Content Marketing Infographic: How Data is the Driving Force | Fold7 Content based Marketing is setting a new trend with Data Driven Insight

A new report conducted by The Content Marketing Association (CMA), in collaboration with MEC and iProspect, reveals key industry trends and how data is proving to be a goldmine for inbound marketers. 90% of the CMA’s members said that they were using consumer data to inform their topic based content strategies, whilst 83% said they were planning to use data more to shape their strategies in the coming year. That said, here are some of the key takeouts from the report, which go further to prove that content is more powerful when it’s data-driven. Video consumption stronger on mobile Research conducted by iProspect, which looked at nearly 1 billion Facebook ad impressions from November 2014 to February 2015, revealed that videos watched on mobile had the highest percentage of completed views (0.49%), twice as high as desktop (0.24%). It will be interesting to see how this insight might impact brand social media content strategies given that Facebook is expected to generate more than £750 million from advertising this year in the UK.

Desktop exposure better for sales iProspect’s research also identified that whilst not as successful with video view completion, audiences who had seen video ads on a desktop were over five times more likely to then make an online purchase than those who had seen ads on a mobile device. Angus Wood, head of research and development at iProspect UK, advises content marketers to “invest in multiple creative executions, where more sales focused messaging in video is targeted to desktop users.”

Alt Tag: Data Driven Content Marketing Practical content is the biggest driver of shares MEC’s citation audit, which identified the top 50 most shared pages for a range of sectors and motivations for sharing, uncovered editorial as being the biggest driver of sharing marketing collateral; typically how-to guides or essential lists. Ben McKay, managing director at MEC comments that, “The most correlating factor for why content is shared is because it has practical value… As with editorial, this typically tends to be because of the length of time the content has been live on the web.” Don’t forget the human in the machine Throughout the report, the importance of deconstructing data and implementing key insights into content strategies is evident but what also resonates is the need to be human. Yes data can inform and shape your marketing strategy but this is insignificant if the content produced is mediocre – it almost devalues the data. Fraser Allen, CEO at White Light Media cites psychologist Nathalie Nahai in the report to stress how brands need to win the hearts of their target audience: “Big data is a fascinating development but it’s only effective when applied alongside other contextual tools… We don’t act as automatons in response to technological drivers, we react as humans. It’s amazing how few brands think about the psychology of individuals in their audience.”

The report, which is the first of four in a series produced by the CMA looking at issues driving innovation in data driven content marketing, provides some interesting insights, which have the potential to shape our industry. Most notably: those who ignore the power of mobile do so at their own peril and targeting audiences on the right device should be an important consideration in any content driven marketing strategy. But above all, our growing fascination with the science of a marketing piece should never displace the need for good, quality content that speaks to audience. Here is some of the video content marketing and creative strategies we use for our brands. Read the full report published by the CMA on data driven content marketing.