For over a year, I’ve been interviewing content marketing executives at global enterprises about the challenges and opportunities they face when trying to scale up single-country or regional content marketing efforts to take them worldwide. (We’ve also been helping several brands build the strategies to make this happen.)

Today my company Kaleido Insights publishes this new research on global content strategy that outlines the challenges organizations face trying to scale and at the same time, coordinate content initiatives beyond borders.  The report also looks at global content strategy best practices across people, processes, and technology.

For now, let’s focus on the primary challenges facing global content operations.

Decentralized and/or Multiple Content Strategies

It’s not that large global enterprises lack content strategy. Nearly all the enterprises we formally interviewed with for this report have a content strategy in place. Instead, the challenge is implementation; it can be a battle for hearts and minds as well as for budget and executive buy-in. “Strategy is a piece of paper,” laments one senior executive.

Challenges facing existing content strategies are myriad as they are frustrating. Adoption of these strategies, from executive buy-in to far-flung staff is frequently cited. Strategy exists for some content initiatives, such
as social media, but not others, such as the company website. Adoption by business units is another near- universal problem. One large global brand, for example, has differing formal strategies in various global regions; the company’s challenge is cohesively tying these together.

Conversely, one global enterprise has a top-down global strategy that can be tone deaf when it comes to regional adoption. Leaders select global marketing and branding elements with little regards for how images or ideas might translate across cultures and borders.

Case in Point: Naming conventions and regional semantics matter. An enterprise’s US headquarters acquired rights to NFL brand assets for a global marketing campaign, oblivious to the fact that “football” means something very different in the USA than it does in every other country on the planet. When creative assets were sent to foreign offices, marketing staff were flummoxed, not to mention bereft of content assets.

Proximity impacts a country or region’s content needs. “Global” content doesn’t always fulfill what a locality requires, nor is it as relevant as local news, events or cultural issues that are geographically closer.

Additional content strategy challenges include:


• Confusing individual campaign strategy for an overarching content strategy


• Scaling content strategy across different regions and business units


• Diverse regional content strategies with no overarching global coordination


• Adoption of content strategy across the enterprise


• Channel strategy, as the ecosystem broadens and audience/algorithms are ever-changing.

• Creating “global anchor” content that can be modified by diverse groups


• Customer experience, particularly as related to emerging technologies and related changes in consumer behaviors.


• The ability to implement the voice of the customer at the core of content strategy initiatives.

• Having too many metrics


• Measuring the wrong things

All these challenges are just the tip of the iceberg. The accompanying chart illustrates more specific hurdles related to people, processes and technology. This are much more deeply discussed in the research, which also addresses the very real ways organizations such as Visa, 3M, Bosch, Save the Children, Cisco and IBM are addressing them.

Please read the report and let me know what you think.

No matter what kind of marketer you are, content matters.

The reasons for this are manifold. Yes, there’s content marketing, which has long been called the “new black” in the marketing arsenal. Content marketing has risen to prominence for a slew of very, very good reasons. It’s customer-centric, rather than sell-centric. It’s about you rather than me, and it’s the marketing of attraction rather than interruption.

Content has also become popular due to the democratization of media. Everyone can do it (though doing it well is another story entirely). Blog? Podcast? Video? All you have to do is own a phone.

But there are other, more strategic reasons why content is paramount in marketing. Let’s examine why.

The eclipse of advertising

Digital advertising: banners, takeovers, video and other formats are plummeting in efficacy. Ad fraud is rampant, as are ad blockers. Marketers are challenged to reach consumers in new ways, and in ways that delight rather than anger them.

Enter content marketing, which informs, educates, entertains, provides utility and is there when you want it rather than when you don’t.

Traditional advertising has evolved into a commodity, swimming in an abundance of media buy options, thanks to the rise of digital, mobile and social technologies. Advertising was once the “boss” of marketing channels and tactics because it cost the most. Now, brands respond to new customer expectations with relevant content at every stage of their purchase decision journey.

Sophisticated marketers are exploring other marketing avenues that offer greater control, while advertising remains costly even as returns diminish.

Converged media

Content is what populates all media channels. It doesn’t just fill the need of “owned” media, such as your website or blog, but also is critical to earned media.

What would Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn be without content? Vacant platforms visitors would have no need to ever visit.

Paid media (advertising) is also content-dependent. It’s called “creative” in that context, but make no mistake about it — ads are a form of content, too. And as paid, owned and earned media combine together and dance new dances to create new forms of marketing, such as native advertising (paid + owned media), a viable content strategy only becomes that much more important.

The culture of content

Content isn’t just for marketers. Content originates across the organization, primarily in public-facing functions such as sales, HR, customer service, product development and in the executive suite.

The culture of content is arising not just because brands are publishers, but because employees are publishers, too. Some will shrug this off this as noise rather than signal, but the proliferation of channels, platforms and devices is further enabling employees to speak on behalf of the brand.

Add to that requests from teams in social media, sales, thought leadership, real-time marketing, recruitment and customer service, and the demand has never been higher for continual content creation, refinement, repurposing and reformatting.

Content can help elevate numerous functions, from social selling to diverting calls from a call center to most cost-efficient digital channels. Smart organizations evangelize this message for cost savings, employee empowerment, thought leadership and other benefits.

Global content

International organizations are challenged to globalize their content initiatives. If content informs all aspects of marketing, then sharing, collaboration and efficiency are critical to scaling these efforts for efficiency, consistency and cost savings.

Attention must be paid to what types of content can be repurposed across channels and cultures, what content must be created and published locally, and what local successes can be amplified, repurposed and shared in other territories and by other lines of business.

Real-time marketing

All marketing initiatives are no longer locked and loaded in advance. Real-time marketing has become a critical challenge for many organizations to achieve relevance, provide customer service and offer relevance and direction in the face of breaking news and events. All of this brings with it new content challenges, but also great rewards: relevance, newsworthiness and other top-of-mind associations.

Yet preparing for and executing real-time marketing requires a finely honed content strategy, training, triage and close collaboration with legal and other departments outside of marketing.

Contextual campaigns

Beacons, sensors, the Internet of Things — content is not only everywhere, it will soon be everything: our appliances, clothing, location and vehicles. Marketers are already collaborating with IT and product groups to create content around how we live, what we’re doing and where we are when we do it.

Content is moving beyond marketing to be part of the way that we interface with the world around us.

For the last decade I’ve been researching these (as well as other) trends in content marketing and content strategy. I’m proud to announce my latest book on the topic, Content: The Atomic Particle of Marketing. It dives deeply into the trends I’ve been following in this column. If you read it, I’d love to hear your reactionsFor the last decade I’ve been researching these (as well as other) trends in content marketing and content strategy. I’m proud to announce my latest book on the topic, <a href=” amzn.to/2henUbH” Content: The Atomic Particle of Marketing</a>. It dives deeply into the trends I’ve been following in this column. If you read it, I’d love to hear your reactions

My advance copies arrived yesterday, so I know my most recent book, Content: The Atomic Particle of Marketing, finally exists in the physical world.

Release dates are June 3 in Europe, June 28 in the USA. I'm as surprised as I am pleased that the title already climbing the rankings in several Amzon business categories.

Thanks for your support if you purchase a copy, and thanks even more for sharing your thoughts and reactions to these last few years of research.

As we’re (hopefully) all aware by now, content strategy is the foundation of content marketing. But content strategy requires its own foundational elements, too. Without them, that strategy is very, very difficult to architect.

Creating a content strategy obviously must precede content marketing, but your brand must have some marketing fundamentals in place to enable that process to occur. Time and time again I’ve run up against this obstacle with my clients. They’re often smart enough to know not to go ahead and just “do” content without that all-essential strategy, but they’re nevertheless lacking some of the foundational strategic elements a content strategy must hook into.

I’ve identified four essential marketing elements that must precede a content strategy. Am I leaving anything out?

1. Brand

What is a brand? There are various elements in the concept of “brand.” One is what a prospect thinks of when they consider your products or services. Another is the promise your organization makes.

Brand has to do with perception, and companies work long and hard to decide what they want that perception to be, and how to achieve it. Without brand strategy, content strategy becomes unmoored.

I’m currently working on a content strategy engagement for a divisional group of one of the world’s leading financial conglomerates. The overarching business has an established brand and brand strategy, but the brand of the division in question is still in development. Without knowing what the organization wants to be, or how it will represent itself in the marketplace, it’s difficult to come up with strategies that support this utterly central marketing pillar.

