Most businesses generate copious amounts of data. While data is big business in itself, it is also a great way to generate content. Even the most difficult niches to generate links for do well with data as their strategy – just take OK Cupid’s no defunct blog. This piece for example generated insanely high shares, not to mention the fact that their data as a blogging strategy got them large numbers of high quality links:
Statistics
People love seeing easy to digest stats. And apart from just educational purposes, marketers and bloggers everywhere love to quote these, which makes statistics as a content marketing strategy a pretty good one.
And although businesses tend to have a lot of interesting internal statistics, it isnt necessary to use your own, combine statistics with curation and lists and you could be on to a winner, see HubSpots Marketing Statistics page for example (which is a mix between their own statistics and data from other third parties):
Data learnings
Online marketers often use data learnings to drive traffic, social shares and links. That doesn’t mean any other business cant do this, the OKCupid example that we highlighted earlier is a perfect example of this.
Industry Insights
A couple of online marketing agencies email and mail out industry insights each month to prospective clients (we get about 10 at least a month!). The great thing about industry insights is that the data is usually available freely in many formats, and if you really want to go all out, high subscription level tools such as Hitwise have data that the average marketer may not have.
Building this into a useful digestible piece of information can go a long way into not just gaining you leads, customers and links, its a great way to establish yourself as an authority. The same way, any business can really use this, provided the right idea and skills exist.
Trends
Trends are very common in the B2B market, however we dont really see why trends cant be used as content for say B2C markets. Take for example large retail sites with hundreds of products. Most have “best sellers” lists.
The thing is, these can and do represent the latest trend in buying – which means that that data can be leveraged into encouraging others who havent thought of buying whatever the latest trend is into buying.
A weekly “trends” report via email, driving subscribers to a landing page with the best selling products, how they are being used, and a user generated piece with images maybe would work quite well for a fashion site for example. Topshop have gone a bit towards this goal, but missed the mark in my opinion:
Next have actually done it better with their Style Radar:
