As a follow up to the poll, Nicole asked the panelists to share their own approaches to content marketing strategy.
Adriana Romero, Solutions Marketing Manager, Industrial IoT, Hitachi Insight Group, shared that her company’s content strategy usually comes from the product manager and that there are one to two people on the content team.
Similarly, Nick Mason, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Turtl, a digital content platform, explained that his organization’s content strategy is decided jointly between the chief marketing officer and the product manager. He emphasized that his organization is very collaborative in its approach and stated that there were four people on their content team.
Scott Logan, Director, Revenue Generation, MetTel, an integrated digital communications company, commented that he was surprised to see that there were no content committees listed in the responses. He shared that MetTel’s content team consisted of a sales person, a demand generation manager, a vice president of marketing and a graphics artist, all bringing their own areas of expertise to the table to create the most compelling content product.
Ellen Gomes, Senior Content Marketing Manager, Marketo, a marketing automation software company, explained that her team puts together a content strategy which is evaluated by key marketing and sales stakeholders and aligned with business objectives.
Ellen commented that they have three content marketers on their team and that they also use freelance resources to round out their content offerings. As the Moderator observed, all of these organizations have multiple people involved in creating and strategizing about content.
Next, Nicole inquired, “When developing content, how do you make sure it is good?”
The answers to this critical question were as diverse as the panelists and the organizations they represented. Responses included:
How you arrive at content is important. Try to test and prove the case before you launch content. You can’t always guess; you have to test and measure
Create the best content possible and avoid content that is too specific as it will be hard to re-purpose it later
Make sure to measure and you won’t fail. If something doesn’t work, be sure to evaluate where you went wrong. Was content offered at the wrong stage of the sales cycle? Was it in the wrong format?
Content is very dependent on the business and target market. With IoT for example, avoid certain types of content and leverage infographics or more visual approaches
Distilling the discussion even further, Moderator Nicole summed it up with the following key content take-aways - Generally, avoid content that is:
Not easily re-purposed
Only valuable on a one time basis
Not aligned well with your target audience or their needs