2. Messaging

Like brand, messaging is another core element of an organization that underpins content strategy (and most of the rest of marketing). What does the business want to say and convey? What does it not want to address? How will it approach its delivery of messages? Obviously this applies to content, as well as many other forms of communication.

3. Positioning

Has the organization defined where it stands in its competitive landscape? What sets it apart from other banks (or stores, or insurance companies or pharmaceutical manufacturers)? What are its unique strengths? What are its shortcomings? If you asked its staff or clients what was great about the organization, as well as what it could be doing better, how would they reply?

No company stands alone. Everything is relative. So knowing the pros, cons, ins and outs of an organization’s position is an essential content strategy framework.

4. Values

What are the company’s core values? What does it want to promote? Some organizations highlight their innovative side, others corporate responsibility and giving back to the community. Some highlight their people. Values can, of course, be a combination of a number of assets and attributes, but without firmly rooting values to practices, content strategy becomes difficult.

“Innovation” is a value one company I’ve worked with wants to promote. That’s great. But in order to do that, the company can’t just aspire to be innovative; it must be able to point to products, people, processes — something that will provide ongoing fodder for content around the topic of innovation.

It’s hard to push back and ask clients to show you how they walk the walk (rather than just talk the talk). But that’s exactly what a good content strategist will do.

Good content isn’t created out of hopes and dreams. It must be grounded in reality and in fundamental marketing principles.

Just as content strategy is the starting point for content marketing, the basics of branding, messaging, positioning and values must first be in place so content can flourish. The same applies to advertising, communications, social media and every other marketing practice.

This post originally published on MarketingLand

For over a decade now, I’ve had a Google News alert for the term “content marketing.” I set it up around the time I delivered my first keynote on the topic and started to write my first book on the subject.

For years, it was a lonely little feed, updated mostly when a small handful of early content marketing-obsessed colleagues (Ann Handley, Lee Odden, Ardath Albee, Kristina Halvorson, Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose come to mind) blogged or posted on the topic. The feed was informative, illuminating, thought-provoking and just downright useful for my research and advisory work on the topic.

No more.

Now I’m seriously considering deleting the feed, which has become a sterling example of spoiling-the-commons junk advice on content marketing from self-anointed experts, gurus, divas, mavens, swamis and supreme potentates.

My feed is now filled with link-bait. Nearly every headline contains a number or promises a list, because common wisdom dictates that particular tactic encourages click-through (4 Reasons Why; 6 Reasons Why; 5 Ways to Make; 10 Make-or-Break Skills; and 7 Questions to Ask are all headlines on page one of this morning’s feed).

The writing is often appalling, editing and proofreading non-existent.

Ignoring the ‘why’ of content

But writing and click-bait aside, there’s a commonality in the bottomless pit of content marketing advice and “thought leadership” my feed has become. These articles, columns and blog posts are overwhelmingly prescriptive and highly tactical. They almost without exception start with “content marketing” and disregard the much more fundamental question of content strategy.

Their point of departure is often about how to reach a specific audience, or how to create content for a specific channel. What they almost universally disregard is the “why” of content: actual business goals.

One recent article I randomly clicked on assured readers that the first and foremost audience to target with content is to “existing customers.” That’s certainly a valid audience for many businesses, but it most definitely isn’t a recommendation that’s universally valid.

What if the company’s priority is attracting new clients or customers? More qualified leads? Shortening the time that those leads take to convert? Creating content for different stages in the customer journey?

What if goals aren’t even sales-oriented? For example, perhaps the need is to demonstrate thought leadership in the industry, to create brand favorability.

Then there are all those “content marketing” how-tos that are channel-, rather than strategy-oriented. Lately, these have been Snapchat-heavy, due to the company’s recent IPO. But just because Snapchat is attracting attention this week doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. (Moreover, Snapchat is more of a channel and a tactic than a strategy.)

These types of prescriptive, formulaic, devoid-of-strategic-oversight articles are what give content marketing a bad name. We’ve entered the eye-rolling phase of content, when noise overwhelms signal.

