A key strategy now for data-driven marketing is to become your own publisher.

At the university level the common refrain is publish or perish, tenure for a professor hangs in the balance of how quickly and how well they can publish a riveting piece of literature. Today the same goes for data-driven marketing; a key strategy in data-driven marketing is to become your own publisher by producing your own content.

Content doesn’t just mean posting lengthy reports or witty news posts, content can be videos, blog posts, slideshows, or images.  “Content strategy” is quickly becoming just as critical in marketing a brand as “social strategy.” Here’s why:

  1. In the near future, brands and organizations will create new or augment existing roles for editors and publishers to create timely, relevant, and captivating content on all social media channels.
  2. Social networks now allow brands to reach a wider audience and the “democratization of publishing” allows brands to create their own content.
  3. “Once we introduce a social object, we must be ready to back it up with additional relevant content, and create a publishing calendar programmed specifically for each network on which we maintain a presence.” – B. Solis, author of Engage

Content must be:

  1. Timely – marketers should aspire to make evergreen content or content that’s as appropriate today as it is six months from now.
  2. Relevant – all content should be of interest to your audience and targeted to inform and educate them.
  3. Captivating – dull jargon based content will not get shared and passed around your audience.  Keep content fresh and exciting while still informative.

We are obligated to build pipelines that carry strategic communications, each with calculated intents, targets and outcomes.

Owned Media

Content goes under the heading of owned media.

For example, in addition to standard web pages, social media presences contribute to our portfolio of owned media including Twitter accounts, Facebook Fan Pages, Blogs, YouTube channels, etc. By creating presences in the communities where our customers, prospects, partners, and influencers congregate and collaborate, we can lay the foundation to contribute “earned” social objects of value.

The more data-driven marketers can build this foundation with published content, the greater the opportunity to engage and create conversations about a brand.