Why Content Analytics Will Tell You More than Business Intelligence

Of course, you know all about web analytics or social media analytics, which has been around for years. However, web analytics and social media analytics alone is not enough to gain an understanding of your (online) business. There is another type of analytics that cannot be overlooked, which is content analytics. What makes it so unique, and why should you be paying attention to it?

Content analytics can be defined as unlocking business value from unstructured content via semantic technologies to find answers to important questions or discover causes to specific trends. Companies can use content analytics to understand the content created, how it is used, the context it is in, and the nature of that content. Content analytics is all about unstructured data. It can be used to explain trends in structured data and provide valuable insights to organisations.

Knowledge at the Core of Your Business

Content analytics is especially relevant for organisations where knowledge is at the core of their business. When that is the case, ordinary business intelligence is not sufficient anymore. Knowing who read what content, when, how often it was shared, the number of clicks, the location of visitors, etc., so-called metadata, is not sufficient for a deep understanding. You should also care about whether the content is useful to your audiences and that it serves the objective it was intended for. Content related trends or insights revealing information such as what content caused a drop in sales can help make better content and drive growth or revenue. It is not about having more content; it is about having better content.

Content analytics is an essential aspect of big data. It should form an integral part of your big data strategy if you are a knowledge-based organisation. It cannot be seen separate but is more entwined with different aspects of big data ranging from real-time analytics, predictive analytics and personalisation. The objective should be to deliver relevant content to the right people via the right channels at the right moment to support the right objective. Not an easy task.

Benefits of Content Analytics

There are several benefits to content analytics. It creates machine-readable content from your unstructured data that allows computers and machines to understand the unstructured content and link it to other data for additional insights. In addition, the semantic metadata added to the content makes content more accessible. It helps organisations understand what content they have or need and more importantly, why that is the case. Finally, it helps to better understand the causes behind trends and events that can be discovered with ordinary business intelligence. It, therefore, helps explain why things happened, taking into account vast amounts of documents and content in real-time.

Content analytics uses a vast array of different big data technologies. From semantic analytics or ontological analysis to discover correlations and patterns in the content, to natural language processing or sentiment analysis to place the data in the right context to multilingual search or linguistic modelling. In addition, text-analytics or text mining will help to extract meaning that might be buried in the text. These technologies are rapidly improving, making it easier to perform content analytics.

Final Thoughts

With 80% of the data being unstructured data, content analytics will become more important in the coming years. It will help you to discover new insights from your enterprise content and deliver smarter, more personalised, customer experiences. The number of content/text analytics startups is growing, developing solutions that can give you a competitive advantage. Content analytics will become more critical and goes beyond business intelligence; it is a tool that knowledge-intense organisations can no longer ignore.

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