No one would confuse the person who makes ice cream with a person who builds a scale. One fills your tummy with happy goodness. The other measures how many pounds you add to your frame by eating it.
They’re related. They affect each other. But they’re still two different jobs.
We notice the distinction a lot these days as marketing content writers, because we find our job is often conflated with that of those who do marketing content analytics. We understand the connection between the two. We make (or write) the ice cream. The analytics people determine the impact of what we’ve done.
To oversimplify it in the extreme, we (content writers) put together the words that make the case for our clients. We write the blog posts, the whitepapers, the social media copy, the web copy, the press releases, the bylines and the sales material that lets everyone know why they should buy what our clients are selling.
The marketing analytics people are more like the scientists to a marketing content writer’s performance art. Analytics people make sure it goes through the right channels and then measure how they perform once they’re in said channels. They measure how many people are reading and how they’re engaging with what they read.
These two jobs are two different sides of the marketing coin, and they’re both critically important to clients. We recognize that clients have the right to expect both, but we must make one point clear:
Content marketing is not content analytics. And the more people recognize that, the better off they’ll be.
A friend of ours who specializes in marketing analytics recently went for a job interview, only to discover that the position was not focused on analytics (the measuring), but rather on content marketing (the writing). The interviewer seemed to assume that the two roles were interchangeable, and our friend had to clarify the distinction between them. This highlights an ongoing issue where employers and job seekers encounter confusion between marketing analytics and content marketing positions. The two are not the same.
Our clients pay us good money to make the case for them with our written content. This helps them grow and prosper. But today’s world is awash in key performance indicators and the technology to measure them. So we get it. And we’re here to say, no. It’s not too much for them to ask us to show if it’s working.
That’s why we’re happy to announce we have expanded our capabilities to include full-scale analytics.
An embrace of analytics would seem to clash with the sensibilities of writers. We are all about creative instinct and expression. As much as we believe in quality, we know that people’s assessments of writing are subjective. And when you came of age as a persuasive writer, like Dan, you soon realize the end-goal is never anything less than to convince someone you’re right.
If we’ve convinced people that our clients bring value to the marketplace, what else is there to measure?
Yet there’s the sticky question of how you can really know, and that gets us into the unfamiliar world of analytics.
For anyone in a creative field, there is likely a natural inclination to resist being measured. If you’ve always just done what you’ve done, and everyone just figured it was probably helping, it’s a bit hair-raising to have that presumption subjected to testing and proof.
But if you really believe you’re in this to help your clients, you want to know what’s working, and you will have to adjust when something isn’t working.
So we’ve heard you, clients. And we’re ready to help bring you what you need. We as marketing content writers welcome the emergence of the marketing content analytics pros (particularly the one who will be working with us). They will help us produce better results for our clients.
But we do think it’s important to be clear: These two jobs are not the same. And we must stop mixing the two. We’re over here making the ice cream and they’re the ones making the scales.