Is Database Publishing in Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Online marketing revolves around driving traffic to your website — targeting relevant audiences in order to introduce your products and services, and get them to buy what you have to offer. Marketers drive traffic in many different ways, but one area that is gaining more and more attention is content marketing. This is due to the fact that search engines play a huge role in generating “free” traffic and they require content, and also because publishing your content across websites, blogs and social media reaches people who would not have ordinarily come to your site.

When most marketers think of content marketing, they usually think about blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, press releases, etc. This type of content generation requires a significant amount of expertise, effort and discipline. However, one area of content is typically overlooked. This area is database publishing.

Most companies have data and databases that can be quite useful or at least entertaining to their target audience. They key is to find that data, publish it on the web, and syndicate it across websites and your networks. Let’s break this database publishing concept down further.

Finding Useful and Interesting Data

At first thought, you may feel that you don’t have any interesting data to market, but that’s rarely the case. Here are some ideas for various businesses and organizations to consider:

• Product catalogs
• Directories of members, businesses, partners, etc.
• Industry data, trends and events
• Regional data such as demographics, education, crime, real estate, interest rates
• Top stats for your website or business, such as top downloads and most popular products or requests

Brainstorm with your team and see what useful data you may have at your fingertips. Ask your IT team what data they can capture from their logs and systems. Look up government websites related to your industry or your region and see if you can download the databases. Chances are that you will have something to begin with.

Publishing and Sharing Your Data Online

With Caspio, this is the easy part. You can get data into a Caspio database in three ways:

• Import existing data from a file (one-time or recurring)
• Capture new data on your website with submission forms
• Integrate sources of data using Web Services APIs

Caspio Import Wizard converts your data files from various formats into an online database.

Once the data is in your Caspio account, you can use app-building wizards to create the web interfaces for database search forms, reports and drilldown pages. If your database is small, you can skip the search form and initially display the data report, otherwise let people filter based on search parameters like name, zip code, product, etc.

Point-and-click wizards help you customize your database search, report and drilldown interfaces.

Once you are happy with what you created with the free online database, you can publish the entire database app by pasting an embed code on your website, CMS or blog where you want the data to appear. With very little effort, you can plot data on Google maps, generate charts and customize the design.

Publish databases on your website with interactive features powered by Caspio behind the scenes.

Increasing Exposure to Your Data

If your database contains a lot of textual data, consider utilizing Caspio’s SEO Data Publishing which enables search engines index the data and attribute it to your own site. There is nothing better than free organic traffic.

One final thought is that you may want to let other people embed your data on their own site. Add a little branding credit at the bottom of your database app with a link back to your site. Then provide the embed code on the page and invite people to place the widget on their own websites. Provided that the data is of interest, this technique can bring additional exposure and visits.

The bottom line is that you want to let your data work for you, and Caspio can make the technical side very easy. Unleash your creativity!

Share your own content marketing and database ideas below.