Gathering audience data from your content

This essay originally was published on January 14, 2021, with the email subject line CT No. 69: "Foundations for a content-driven data strategy," alongside a review of cookie management tool Iubenda.

Congratulations! You’re regularly publishing content. Whether you’re a one-person show launching your newsletter or running a 50-FTE-deep enterprise brand content marketing operation, you’ve gotten past the first hurdle: getting something out the door on a semi-regular basis.

Now you have to take care of your audience, ensuring that they’ll stay with you for your publishing endeavors. And the first big step in ensuring that they grow with you? Having a sustainable data collection strategy.

“But I don’t want to collect or sell data,” you say. “I hate when ads follow me around on the internet, and I wanted to create content for an audience not for robots.”

Darling, you’ve built your career on a computer. You are creating and distributing data already, so you should understand how to collect, use and protect data responsibly.

Most content folks don’t start their careers thinking about the data they create and collect when they are producing and distributing content. For some reason we’ve built a world where numbers and words are considered wholly separate endeavors for two different types of people, and “data” connotes numbers.

Real talk: All the content we make with our screens and our keyboards becomes data, and interacting with an audience requires data management.

If you’re using a content management system, you’re creating structured data.

If you’re gathering email addresses in a newsletter, you’re collecting audience data.

Whether you think about it intentionally or willfully ignore it, data management is a part of your life as a content professional.

Legacy media companies have audience development departments (at least I hope they still do), filled with the information management pros who topped mainframes off with subscriber deets decades before databases were cool. (They’re still explaining their jobs to their families at the holidays, I assure you.)

Most brands and agencies leave data management and security to operations or have a separate analytics department that often doesn’t collaborate or integrate with content or publishing departments. Data given to marketers is rarely content-focused, or it’s so reductive that it doesn’t help make nuanced decisions (and that’s probably why so many editors still rely on pageviews, the worst metric ever).

Even now, 20 years after the rise of search engines, PPC, email newsletters, social channels and other tools, very few businesses devote resources to honing their digital first-party data collection strategy and approach.

And almost no one — except the most forward-thinking digital businesses — considers audience data collection as a facet of content strategy and website structure.

Why do you need audience data?

You need data about your audience so you can connect with existing subscribers and attract new ones. You need to be able to reach them on their preferred media, whether that’s via email or web or tv or social channels.

You also need data to maintain your audience’s interest and connection with your content. Unless you’re one of the lucky folks who can attract followers with a snap of your fingers or a bluster of opinions, you need to know what content your audience will read in the future. Good data significantly improves your audience's experience with your brand.

Most importantly, unique audience data is one of the most monetizable assets in a content operation. Audience data seduces advertisers, investors, your sales team, and even your audience itself. (Communities love to know what they have in common.)

Content marketers who have a hard time proving their value to the higher-ups can point to the data editorial gathers:

• What do you know about your customers that you wouldn’t know without your content marketing?
• How large can that dataset be?
• How can you expand that data?
• Will that data eventually lead to higher revenue?

Finally, you need your own (first-party) data because it is extraordinarily likely that in the future — maybe in two years, maybe in ten — the data we use for third-party digital advertising today will be significantly limited if not cut off entirely. Third-party cookies that connect personal audience data across websites are already going the way of the dodo (and, frankly, that data’s lost much of its effectiveness now that the novelty’s worn off).

Collecting your own data with the help of content ensures that you can reach your audiences, clients, and customers for years to come.

Before we get too far, let’s talk privacy

It’s a hard line to walk: your audience is entitled to their privacy. They’re entitled to you not spamming them or selling their information directly to data brokers. They’re entitled to having their data treated seriously and securely.

If you’re a media or content marketing company, or even a newsletter, promising “We will never sell your data” isn’t particularly realistic phrasing. If you run any programmatic advertising or use Facebook/Google/remarketing/floodlight pixels on your website, or you plan to sell your company one day, or even if you merge lists with three other newsletter authors in a new collective, you are technically selling your audience’s data.

Promising to “never sell data” and then doing any of the above… well, I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds like fraud. We could all use a little less fraud in our lives. So let’s be as responsible and honest as possible in the often-opaque world of digital content monetization.