And we’ve seen it all before. Ten years ago, this happened to social media. The carpetbaggers moved in, and suddenly marketers branding themselves as social media experts were crawling out of the woodwork.

I wrote about one of these social media wannabes in August 2009. Here’s an excerpt:

This social media “expert” launched a blog in July 2008. She managed three entries last calendar year, and an equal number so far this year. Six entries in 13 months on a blog with no comments, no categories, and no keywords? No thank you. Over to Twitter, then. Our social media workshop leader has been on Twitter for a scant five months! She’s following 19 people, and has 22 followers. She’s posted 26 times since joining (yes, counting tweets like “testing from my blackberry”). Some of those are references to articles she’s published online, but without links that would help you to actually find and read them.

This species of social media fraudster is perfectly representative of the type of “expert” who is quick to migrate to the next shiny new object. We had them in email, we had them in search, then social, now content.

I can’t yet say where they’ll turn up next, but I will end this little rant with a resounding caveat emptor.

Brands seeking service providers need to conduct due diligence. And put strategy ahead of tactics.

This post originally published on MarketingLand.

It’s that time of year again, in which columnists dust off their crystal balls and peer into the next year to discern the trends, directions, and probabilities of the coming year.

I’ve got five trends on my list, explained below.

1. Contextual Content: Context will be the foundation of the next phase of content marketing. Content is moving beyond screens, and also far beyond mere personalization. Beacons, sensors and IoT enabled devices mean content is more contextual, and hyper-relevant messaging can be delivered in the "phygital" (physical + digital) world at places, times and under circumstances that are meaningful, valuable and helpful to individuals (I recently published research around this topic). Enterprises are beginning to investigate with contextual campaigns and content. They will develop methods for making highly personalized and relevant real-time messages based on triggers such as purchase history, the weather, physical location, and myriad more factors. Such campaigns are highly complex and technically demanding, but as one Disney executive once told me, “The more context there is, the higher the ROI.” Next year will be an experimental year, when trials are floated in this very new and potentially very lucrative arena.

2. Global Campaigns Enterprises are investing heavily in creating global content strategies. Content in diverse countries and regions must both ladder up to central messaging and goals while at the same time containing enough local relevance to resonate with audiences. People, processes, and technologies must be coordinated and synced - easier said than done. Moreover, doing so creates efficiencies and cost-savings, as well as just plain better content. I’ve got research on this topic publishing in early 2017 that was largely generated from work I’ve been doing for clients recently. Over the past year I’ve seen a spike in this type of planning among my clients. I’ve worked on global content strategy for both a major technology firm and helped a global non-profit shape a content strategy that encompasses 93 countries. This trend is already gaining serious momentum.

3. Content Grains Traction in the Enterprise Organizations are looking more seriously at issues surrounding content marketing, whether it be creating a global content strategy as mentioned above, or assessing needs and investments in tools, people, and other resources to ‘get content done.’ Then there’s the importance of gathering stories and assessing content needs beyond marketing into functions and lines of business ranging from sales, research and development, human resources, and other areas. To this end, content is becoming more deeply institutionalized. A fixture of the Fortune 100 list recently hired (but has not yet announced) a global content lead. Expect more formalized content positions and departments in the enterprise in the coming year.

4. Native Advertising Growth Native advertising, a form of converged media that marries content marketing with paid advertising, will continue to burgeon in 2017, providing desperately needed revenue to publishers who are investing in this more premium and customized service to advertisers. The New York Times’ content group T Brand Studio now employs 110 people. In 2015, revenues increased from $14 million to $35 million in 2015, and it now represents 18% of the company’s total digital advertising revenue. Time Inc. employs 125 people at its content group, the Foundry, and the Washington Post’s BrandStudio branded content unit also is growing quickly, as is The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Custom Studios. This trend will be driven by the continued eclipse of more traditional forms of digital advertising (see below), as well as brands’ growing sophistication with and confidence in content marketing. It’s a win-win for everyone but ad and media agencies, as brands partner directly with publishers on native advertising campaigns.

