Whoa there, Gut of Jay!
For those of us who want to break the wheel of current content marketing, data can be our friendly sledgehammer!
I think, and I await the appropriate smack down if/when I am wrong, rational, non-obsessive data crunching can:
- Help all of us better understand our rat people,
- Help those of us with bosses convince the entrenched that our ideas could work, and
- Prove that they did (or did-ish!) work, which allows us to keep on kicking convention to the curb.
Here’s what I mean, though I know you don’t care/already know😉:
Our primary source of inspiration is our audience, right? Our customers, the people we want to be customers/listeners/subscribers/believers. Our rat people, as Paul Jarvis says.
Everything we know about them is data! If we know seven are in-house marketers, three are journalists, 18 are recruiters and 2,654 are college undergrads majoring in marketing, then we can assume the best place to reach them will be on Snapchat with a branded “Unthinker!” filter that turns their head into a yellow balloon on graduation day.
(no, I don’t think you can really do that yet, but I’m spitballing, here — and that would be hilarious on graduation day, parents so proud)
If you didn’t have data, you might assume that your audience is full of journalists, since they’re the ones who ask questions in the comment section (again, spitballing, my Brain isn’t as good as yours). So you’d spend your cash creating phat/fat (I just did that) branded, noise-cancelling Beats headphones — bright yellow with a big black U, “Unthinking…” written in an arc — and shipping them to noisy newsrooms.
I’m so darn with you that data-because-hashtag-big-data shouldn’t swoop down and burn the creative crop that feeds our grazing readership — those happy non-converters, those dark sharers, the people who hang on to the way your content makes them feel — just because that crop doesn’t turn a measurable profit.
But I feel that when we wield data power for good, we can do good, BETTER.
Data says you shouldn’t bother talking about this with people like me, though. #NotAnInfluencer 😢🤔
I may have undone my whole point just then. 😆
