Content marketing is increasingly understood as "disseminating information through owned media" or "essentially creating web magazines." Consequently, it often begins as a replacement or supplement to traditional mass advertising.
It starts with declarations like: "Let's own our media and actively disseminate information from it!" or "TV commercials alone don't reach young people effectively. Let's create compelling digital content and spread it widely!"
After a month or two, they look at metrics like PVs, UU, and shares. They summarize how many people came, how many watched to the end, how many shared it – whether it was good or bad – and then think about the next new initiative. (Or it ends as the campaign budget is spent.) This is the typical type of work.
But if we stop here, I believe we'll miss out on the true fruits content marketing should yield.
Because what content marketing aims to do goes beyond "publishing digitally." It's about "using digital publishing to drive action from existing and potential customers." In other words, by continuously "driving action from existing and potential customers" online, data accumulates. If you can properly interpret that data, it reveals challenges in your marketing communications and business operations.
What trends and accumulated data reveal
When you consistently publish content on a content platform and people become aware of it, various individuals start engaging around that platform (incidentally, if you do nothing, people typically drift away). While monitoring these activities at fixed points, simultaneously analyze the data accumulated over six months or a year. In some cases, proceed with analysis while gathering supplementary data, such as through surveys. Continuing this process reveals various insights that wouldn't be apparent from campaign-period communications alone.
For example:
・What themes, angles, or contexts do people actually want?
・Where do users' actual needs truly lie?
・How have customer sentiments toward the brand changed compared to three months ago, six months ago, or a year ago?
What previously could only be explained by creative intuition or proven through limited group interviews—and was often difficult to convince senior management of—can now be demonstrated with objective data. Moreover, data collected over several months carries greater credibility than smaller figures gathered over just a few weeks.
In one case I was involved with, an education company consistently published content teaching "the right way" for about six months. This revealed high-demand user needs and, conversely, themes that struggled to attract an audience. Combining these findings with qualitative data from social listening and insights from the sales floor led to discussions that clearly redefined the client's business strengths and the areas needing reinforcement.
Content marketing is different from advertising creative
Planning and producing content costs money. Maintaining a web magazine requires both volume and effort. Often, people eventually burn out from the effort, and when pressed to justify the budget, they seize the opportunity to stop. However, doing so risks rendering all the data accumulated up to that point useless.
The real question is how to extract actionable insights for the future from the facts revealed through persistence. Content marketing that focuses on this is, from the outside, very similar to advertising creative, but in reality, it is entirely different.
From the Front Lines of Content Marketing [27]