5. “Traditional” Digital Advertising Continues Its Decline Ad blockers. Ad fraud. Set-it-and-forget it programmatic campaigns that push horrible ads to unwilling consumers. Missing frequency aps that run the same ad again, and again, and again. Long load times that eat up consumers’ data plans. Adjacency issues, now particularly with the recent explosion of fake news. Platforms like iOS that block ads completely. Falling rate cards. It seems that display advertising an’t catch a break, and video advertising isn’t far behind (most consumers don’t make it to the 5 second mark. Advertising on the web isn’t going away any time soon (if ever), but it has certainly been regulated to ugly stepchild status, both by consumers and now increasingly by brands, too. In fact, it’s this decline in the efficacy of online advertising that in large part is spurring the shift to content and to other forms of marketing in owned and earned (rather than paid) channels. While it sometimes hardly seems possible, “traditional” forms of digital advertising will get worse before they get better. That, at least, is in my crystal ball for 2017.

Happy holidays and happy new year to all.

For the past few months, I’ve been interviewing content marketing executives at global enterprises about the challenges and opportunities they face when trying to scale up single-country or regional content marketing efforts to take them worldwide. (I’ve also been helping some brands build the strategies to make this happen.)

Here’s an advance look at some of my research findings. The full report publishes soon.

Five top global content strategy goals

When I asked global content strategy leaders what their top goals and responsibilities are, five clear themes emerged.

1. Creating a global content strategy While about half the organizations I interviewed said they have a global content strategy, the rest admit they don’t yet have that aspect of content marketing formalized. Some have domestic strategies or have worked out strategy on a country-by-country basis, but tying it all together is complex — from strategic and logistical standpoints, as well as from the perspective of convincing diverse stakeholders, groups and regions to get on the same page. If 70 percent of organizations in the US don’t yet have a documented content strategy domestically (according to numerous research studies, including my own), looping in over 93 nations is geometrically more complicated.

2. Evangelizing and socializing content strategy (and content, period) As one executive I interviewed put it, “A content strategy is just a piece of paper. The really difficult part is implementation.” “Evangelism” is a term I heard over and over. Convincing senior management to allocate budget. Determining who spearheads initiatives. Making certain numerous voices are heard, but that overarching rules and guidelines are enforced. Developing training programs, perhaps establishing a Center of Excellence. Small wonder that when asked what their principal duties as global content leaders are, “change management” was the most-cited term.

3. People Content can’t happen without people, one of the three lynchpins of enabling a strategy (the other two, process and technology, follow). A global content strategy requires buy-in from senior leadership. It also requires content leaders, often in central command roles, as well as regional leaders who can help oversee efforts on the ground in, say, Europe, Asia or Latin America. People in lines of business other than marketing have to be involved in content initiatives, too. IT is one obvious area; so, too, is legal. But the really good content leaders know looping in divisions where stories and customer-facing issues lie is also critical. This means establishing relationships with customer service, product groups and internal thought leaders, not to mention sales divisions and often even HR and recruiting. Content strategy relies on strong relationships, consensus building and the ability to tap into diverse skill sets.

4. Process The components that enable and streamline a global content strategy are, by definition, more complex than what keeps a single-country content strategy chugging along. As a content leader in Scandinavia puts it, “Process and governance are where it gets complicated and expensive. But leave these out and quality is the first casualty.” Overwhelmingly, I’m finding process is driven top-down. Most organizations have a central, overarching content strategy or, failing a formal strategy, governance on levels such as brand and/or legal. But at the same time, process must also be driven bottom up, with countries and regions given enough leeway to develop their own initiatives, and also granted sufficient resources to allow that to happen. Establishing process also means developing training. Nearly every organization I interviewed has initiated formal training, ranging from mandatory courses in topics such as Digital 101 to highly specialized modules on discrete disciplines. Finally, process encompasses metrics and KPIs, broken out for global, as well as regional and local initiatives.

5. Technology Clearly, no digital marketing initiative occurs without technology, global content marketing being no exception. Technology’s role is to enable, centralize, streamline and optimize. The number one need I heard in my interviews (as well as from companies I’ve worked with in this capacity) is centralized assets — a digital asset repository where creative elements can be easily stored, accessed and retrieved. Not only does this require the usual tool assessments, but also carefully designed taxonomies and tagging that will work across languages and cultures. Shared assets are just part of the call from collaboration tools. Unilever has saved millions of dollars worldwide by enabling shared assets and collaboration, so multiple agencies and internal stakeholders can drink from the same well, so to speak. Knowledge sharing is another important role of technology, as well as the ability to share work and results. Nestlé has built out an extensive internal social network for content creators for exactly that reason. Finally, while it’s important to assess tools for global accessibility and fluency in multiple languages and alphabets, it’s essential to understand there will be exceptions in regions like China, where firewalls create a need for separate systems.

