What does it take to implement content marketing effectively in a larger organization?
It’s not an easy question to answer broadly because a) every team has its own dynamics; b) every organization has constraints and limitations, and c) every vertical market has its own unique characteristics.
Even so, there is a growing body of research that points to several underlying factors present in successful content marketing, including following:
- Commitment
- Consistency
- Documented strategy
- The time and resources to produce quality
Those themes are certainly accurate, but these gloss over important nuances in mid-to-large organizations that are in essence implied tasks.
1) Active participation from marketing leadership
Surveys show the most successful content marketing organizations allocate the proper staff including internal and external resources. In less successful programs, content marketing is treated as an additional duty or a part-time job.
That makes sense: any business initiative that stands a chance of success requires resources, but it’s my observation that the survey data misses an important point: marketing leadership.
Content marketing isn’t something the CMO can just hand off to a team and expect them to figure it out, like many did with social media. If a team is assigned to tackle it, passing off that responsibility often leads to a long list of meetings, slide presentations, and uncertainty.
Effective content marketing requires active participation from digitally proficient leaders empowered to make a decision. A little personal experience in trying to build an audience will go a long way.
It is better to draft a simple one-page plan – and start executing – than it is to have one that lands with a heavy thud and never gets off the ground.
2) The content marketing plan must be executable
Research also demonstrates that the most successful programs have a documented plan or strategy. Again, my experience tells me there’s an important subtly to this wisdom: the plan has to be executable.
This seems straightforward, but any marketer with experience in bigger marketing agencies knows that teams can waste a lot of time creating a detailed—and often very lengthy—plan that becomes too complicated to use. Usually, this happens in marketing teams where the individuals drafting the plan are different from those who have to carry it out.
Yes, there should be a strategic vision, goals and objectives. It’s true that editorially driven content should favor education over hype. Of course, the program should be tightly integrated with other aspects of marketing – across owned, shared, earned and paid media. Content marketing should absolutely be measured, over time, for the value, it delivers to the organization.
However, if all of these aspects are so heavily weighted that they inhibit a streamlined process for efficiently researching, producing, approving and publishing content, the initiative is likely to falter before it even gets underway.
It is better to draft a simple one-page plan – and start executing – than it is to have one that lands with a heavy thud and never gets off the ground. A one-page plan can be improved and those improvements will be infinitely better over time.
3) Resolve and tenacity
Consistency absolutely matters in content marketing. Here again, research shows that those organizations capable of producing content consistently on an owned media platform over time are more likely to report success with content marketing.
However, I find the “over time” aspects of consistency get unwittingly glossed over in reports on these studies. There’s an implied characteristic here and that is perseverance. Content marketing requires time – six months at a minimum.
Why?
Few are the buyers willing to part with six or seven figures on enterprise technology because a vendor wrote a blog post. There’s a lot of competition out there – and your competition and your customers both get a vote. It’s not just what you do with content, but how well it performs comparatively. It will take some trial and error to figure out the niche, tone and angles that work best for your company.
All of this requires resolve and tenacity – the ability to keep coming back relentlessly despite knowing you might have some real winners, but you’re also going to have some real flops. Many times, what you think will win actually flops, and what you think will flop sometimes wins.
Perseverance is probably the hardest part of content marketing. This is because many businesses today are driven by short-term metrics reported, weekly, monthly or quarterly.
And that constraint brings us right back to leadership and the ability of marketing leaders to simultaneously staff, plan and execute marketing campaigns for short term and programs, like content marketing, for the long term.
Note: A version of this post was originally published on Sword and the Script under the title What Does It Take to Implement Content Marketing Effectively in B2B?