Should Organic content be founded in responsive data?
MEC Manchester
Working in analytics naturally pushes us to the business end of digital and non-digital marketing reports, assisting both the internal activation teams and our clients visualise how their activity has impacted on their performance.
It’s where we, as an Analytics and Insight department, historically create our best work by finding new ways of working with data and providing those “all important” insights.
One of our core focus projects here at MEC is to move away from the standard spreadsheet report. Whilst it’s totally acceptable to assume that data to some people can and will be inherently boring; it doesn’t always have to be that way.
Data will always tell a story, and for me, it’s as important to tell that story in a convincing way as it is to reflect accurate data. If there are no performance insights, then the chances of the actual data being digested are pretty slim.
So how does this rhetoric relate to the post topic?
Content pieces should be founded in research if they are specifically targeted to a certain audience of course. But what if the data already exists?
Outreach projects for example, compete not only for authoritative links but audience attention via compelling content. But providing the actual data in a visual and truly interactive way that encourages the user to engage and share can really help support the cause. We are the specialists in data visuals and by providing packaged insights we help to inform the backdrop to all content.
In a recent content brief, our client wanted to create a page dedicated to a certain type of insurance and pinpoint why it should be purchased using a few insightful snippets. We used data.gov.uk as an authoritative source for the background content, looking specifically at road traffic accidents across the UK.
We merged, manipulated and managed the data set to a nifty 140,000 rows of data. Which of course no one wants to sift through to find a story – even the most dedicated of data journalists would struggle to stay motivated through a file of that size.
By using techniques acquired and developed through working with performance reporting, we created a dynamic and responsive asset that allows the user to play with the data in terms of natural search queries, such as the ones below:
- How many accidents occurred in Lancashire last year?
- What age group had the most accidents?
- What were the road conditions like?
This allows the user to engage and interact with the data to tell their own story and discover their own insight.
In a world that creates and consumes data at an ever growing rate, it’s becoming easier to miss a trick. However, by working closely with our content team, we can now create genuinely captivating data assets for our clients.
Written by Lewis Carroll and Niamh Spence