Final thoughts

As I finalize this research, I look forward to sharing more findings.

In the meantime, if you’re conducting content marketing on a global scale, please share your successes and challenges with me.

Together we’ve looked at why context is digital marketing’s next frontier.

Since then, I’ve delved further into the topic, publishing research that looks at the value of marketing in the “phytigal” world we now inhabit, where things are as connected as devices are. Beacons, sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT) are moving marketing past the screen to the objects, places, and even the conditions (weather, holidays, sales) we occupy and experience in the real world.

Contextual campaigns go well beyond “the right message to the right person at the right time.”Location, for example, plays a role. Automotive dealerships are using beacons to determine which customers visit the showroom versus the service department, enabling them to connect contextually in the right way, with the right messages, based on hyper-granular location data.

All of this is super-cool, of course, but what are the actual benefits of contextual campaigns, not only to marketers but also to the organizations they work with — as well as to the consumers they interact with? My research reveals at least 18 benefits, only some of which are directly related to marketing.

Marketing benefits

Contextual campaigns confer some very obvious benefits to marketers. More targeted and individualized communications can result in amazing ROI.

“The more context there is, the higher the ROI,” Disney SVP Gunjan Bhow tells me. In partnership with theater chains and retailers like Walmart, Disney has been targeting consumers with relevant offers. They recouped the costs of integrating numerous back-end systems to enable the initiatives (both their own and their partners’) in just three campaigns.

Context also boosts campaign attribution and can be a great contributor to customer loyalty. It enables precision in rewards and incentives; MGM Resorts triangulates location data together with purchase history to send the right offers to individuals in their properties.

And of course, there’s the cool factor. It won’t last forever as the practice grows more common, but context can produce buzz at present, as well as amplification on shared media channels, leading to differentiation in the market.

Unsurprisingly, contextual marketing begets contextual data, a massive (and complex) benefit to marketers, as well as to the organizations they work for.

Organizational benefits

Data about how, when, why and where consumers interact with brands and their products goes far beyond the marketing department. Enterprises can use this information to make decisions about how they operate. (For example, do sales of a certain product spike under specific conditions or with certain consumer segments?)

These insights also can be used to develop new products and update existing ones. Marantz is developing new types of speakers for specific locations, based on numerous consumers naming their speakers “bathroom” and “garage.” This led to developing waterproof and more rugged models of IoT-enabled electronics.

Organizations also have visibility into areas that were previously black holes, such as the supply chain. Nestlé is looking forward to the day when it can send trucks to restock only those store freezers that need more ice cream, saving man hours, fuel and the environment in the process.

Companies are also considering using data to generate new revenue streams from contextual campaigns. Another example from Marantz: It now has a plethora of data from all the streaming services in aggregate. Would Apple Music, Amazon and Pandora be willing to pay for that type of consumer data?

Consumer benefits

Unless there’s a benefit to consumers, forget about using contextual campaigns. Without clear benefits (and, of course, opt-in), context can come across as creepy and Big Brotherish.

So, how can context benefit consumers? Improved experience is a huge benefit. Helping consumers to use a product or, as Home Depot does, find an item on their shopping list when they’re in-store, provides a distinct advantage.

Customer service reaps other big benefits. Manufacturers can “see” when a printer is out of ink, or if a user has rebooted a device numerous times in a short period, then proactively reach out to help.

Finally, there’s simply being helpful and useful in a general sense in a way that’s relevant to the brand. Sportswear and equipment retailer REI offers a digital concierge service to America’s National Parks, helping their customers find the right hiking trail or learn of weather or other important conditions.

Linking context to the brand and your organization’s overarching strategy is key, not just using technology for its own sake. And with contextual, don’t forget that it’s not just the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me), but also what’s in it for my organization, my customers and my prospects.

