properly organized and coded, marketers can unlock its true potential. This allows marketers to understand exactly what is working and why.
With that in mind, here are some tips and value-add details for organizing your data.
First, realize that your content is designed to interact with your audience. By categorizing content that tends to be viewed as various components (i.e. scripts, images, videos, audio captures, etc.) for future use and complementing it with layers of performance, marketers can create complete performance can be obtained. He has a 360 degree view of the content.
This means that the next time you create additional content for your campaign, you have access to learnings from previous campaigns related to overview and performance, allowing you to reuse or repurpose some of the assets you previously built and save money. You will be able to do it. Both time and cost. It also helps you choose the right agency based on content and synopsis effectiveness, resulting in smarter decision making.
Also, consider that high-quality content is only valuable if you establish similarly high-quality insights through your data. As such, brands should leverage metadata (essentially, overarching category tags that describe data sets) to provide context and increase discoverability.
By adding meaningful descriptions and tags, brands can increase the likelihood that their content will reach the right audience. As opposed to tagging too many semi-related topics, which clogs the data stream and clutters the data.
Successful brands continually iterate and improve their content strategies based on data insights. Make more informed decisions. Improving customer experience. Greater potential for growth. All phrases that should sound like music to a marketer's ears.
* * *
In the digital age of data-driven marketing, it's easy to think that content is king. Content is important, but quality content is most important.
Content strategy is only effective when supported by the right data. Through taxonomy and proper data organization, brands can gain valuable insights into audience interactions, create personalized content, and build deeper connections.
Again, knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens. In this data-rich landscape, success lies in not only creating more content, but also listening to your audience.
You can continue to create content at scale to power your marketing efforts, but your efforts will be inadequate until you start listening to the data.
More resources on optimizing your content using data
Content intelligence isn’t just for demand generation marketers
What you can learn from customer searches. Are you paying attention?
How to create and optimize content marketing for B2B funnels [Infographic]
3 ways to use customer data to deliver the brand experience your customers want
