How to Turn Data into Content

Data is what drives business today, especially when it comes to strategic decision-making during an increasingly unstable market. According to Forbes, global inflation is rising, making it even more challenging to maintain and grow your firm. Content, and how it engages your current and potential clients, is what drives your marketing, giving you an edge in tough economic times. But even though data is a major part of your content strategy, it alone is not content.

What’s the Difference Between Data and Content?

Data is basic or raw facts and figures. And while raw data is powerful, it’s not really useful unless you know how to interpret it. 

According to The Content Wrangler, the difference between data and content is context. Content, or contextualized data, places data within a system of values, concepts and utterances. 

In today’s digital landscape, content includes everything from financial and legal documents and marketing materials to written communication. 

Understanding the difference between the data and content can help you leverage your data to produce content that effectively speaks to your audience, no matter what type you choose.

Why You Need to Leverage Your Data Through Content

Every firm has access to some level of data, whether it is a list of billable hours, a Rolodex of client contact information or client retention rates. But many firms don’t use their data to its fullest extent. 

According to Transforming Data With Intelligence (TWDI), more than 80% of data that organizations generate goes unused. Data can’t inform organizational decisions if you don’t put it to good use. If you’re not leveraging your data, your marketing strategy will suffer, inhibiting your ability to reach new clients. 

According to our partner, Templafy’s “Content is Everything” report, 78% of respondents agree that good content is the number one most important driver of business success.

Leveraging your data through content, allows you to put it into context that lets you, your stakeholders and clients see the most value out of it.

Examples of Data Being Transformed into Content

Marketing Assets

Data plays an extremely important role in marketing strategies. Nearly every decision that goes into marketing is made by data, e.g., which clients to engage, where to place digital ads and how much money should be put into top-of-funnel assets. 

In addition to using data for strategic marketing decisions, data can also be channeled into potential-client-facing content. There are tools available, like Pitchly’s data enablement platform, that takes your stored data and turns it into something useful. Pitchly’s Elements and Documents products automate repetitive work, like creating tombstones, CVs and bios, for marketing assets. 

This empowers your team to harness all the data that you already have available to you and easily convert it into pitch content that can help you win more business. 

The best part is that by using a data enablement platform like Pitchly, your staff saves hours of time versus gathering all the data they need manually and running the risk of using data credentials that are out of date or are confidential.

Company Vision + Reporting

The more you share with your employees, the stronger your team will become. 

According to Glassdoor, organizations that are more transparent with their employees tend to have increased employee engagement, stronger company culture and help employees feel comfortable communicating with managers. 

Data about the company can be turned into content - like presentations, statements of work and results reporting - that helps employees understand goals, milestones and even shortcomings. 

This type of transparency will aid your team in both celebrating successes as well as brainstorming tactics to reach aggressive goals and pivoting to correct missteps that have been taken. 

Whether you automate these data processes or not, taking the time to transform this information from raw data to digestible content for your employees to consume will make employees more prepared for and more invested in helping your organization achieve your goals. 

Employee Experience

Turning data into content is a great way to empower your leadership teams to craft a fulfilling and effective employee experience.

Using data, firms can determine the best time and channels to communicate with staff. Data can tell you how many employees engage with emails, firm social media channels or internal chats.

If you have an important piece of information to share, like benefits open enrollment dates, you want to make sure you choose the right channel to craft your message. Data can tell you readability and where best to place your content.

This content can look many different ways, from weekly/monthly reports to storytelling to presentations of survey results and more. 

Creating this bridge between data and content ensures that you are making the right, informed decisions on engaging with your team. 

Go Beyond Content Management

Once you understand how to turn your data into valuable content, the next step is to enable that content. 

Content that is simply managed, i.e., content that sits static in stored repositories, isn’t doing you any good. Your content needs to be enabled, just like Pitchly does with your data. According to Templafy, enabled content is active and meets people in their workflows and within the applications that drive them. Enabled content reduces risk and encourages growth with meaningful insights.

Take the next step and learn more about data enablement and content enablement by downloading the Pitchly + Templafy data sheet.

A Peek at What Pitchly Has Accomplished So Far This Year

To round out the first half of the year, innovation in the Pitchly data enablement platform via a newly released content API allows the company to help clients generate multi-format content (Word, Powerpoint and website content) from a single template.

 

The company also received its SOC 2 Type 2 audit and earned a clean opinion ensuring that the innovation in the Pitchly platform is secure.

 

In addition, Pitchly clients are using the platform to manage 6 million data points, 750,000 live content assets and now has integrations with Upslide (document management) and Templafy (content management). This product innovation has been met with enthusiastic responses from clients, prospects and partners alike.