As any eighth grader studying Charles Darwin will tell you, adaptation is not a choice—it’s a prerequisite for survival.
And, as today’s marketers know, this rule firmly applies to business environments, too.
Adapt to Survive
The marketing landscape is shifting rapidly in response to the independent consumer, who expects a consistent and valuable experience across all of their devices and channels. Yet marketers are struggling to adapt to this expectation.
While 78% of CMOs believe customer content is the future of marketing, 68% of marketers say they’re not creating enough content, and 73% say their not tracking leads effectively.
Marketers cite many reasons for their struggle to create consumer-centric content at scale, including lack of time, lack of budget, inability to measure ROI, lack of coordination, and scarce resources.
But these challenges are merely symptoms of a bigger problem: marketers today are chasing after the newest trends and creating multiple channel “strategies” in an adhoc fashion, rather than operationalizing their content and teams around the value their customers seek.
While 78% of CMOs believe customer content is the future of marketing, 68% of marketers say they’re not creating enough.
Organize around the Customer, Not the Channel
Building an adaptable content marketing operation is the secret to thriving in the new marketing landscape. Marketers who have taken the time to do so reap big benefits, including:
Core Principles of a Content Marketing Operation
Let’s take a look at some of the core principles of a content marketing operation, and the resources you need to start building one.
1. Customer Value
Content operations prioritize customer value above anything else. They do so by cultivating content their buyer actually needs, serving their buyer at every stage of their purchase journey, sparking engagement with customers, researching buyers wherever they go, and producing fresh, relevant messages consistently.
With an operation focused on providing value—above all else—you can adapt to any change in marketing technologies or channels.
2. Alignment
Content operations align the production and distribution of each company asset around key business initiatives and specific buyer personas and content themes. By mapping content in this way, marketers can ensure they’re producing relevant materials that help their company drive real business results. They know who their content is for, why it’s being created, and how it will be used and reused to serve the company.
3. Visibility
In a content operation, everyone can see the content marketing process, from ideation through promotion, and understands the roles they play. They are held accountable by clearly defined workflows, can find any asset they need in an easily accessible content library, and can see which content assets has been distributed through inbound and outbound channels.
By breaking content out of a silo, it becomes a cross-functional and cross-channel resource for every member of the team from product to sales.
4. Insight
Marketing performance is measured beyond vanity metrics like unique visits and social shares. The content operation provides insight into the entire content process—revealing bottlenecks in production, thematic gaps, clarity of performance across inbound and outbound channels, and an in-depth analysis of what moves people through the pipeline.
Content facilitates the buyer’s journey from interest through purchase. Figure out what assets and campaigns enhance that journey and how.
Ready to start building your content operation? Learn how in the American Marketing Association’s upcoming webinar “The Rise of Content Marketing Operations: How to Survive and Thrive in the new Marketing Landscape” on January 13th at 1PM ET.
Jesse Noyes, Senior Director of Content Marketing at Kapost, will walk through the content operation in more depth, and reveal the steps you need to take to build one.