Since the dawn of digital marketing, practitioners have hailed personalization as the ultimate in sophistication.

Calling customers by their names and knowing a lot about them — their ages, genders, birthdates, interests, purchase histories — enables marketers to deliver more relevant, meaningful content that helps win new conversions and engender their long-time loyalty.

Beyond one-to-one marketing

But personalization is no longer the be-all and end-all, as it’s now being overtaken by technologies that allow for the establishment of even more profound relevance and connection — both in marketing and in the overall customer experience.

These technologies provide marketers with insight into context — a largely untapped element that can provide such an in-depth understanding of customers that marketers may then begin to anticipate people’s needs, wants, affinities and expectations. These insights — which may take into account the device in use, the channel, the location and the particular brand — can then be put to work to power improved marketing in every situation.

Context, in other words, takes into account not only the Who, but also the When, Where, Why and How. Simply put, it’s deeper targeting and more on-point messaging.

It’s about so much more than just who

My soon-to-be-published current research looks at marketing beyond the right message, to the right person at the right time. Contextual marketing goes further by considering a variety of factors: the platform consumers are using; their physical location (perhaps, using beacon technology, down to the store-shelf level); real-time information such as atmospheric conditions (Is it raining?), or even geospatial movement (whether they are in a vehicle, and if that vehicle is stopped at a red light, for instance).

These types of campaigns aren’t just fantasy, they’re reality. Maille Dijon mustard used beacons to target customers who had food-related apps installed on their phones in supermarkets. Waze teamed with Taco Bell to send a coupon to drivers who were near a restaurant, but only when drivers were stopped at a red light (safety first!).

I recently talked to an audio technology manufacturer using Internet of Things (IoT) data to target offers to their customers based on the data related to how those customers actually use the product. That company boasts a five- to seven-percent conversion rate from its email marketing campaigns. This when email open rates often run in the minus-one-percentile range.

How to think about context

Contextual marketing raises questions around contextual content. What type of coupon should a customer receive? When, and for what offer? MGM Resorts makes these determinations contextually — sending offers to guests’ smartphones based on where they are on the resort property (which restaurant, shop, show or casino), as well as in the context of their individual loyalty member status, past purchase history and stated interests.

Context can also drive the strategy behind information and other types of content, whether it’s via smart packaging (Think nutritional information, which one CPG giant is looking into) or apps that are content-centric and location-aware, such as REI’s smartphone app that provides a brand-relevant concierge service for American National Parks.

Context in marketing can only be employed with the use of powerful integrated technologies. Its components range from semantic technologies to machine learning and predictive analytics, customer data, product/service data, flexible, dynamic content and journey-mapping.

Without a doubt, context is complex. Moreover, it is growing in importance, not only because it’s increasingly technologically feasible and effective, but also because newer technologies (the IoT and beacons, for example) will enable additional layers of context to meet consumers’ growing expectations for contextually relevant experiences and messaging from the brands they interact with in an increasingly digital world.

Start with baby steps

How best to get started in contextual marketing? Think small, say the overwhelming number of executives I’ve interviewed for my research. Begin with small pilot projects. Think about the data you have and how to leverage it. Often, brands find partners to team up with: retail outlets, cinemas, dealerships or other physical locations.

These partnerships, or even solo campaigns, can require a lot of back-end platform integration to join up disparate data sources — CRM, location, content and myriad other campaign elements — but, when planned effectively, the ROI can be great, and it can arrive very quickly. An entertainment conglomerate that teamed with a theater chain to send video offers to moviegoers saw ROI in only three months, and that after a significant platform build.

Teams, technology, privacy and permission concerns are other significant factors in contextual campaigns, as is a solid foundation in content strategy. But there’s perhaps nothing more important that creating a value exchange, especially given that you’re asking a customer to let you engage with them anywhere at any time. Without your offering consumers something of value — monetary, convenience, information, experiential — there’s no reason for them to listen. Or participate.

The time to consider contextual campaigns is now. Already, brands like Disney, Nestlé, GE and Unilever are developing programs. Consumers will soon expect brands to be there when they’re needed, not just in cyberspace, but increasingly in the “phygital” world we now inhabit.

This post originally published on MarketingLand.

