Creative ways to use third-party research in your content marketing

As one of my colleagues astutely wrote last week, we are a content marketing company, creating content for content marketers.

Well, what happens when you couple all that with some content marketing research from the Content Marketing Institute? Interesting content marketing opportunities, of course!

We recently sponsored a Content Marketing Institute research on interactive content marketing, and I wanted to share a bit about how we used the resulting report in our content marketing.

Just two years ago, when interactive content was relatively nascent, we did a study on the state of the industry and found that while marketers could see the value of interactive content, most weren’t utilizing it to its full advantage. In fact, only about a quarter of marketers were using interactive content, though 70% reported that their interactive content was working well.

This year we partnered with the Content Marketing Institute to learn how interactive content is being used by content marketers. The results both gave us a clearer picture of how companies are using interactive content and gave us some ideas for content of our own. When we got our hands on the report, we pounced on incorporating it into our own content marketing.

The first thing we set out to do was synthesize the data into some digestible tidbits for an interactive infographic. Our goal with the infographic was to provide an easy to read, easy to share teaser experience for the research, while offering an optional download of the complete report for visitors who wanted it.

Next up, I wrote a couple of quick blog posts about the research. The first, a general overview of the interactive content research. The second relating the data to specific challenges and pain points that content marketers face today.

The blog posts were important to help me formulate my thoughts in preparation for our next initiative, which was a webinar. We sent out an invite to our subscriber list via email, promoting the webinar. Most registrants attended the live presentation, and others watched the recorded version after the fact. Slides were posted on one of my personal favorite sites, SlideShare.

And now, we’re using the data from the report to create an online assessment tool. Marketers will be able to answer the same questions that survey respondents answer and see how they benchmark against their peers, while receiving personalized recommendations for areas of opportunity. I’ll update you once that assessment is launched, and let you know what’s next. There’s still cool ways to leverage the data — from quizzes to an interactive version of the report, and lots more.

As we’ve written before (like a broken record, probably) interactive content lets you repurpose a single piece of content into a variety of other content experiences, and data & research is probably the most exciting, extensible type of content to leverage.

The CMI study captured exactly how we’re feeling about interactive content: that we’re in the middle of a movement to create not just content, but content experiences too. With 53% of marketers are using interactive content and 75% planning on using more in the future, of course we are excited to get the word out.