Data-driven content marketing rocks, Eric Ingrand says. In a workshop filled with best practices and cool case studies, Eric and Gianfranco Cuzziol will cover how data analytics can help content marketers build a sharp and measurable content strategy in this age of data-driven marketing.
Don’t miss this workshop at i-SCOOP’s Content Marketing Conference 2014 from Gianfranco Cuzziol and Eric Ingrand. We asked both of them to share a practical tip as a preview to their workshop.
Gianfranco Cuzziol: Brands can’t create valuable content if they don’t understand how their customers buy. Before setting about creating a content strategy, it’s worth spending time understanding the stages that customers go through in the decision making process and getting to grips with customers want at each point.
Talk to customers, look at data and of course do it for yourselves. You would be surprised at the number of brands that don’t know how their customer buy. Yes, the journey might not be linear but at least this way you can create content to cover all bases.
Eric Ingrand: Hire a data scientist and make sure he does not sit with the IT team but with the marketing team, let them have lunch together, let them share their objectives and monitor the results. Data alone is as useful as a creative guy looking at a database.
Let them share their stories, objectives and frustration to come up with clever ideas to monetize all the data you are collecting every day, and not utilizing to generate more targeted ways to communicate with your existing and future clients.
As the theme of the conference is creating business value through customer value, using content marketing, we also asked Eric and Gianfranco what is one of the most important ways that content marketing creates value for customers.
Eric Ingrand: Content Marketing delivers the answers that your customers are asking Google! Quality content gives your audience more reasons to come back to your shop, online or offline.
Deliver the most accurate, clear and honest information where your customers are looking for information: Google, social media, forums, blogs…
Creating quality text, video, images or games will give your customers a good reason to be loyal to your brand now and tomorrow and clearly this is important to your future!
Gianfranco Cuzziol: Of course that depends on what the customer perceives as valuable to them at that particular time.
Value can be defined as being useful to a customer because it helps them make an informed decision about. That decision might be the creation of an initial shortlist of brands, the choice of models within a range or indeed which finance package to go with. But what provides real value to the customer is not just the content to help make those decisions but the ability to access that content at the right time based on individual customer needs.
