05 Dec In pursuit of content maturity
I have been talking a lot recently about the value of taking a content led approach and the role that plays in delivering successful digital marketing programmes. Not exclusively but especially around destination marketing and putting content at the center of what you do.
Those of you who know me will already know that I am endlessly fascinated by how people and organisations work. Sometimes extremely successfully but unfortunately often hideously unsuccessfully! Achieving success in digital is often about the sum total of many small parts. The way clients and agencies work together is changing. Getting the right people on the job and creating the right environment for those people to thrive is more important than ever.
In pursuit of achieving that I have become increasingly interested in models around organisational maturity with respect to content marketing. They come in many flavours. Some feel more applicable to larger corporate business. For example, the one outlined as part of Content – The New Marketing Equation developed by the consultancy Altimeter. Others feel more practical and actionable in smaller organisations or individual business units. The one covered in the white paper Content Changes Everything by Ariad is a good example. Worth downloading.
I’ve interpreted this one around the kind of business problems I am facing within the specific organisations I am working. There are five stages to achieving content maturity and they go something like this:
One. You realise you have a problem
You have invested in technology and channels but your focus is still very much on the products and services you provide. You are still in sales mode rather than figuring out how you might be genuinely useful to your customers. Your social feeds might be quite sparse and have little engagement across them.
So, what content do you need to produce?
Two. You start testing and learning
You try fixing some of the business problems you face with content – often kicking off in the marketing or customer service area. The results are inconsistent and you start looking across different departments to try and improve them. You experience that penny dropping moment when you realise that the way you are organised is fundamentally misaligned to the way your customers see things.
So, how do you align yourself to the customer journey?
Three. You start mapping content to the customer journey
You start understanding what the content requirements are across the customer journey. The process of doing that keeps you focused on content and the customer rather than technology and platforms. You start seeing the value in customer centricity and working across channel and product silos.
So, how do you put content at the heart of strategy?
Four. You start managing content properly
You are organising yourselves around the need to plan, develop and manage content across multiple channels. You hire new skills and define new roles. You hook up your measurement and evaluation so that you can start optimising what you do in real time. This thing is really starting to fly.
So, how do you really resource this properly?
Five. The bosses start to “get it”
You have developed a business case based on ROI and gained support for it at the highest level. Not only do the numbers stack up but senior management understand how exactly a content led approach works. Content becomes critical to articulating the brand and you might even be developing entirely new business models around content.
So, I guess you have made it!
Another nice way of looking at it is how things are changing as you move from one mode operandi to another. The really interesting thing for me is how you start to move towards ‘always on’ marketing programmes rather than running time focused campaigns and you start to budget around the themes you are supporting instead of the channels across which you tell your brand story.
Thoughts welcome.
