Considering I work for a market research company and nearly three-fourths of our traffic comes from inbound marketing, I always have my eye out for interesting content marketing examples built on the creative use of data. It almost feels a bit like cheating, having access to research and analysis tools, but really anyone can create compelling content using their own data and a bit of storytelling skills. What I’m talking about involves a keen mix of both art and science, information and emotion.

Over the last few months I’ve been curating and storing relevant content marketing examples that follow this trend as inspiration for my own work. In this post I’ll highlight a selection of the most recent studies that have caught my eye, including one that we made at Audiokite.

7 CONTENT MARKETING EXAMPLES USING DATA & RESEARCH

1. Why startups fail, according to their founders

Brand: CB Insights, a data research company for VCs and startups

Data Analyzed: 101 startup post-mortems

Story Angle: CB Insights picked apart “why we died” blog posts from startup founders and ranked the various reasons these companies ended up shutting down.

2. The delivery votes are in; whose supporters were the hungriest?

Brand: GrubHub, a food delivery service (also owners of Seamless)

Data Analyzed: Customer orders

Story Angle: For the first presidential debate this year, GrubHub asked its customers to enter special codes when ordering food that evening to identify which candidate they supported. Using that tracking device, the online food ordering service was able to see if Trump or Hillary was leading in their unofficial poll and what type of food each one’s supporters prefer.

3. The reason grammar matters in online dating

Brand: Grammarly, a proofreading app, and eHarmony, an online dating site

Data Analyzed: eHarmony user profile text

Story Angle: Grammarly analyzed the copy in over 10,000 eHarmony profiles of both men and women to see which gender had better spelling and punctuation, and cross-referenced this data with profile success rates.

4. How rappers roll

Brand: GoCompare.com, a car insurance rate comparison site

Data Analyzed: Rap song lyrics

Story Angle: The methodology isn’t very clear, but it looks like GoCompare.com analyzed a bunch of rap songs to see which brands and models of cars are mentioned the most.

5. Study: Musical tastes of Trump and Clinton voters

Brand: Audiokite Research, a music market research company (mine, actually!)

Data Analyzed: Music fan surveys and consumption behaviors

Story Angle: We polled over 1,300 of our music listeners to find out who they planned to vote for, then cross-referenced these results with a whole bunch of data on their music consumption habits and preferences.

6. IBM’s Watson sorted through over 100 film clips to create an algorithmically perfect movie trailer

Brand: IBM’s Watson, its all-knowing and all-learning data AI machine, and 20th Century Fox’s new movie Morgan

Data Analyzed: 100 horror film clips

Story Angle: Ok, this isn’t a classic “study” per se, but it’s a very creative example. Watson looked at 100 horror film clips to determine the best possible template for a movie trailer and created the ultimate one for this new film.

7. Crowdsourcing the definition of “Punk”

Brand: Converse, the sneaker brand with deep ties in music marketing, and Polygraph, a studio that churns out visually-driven essays

Data Analyzed: User-created playlists on Spotify and YouTube

Story Angle: Polygraph looked at public playlists with the word “punk” in the title to ascertain which bands were most considered “punk” by different music fans.