Your audience wants custom content; Give them what they want. Recent studies on content marketing have shown that:
- 90 percent of people find custom content useful.
- 78 percent of people feel that organizations providing custom content want to build a relationship with them.
- 61 percent of people are more likely to engage with an organization that creates custom content.
Give people content that speaks directly to them and they are more likely to value your organization and engage with you.
IT STARTS WITH BIG DATA
Big Data refers to collecting and using the data you have (or can get) about your audience. This includes demographic and psychographic information, analytics of actions taken, audience research, etc. Effective marketers analyze all of the data points to see if there is any correlation that predicts interests and likeliness to take action. They then build audience personas that reflect the insights gleaned from the data analysis. Personas provide a way to categorize audience subsets in a way that may reflect interests, traits and, ultimately, predict behavior. Then, marketers segment the audience by assigning each person a persona that the data indicates is the best match. Finally, marketers develop campaigns specifically for each persona to drive members of that subset towards completing a desired action. The best marketers create comprehensive lifecycle management campaigns to retain and drive people to make more meaningful actions over time. And then they monitor and update the data to reflect these actions.
It’s a lot of work. But it may be worth the work, prompting target audiences to be more active and engaged.
DATA DRIVES CONTENT CREATION
Content creation (aka content marketing) involves creating and sharing media (e.g., photos, images, video, text, white papers, case studies) in order to engage key audiences. Its intent is not to sell but, rather, to communicate. The idea is to inspire loyalty from the audience by delivering consistent, ongoing valuable information. Increasingly, audiences don’t distinguish between content produced by mainstream media and other organizations.
Good content marketing is developed to appeal to each persona, using custom messages, images and calls to action – and this content is ideally delivered via their preferred communications channels.
TOGETHER, BIG DATA AND TARGETED CONTENT DRIVE ACTION
Tailored content marketing doesn’t just increase web visits, web conversions, time spent online, and engagement – it ultimately drives audiences to meaningful action. In fact, it may produce better results for significantly less money than traditional advertising or public relations strategies.
