What is marketing?

The new buzz in the market is “data-driven content strategy”. This begs the question: what is marketing? Marketing is no longer about the fluff. It is about clever content, with measurable results, that feed into your bottom line.

What is the meaning of data-driven marketing?

Steve Jobs stated that deciding what to do is as important as deciding what to do.

Deciding what to doo

Most companies’ don’t understand marketing and fail to see how marketing has been revolutionised through the mass amount of raw data made available due to the changing digital landscape. When defining your marketing strategy you need to look closely at data and content. Content with useful and measurable insight is the only this that markets. If you think of the age of the caveman, even the drawings can be considered marketing where someone was looking to communicate.

Define your data.

Jay Baer, author of Youtility said that marketing is any piece of communication that a company creates to drive a desired interaction. With digital disruption and internet savvy audiences marketing has evolved and companies who are not at the forefront of understanding their markets and customers are battling to grasp the concept of data driven marketing.

Big data must now be considered and integrated into your marketing.

Content marketing is badly misunderstood

In the 60’s to 80’s we had broadcasting, everyone saw the same product and this lead to persuading customers to use your product or solution. The marketing collided with the internet and the dawn of “big data” arrived.

In a recent article in the Gibs magazine the advice is to gear marketing, through clever use of data to “hyper scale” your operations. Think Amazon, think “mass is back” as “networks now encompass the communication of information between devices” now is the time of the IoT (internet of things).

Data meaning:

When you Google “what is marketing” you get About 969,000,000 results in (0.49 seconds). 20% of Google searches every day have never been typed before. So how do you do marketing? How do you get your message across?

Data. Data. Data.

You need to go back to the drawing board. Let’s look at data meaning and marketing taking devices into account.

Ask yourself these 2 questions;

  1. Is my traffic mobile?
  2. Is this mobile traffic mainly via cellphone or tablet?

You need to understand the data to determine your content marketing strategy moving forward. Know what this data means for your marketing plan and what to do with the insight gained through your data.

Data gives brands power in marketing
When building your content marketing strategy you need data. It affects the delivery of your message i.e. a cellphone user is on the move vs a tablet user is possibly chilling on the couch or sat at a coffee shop. This means you need to cater for their attention span when relaying your message.

Conventional marketing fluff.
Data allows you to earn your seat at the table, to be seen and heard and open the channel to interactive and 2 way interaction. The great thing about this? Marketing becomes a shared commodity where brand advocates market for you.

People buy from people.
The trick is to take all that data and add meaning and allow for customers to tell your story in their own words. 5 reasons business need content driven by clearly defined and researched data?

  1. Brand Awareness
  2. SEO (Google)
  3. Engagement (User)
  4. Thought Leadership
  5. Lead Generation
  6. Conversion

Speak directly in their voice, in the right way. This is marketing. Powered by data.

Remember: If you are not using data, then you are wasting your time.

Jessica McEndoo

Author: Jessica Rose McEndoo,

Head of Social Media & Content at BlueMagnet