Dataiku partners with O’Reilly for content marketing

How did you start working with O’Reilly?

I think it was maybe three years ago we did our first sponsorship. It was sort of at the end of the year, and I think someone on our content activation and digital demand generation team was contacted and had end-of-year budget to spend. So we sponsored our first title and then we had such great results that we kind of haven’t stopped since.

What is it that makes the relationship work so well?

O’Reilly produces so much great quality content that there’s always something for us that makes sense for our business and for our audience. I can’t say enough about the quality of the content. That’s something that’s super important for me as a content director—quality, quality, quality. We would never put out something for our customers, users, prospects, or even people who don’t have anything to do with Dataiku that isn’t the highest quality. And O’Reilly has really high-quality content. So that’s why we keep coming back.

How does tying your brand to O’Reilly help?

Audiences that are very, very technical tend to be less receptive to marketing. Especially audiences that don’t know your organization. But because they know who O’Reilly is and that you produce good quality content, that’s why it works for us. By sponsoring an animal book or a report, now we can get in front of that audience that’s been extremely hard for us to tap into.

That’s the other interesting thing: even though the end users end up being data scientists, data architects, or business analysts, the buyers tend to be more executive level. And O’Reilly also helps us speak to that executive audience that’s a bit more tech savvy. Not so much a CEO but more like a CTO or CIO—someone who’s a bit more on the tech side. Those are the executives that are buying. And we’ve had great success in sponsoring content for those types of audiences. It’s why some of our top-performing campaigns for the entire year are our O’Reilly content.

How does Dataiku leverage O’Reilly sponsored content?

One of the big things that we use it for is nurturing. So even if we already have people in our database, if they’re in the right sort of audience buckets, we’ll offer them access to O’Reilly content. It tends to reengage people who aren’t as responsive to other kinds of reach-out emails. And then when it comes to getting new people in the door, we do paid campaigns that always perform very well for us. Just having the O’Reilly name and logo and the sort of promise that it will be high-quality content, we get a higher number of people clicking, a higher number of people who are then converting on the landing page, and more people in the door. And they’re the types of people that we want to be talking to.

But the sweet spot is when we can use O’Reilly content with a provider that’s really specific to this domain. We partner with media providers to do an e-blast to their database with O’Reilly content, and that’s where we get hands-down the most click-through, the most interest—the most everything.

Any other interesting surprises that you discovered?

We have a tool for our content where we can see not only who filled out the forms to gain access but also how long they’re reading the content. Our O’Reilly content keeps people engaged for a good seven or eight minutes on average (which is quite high based on our average for all content). So they’re reading it for a very long time, which is awesome. It shows a true interest in it.

I also think there’s also something to be said for another internal thing I’ve noticed at Dataiku, especially with the Introducing MLOps book that we authored. We have a book club at Dataiku, and they’re just loving that book; everyone is asking me for print copies to take to their customers and prospects as a leave-behind. So yeah, there’s all the lead gen stuff and all of that, but internally people are really proud and excited. Which is not nothing, right?