Enterprises are only just starting to incorporate content marketing as a discipline into the mix, and as a result, they’re quickly realizing content must permeate the entire organization. This applies globally just as much as it does regionally. Yet scaling content up to a global level brings with it a host of challenges.

Creating a global content marketing strategy is absolutely essential, but at the same time, it’s exponentially challenging. One large global organization asked me to help develop a global strategy, but to do so with two separate teams and in two separate client engagements that effectively bisected the globe (and as a result, the strategy) in two separate meridians.

It was a start.

I just worked with a major global non-profit to develop a content marketing strategy road map that will be applied across no fewer than 31 countries as diverse as South Sudan, Guatemala, the Philippines, the US and the UK.

Without a conscious effort at orchestration, time and money are wasted, employees become frustrated, efforts are duplicative and customer experience suffers, not to mention consistency in brand and messaging.

The need for content is universal, but each region, country and locality in which a brand operates has specific needs that are unique to their language and culture, and often other requirements, such as legal. You can divide these needs into three buckets that are core components of any content marketing strategy:

• teams
• tools
• channels

Teams: Structure your global teams for centralized leadership and local autonomy

Creating content marketing teams and governance is essential. Content marketing requires centralized leadership, but also a substantial degree of local authority and autonomy.

If there’s a parallel editorial model, it would be that of a major international news organization. The New York Times, CNN, the BBC and their ilk maintain bureaus in major regions and capitals across the world.

How leadership is appropriated, however, varies greatly. Very few organizations have formal content marketing departments or divisions. This is no less true of global enterprises which often assign content duties to marketing teams, social media groups or communications and PR staff.

My research has identified six real-world content governance models, all of which are as relevant to global content management as they are to running content strictly on a local or national basis.

Content is a team sport, and, as I’ve stated previously, coordinating content on a global scale is sort of like running the Olympic games. Each regional needs to have teams, those teams must have captains, and they must have training, knowledge of the universal rules of the game and the equipment needed to play it.

At the same time, each team will always fly its own flag and proudly wear its own colors.

Tools: Choose compatible tools that serve a global team

The content marketing software landscape is rapidly evolving and shifting. Selecting tools comes with additional considerations and concerns when they must serve global teams.

Does the tool support multiple languages? Diverse alphabets? Can it handle country- or region-specific barriers, such as firewalls or local privacy and data-protection regulations? Will licenses differ on a country-by-country basis? How easy (or difficult) will it be to train and onboard far-flung users? Can it be integrated with other marketing and enterprise software already in use (or planned for deployment) on a global or regional level?

Research on the content software landscape I recently conducted finds 40 percent of marketers say a lack of interdepartmental coordination is leading to investment in disparate, incompatible toolsets — and that’s just on a domestic level. Global requirements demand sharing, collaboration and efficiency.

In 2013, Unilever invested in a single tool to consolidate and coordinate content creation and publishing efforts across just three brands in the dozens of countries in which it operates (not to mention use and collaboration by hundreds of internal and external content stakeholders: staff, agency and vendor partners). The brand realized $10 million in savings in just one year. If that’s not an argument to pay close attention to the efficiency the right tools can create, I don’t know what is.

Channels: Use location-appropriate content and channels

What content should be created? Where should it be published, in what form and for which audience? Publishing on Facebook simply isn’t the same as engaging with social audiences on VK.com, Line, Mixi or Weibo.

Then there are various regional holidays to consider, local sporting events (in most of the rest of the world, “football” means “soccer”), festivals, superstitions, political and news events. If you ignore these differences, you’re an outsider, not a potential partner or a credible source of information.

Local input, knowledge and culture are essential. It’s not enough to translate content into a local language or to push content created at headquarters out to regional divisions.

In fact, often, local content surfaced in far-flung markets can bubble up and be expanded into fodder for headquarters or other markets.

Conclusion

Every organization committed to effectively using content in the marketing mix (and after all, there can be no marketing without content) must consider how to scale efforts, as well as how to establish governance, staffing, tools and technology to create compelling content in the right channels to deliver desired results. This is no small task for even a local mom and pop.

On a global scale, the complexities of creating a global content strategy can often seem daunting. A strategic approach, combined with a step-by-step process, will lead to content that’s effective globally, regionally and locally.

This post originally published on MarketingLand