When you talk to marketers at mid-to-large brands, one of the biggest challenges is trying to get a process in place to manage all of the content that their company is creating.
How do you keep all departments on the same page?
How do you find a way to harness all of the collective content and knowledge?
As Pam Didner says (and as anyone who works in this industry would agree), “There’s no shortcut in terms of deploying content marketing.”
In this video, Kelly LeVoyer (Director, Marketing Editorial; SAS), Kevin Cain (Director of Content Strategy; OpenView Venture Partners), Pam Didner (Global Integrated Marketing Manager; Intel Corporation), Waynette Tubbs (Manager, Marketing Editorial; SAS), Elizabeth Gaines (Senior Director; SAP Global Marketing), and Michael Kirsten (Senior Manager, Global Content; Kelly Services) share their challenges and ideas for managing content marketing across their often complex and highly-matrixed organizations.
Here are my favorite insights from each person in the group. As there are no silver bullets in this industry, and no one right way to do everything, I’m also posing questions to you, our readers, to see how you manage all of this content in your organizations. I’d love to get your thoughts in the comments.
We curate a lot of content, and we also try to take very much of an educational approach; so we’re always trying to get content out there that’s going to be very informational in nature; very instructional, so that our portfolio companies are constantly learning and looking to us as a thought leader and an expert. —Kevin Cain
Question: What is the mix of content curation vs. orignal content creation in your organization?
We recently established content account managers whose role is to make sure that they are plugged in to all of those field marketing teams and all the local geographical teams to make sure that they are surfacing the right content and bringing it to the forefront. It’s a new role for us, and it helps in a highly-matrixed organization like we have at SAP. — Elizabeth Gaines
Question: Does your company have a person to bring all of the content together?
It may sound stupid, but it’s communication. I spend right now at least 30 percent of [my] time with communicating with the different kind of stakeholders and thinking about who I need to think of. — Michael Kirsten
Question: How much time do you spend on communication? Do you have any tips to making this easier or more effective?
We will do the whole annual editorial planning literally a quarter before the next year starts, and then in May we’ll do a second half year adjustment if necessary… For example, the editorial calendar that we’ve created for 2013, we just completed that in September; like I said, a quarter ahead. Do you know how many times I actually presented the same presentation? 30 times. — Pam Didner
Question: Who do you share your editorial calendar with, and how to you make sure the right people have access?
We’ve come together with our field marketing counterparts… and we’ve said, ‘We’re not going to have individual plans for each of those. We’re all going to contribute to the same plan,‘ and it’s a huge, massive ugly spreadsheet, but it works. — Kelly LeVoyer
Question: Do you manage via a spreadsheet or some other way? If so, do you store it in a shared folder? If not, how do you keep everyone on the same page?
One of the things that we did to build the plan is you have to sit down with one another and say, ‘What is it you do every day, what do you get credit for, what do you get measured on, how can I understand what your role is? You need to understand what my role is so that we understand how to build this plan well.’ We had been working together for years, and when we sat down to understand what my role is, what your role is, the content came together so much better. — Waynette Tubbs
Question: What suggestions do you have for getting everyone from across departments to get on the same page? Is there anything else from the video that caught your attention? Or are there additional suggestions you would add? Please let us know in the comments.
A sound editorial process is one of the five core elements for running successful, scalable content marketing operations. Read our 2016 Content Marketing Framework: 5 Building Blocks for Profitable, Scalable Operations for an overview of the full strategic blueprint.
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