4 Steps to Building a Content Marketing Culture That Works

If you’ve ever worked with a company where no one knows who is supposed to own what content or how content aligns with company objectives, you’ve probably seen tension build between departments and within teams, and you’ve probably seen content produced that’s aimless and inconsistent.

In large B2B organizations especially, no one person or team owns all the content. Each team needs to produce content on demand for its own objectives. Here are some typical (potentially conflicting) interests:

• The SEO team wants quality web content that will survive Google’s algorithms and drive organic search traffic around certain keyword phrases.

• The demand-generation team wants to drive visibility and interest in the brand through eye-catching content.

• The product team wants content that highlights the features and benefits of the product.

• The sales team wants content that persuades and shows how the company has produced results.

• The customer-service team wants content to teach best practices and innovative ways of doing things.

• The PR team wants thought-leadership pieces it can use to secure placements and interviews.

• The recruiting team wants content on the company’s culture, news, and events.

To align these efforts, a company must build a culture that unifies teams and their content when no one team owns all the content.

In an ideal content culture that’s driven by a unified process, the following things should be agreed on and documented:

1. Messaging

2. Content objectives

3. Content marketing roles

4. Content workflow

5. Content guidance

6. Content approvals

7. Content results

Read on for suggestions related to each element.

1. Build a message ‘house’

One way to help your marketing team unify its content efforts across multiple digital channels is to build a message architecture, which acts as a guide for aligning content with both customer needs and business objectives. You might find it helpful to create your message architecture in the form of a house.

2. Establish content objectives

Keeping the message architecture in mind, marketing leaders must associate every piece of content with at least one objective. A content objective, as content strategist Meghan Casey defines it, is simply “the thing you want a piece of content to accomplish.” Examples:

• Amplify a specific message

• Reach a certain target audience and promote a branded initiative

• Influence an outcome for a specific business unit/influence a decision

• Promote an event

• Build registrations to a webinar

• Drive sales

Content objectives, of course, must tie to both business objectives and audience objectives.

• Business objectives: Know what value the content to be created brings to the business’ overall goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, if the goal is to increase sales by X percent, how many leads do you need? And how can you generate X number of leads through content?

• Audience objectives: Your content has to serve a purpose for the audience it’s intended for. If you don’t know what your audience is trying to accomplish, content results will fall flat. Create content that is useful and helps them take action relevant to their objectives.

Content objectives provide a basis for suggesting the types of content each team should create. For example, if your objective is to build brand awareness, your best content types may be videos and infographics. If you want to drive demand, you might want to create webinars, emails, and white papers. If you aim to influence a wider audience, you might go for contributed bylines and thought-leadership pieces in industry publications.

3. Define content marketing roles – including a unifying leader

Only after you’ve built your message architecture and established content objectives accordingly do you define content marketing roles. Many companies define roles prematurely, creating overlap, inefficiency, and turnover.

Roles must be defined by marketing and business leaders if there’s to be a unified culture in which multiple stakeholders own content. Joe Pulizzi identifies a number of possible roles:

• Chief content officer (CCO)

• Managing editors (ME)

• Content creators

• Content producers

• Chief listening officer (CLO)

• When you define your roles — whatever names you may give them — establish one high-level role (CCO or equivalent) that drives content strategy. This role sets, upholds, and refines the processes across the content teams — even when content owners are decentralized (not all reporting to the same person).

This high-level role is important because a content marketing culture that works requires common processes and a shared messaging system — cross-functional “standards and mechanisms” of governance, as Lisa Welchman refers to them. And, someone needs to be in charge of those things. If the person in that role doesn’t have all the content teams officially reporting to him or her, that person needs to find ways to “matrix manage” across those teams.

Within each team, then, content stars can emerge: those who are most likely to contribute, within their area of expertise, to the success of your content marketing strategy. Define all roles according to the unique skill sets of your people, including any number of hybrid skill sets growing out of disciplines like PR and SEO.

4. Measure and Track Results

Someone must measure and track results for you to learn whether what you’re doing is effective. What you measure must tie back to your content objectives (as described above).

You need to find ways to measure what your audience does in response to consuming your content. Maybe people give you feedback. Maybe they sign up for a demo. Maybe they do something else.

Ideally, track behaviors that align with business KPIs.

Content measurement may be part art and part science, but to justify continued investment, marketers need to start being more scientific in their analysis of performance and monetary value — as difficult as that can be to pull off.

Conclusion

In a content marketing culture that works, the right people with the right experience produce the right content that resonates with the right audience. Departments align their content efforts (even as they work independently), customers accomplish more of their goals, and the business is more successful in delivering on its KPIs.

If you take these seven actions, your organization is on its way to building a content marketing culture that works.

Which of these actions has made the most difference for you? What else have you found contributes to a content marketing culture that works? Please let us know in a comment.

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