It’s fair to say that content marketing is both one of the oldest and newest disciplines in the marketing world. A content approach, which is typically more about addressing the customer’s needs than product-centric advertising, has been the bedrock of magazines, direct mail and email newsletters for years. But the ways in which we can tailor and target content to be truly relevant has never been newer. And with the rise in online marketing now eclipsing TV, it has to be. There are simply too many competing messages in the marketplace not to drive for better relevance. Enter content’s love affair with data…
And yet, using data to develop a results-driven content marketing strategy and prove its value isn’t a walk in the park. In fact, proving the ROI of a content marketing program is something that keeps many people in the industry up at night.
But while other marketing professionals are tossing and turning, Adam Braxton, VP of Strategic Insights, sleeps just fine. Adam knows what goes into developing a content marketing strategy based off of research, insights and legit business objectives. Yes, legit, because that’s where creating a solid strategy that gets results all begins: at the business objectives.
In your new role as VP of Strategic Insights, what’s your main focus?
Here at Pace, one of the core goals of my job is to help determine how we constantly maintain relevance to our changing audience. Part of how we do that is through editorial expertise, as well as strategically analyzing data—not just website data, but also data pulled from all the various forms of the content ecosystem that contributes to the entire customer experience. Together, these allow us to make a more informed strategic decision so that we can get closer to truly understanding what our audience wants. We’re investing in building true editorial insight tools and developing some of the smartest analytical individuals in content. Just like our content, we optimize constantly as well.
At its core is the concept of ‘design thinking.’ Design thinking is all about how we may/should fail often, but also win often, so that we are constantly learning and adapting to our audience to drive relevance. We mitigate that failing by learning constantly as we go and starting off with a solid research foundation. Some content that we create isn’t always going to work for an audience, but it’s not considered a ‘fail’ if we learn from it. We work with analytics, account strategy and editors to evaluate our content and what’s working and what’s not. It’s a cyclical process that, depending on the client and ‘the ask,’ plays out over and over again. A lot of the content we produce is evergreen, and whether we’re pushing out new content weekly or monthly, our design-thinking process ensures that we continue to learn and tailor the content back to the audience.