Last week, we held our inaugural CMI Executive Forum in San Francisco. Content marketing leaders from some of the largest B2B and B2C brands came together to talk about the challenges and opportunities they see for content marketing.
We asked attendees to keep our discussions during the meeting private — no tweets, posts, or social media updates allowed. This also means we won’t be sharing the bulk of the meeting details (well, not just yet). But I did want to share a number of questions I came away with — questions worth mentioning because most content marketers don’t seem to be addressing them.
1. What are your content marketing objectives (and have you written them down yet)?
Whether or not you want to refer to your list of objectives as a content marketing mission statement is up to you. But the simple truth is that most businesses don’t have a clear idea of the direction in which their content marketing strategy is headed — or, even worse, they simply haven’t thought at all about what the purpose of their content is.
2. How does your content marketing strategy impact your company’s overall business vision?
What is the role your content is supposed to play for furthering the organization? Set your content marketing mission side-by-side with the company’s business vision. Map what your content’s purpose is to the specific parts of the company’s path. If these don’t align or you can’t make the case, that’s a problem.
3. Does your content help its audience members achieve excellence at what they do?
You should be asking yourself this question at the start of every work day. If your content doesn’t truly impact the lives of your audience members, why create it at all?
4. Do you read all the content your business creates?
Most senior marketers aren’t aware of the wasted efforts their company may be dishing out on a daily basis. To truly get an understanding of what’s working and what is failing when it comes to your content marketing, you need to engage with every piece of content your company creates and distributes… at least until you can set a clear benchmark for the direction your content should be taking.
5. Are you taking a definitive position on issues in your content?
Are you actively creating value, or are you merely describing what should be considered valuable? If you don’t take a stand on any of the issues affecting your industry, what will separate you from your competition? You need to create differentiating value by actually being different. To be honest, with most content marketing, you could simply remove the company’s logo and switch it with a competitor’s logo and no one would be able to tell the difference.
6. Can you do a better job than the relevant trade media that covers your industry?
This is a worthy conversation to have in your organization: Could you provide more valuable information or deliver it in a more beneficial way than the professional trade publishers have been able to do? Strip away all the things you think you can’t or shouldn’t do, and get your senior team to discuss the merits of covering the industry. You may surprise yourself with what you can achieve.
7. Are you training your marketers to tell better stories?
Do you have a formalized training program that communicates the company’s vision for its content — and its expectations of quality — to the entire marketing team? If not, how will they know when they are succeeding, or where they need to improve?
8. Are you training your employees to tell better stories?
Getting all employees, across all a company’s business units, to participate in creating content marketing is usually a major challenge. If you start to ask for their involvement in your content without giving them the formal training they need to feel comfortable and proficient, you are just setting them up for likely failure — and certain frustration.
9. Have you developed a communication tool or process for spreading your content marketing vision throughout the organization?
I believe one of the reasons Coca-Cola’s Content 2020 initiative was so readily adopted by its senior staff is because everyone fully understood and believed in the company’s content vision. How was that possible? Coke created a Jerry McGuire-like mission statement document for the Content 2020 program. It was highly engaging, highly shareable, easy to understand, and was able to make an impact on thousands in a very short period of time.
Are you finding it difficult to get buy-in? Do the field marketers, product marketers, and sales team members all understand what you are trying to do? Probably not, so it’s vital that you provide them with tools they need to make sure everyone works off the same script — and toward the same goals.
You may not have the answers to these questions right now, but you need to figure them out at some point. Every week you should be reviewing these questions with your team and tracking progress… they are that important.
What additional questions do you think content marketers overlook?
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