It may not technically be the new year, but for anyone who’s ever attended school, the annual September entry into fall — and a new business and social season — brings with it the tendency to look forward and ask what’s next.

In that spirit, here are the five Content Marketing trends I’m going to be keeping an eye on over the next few months, both as a research analyst and on behalf of my clients:

Content Around Things

This first trend isn’t so much content marketing as it is about content strategy and user experience.

We’re witnessing rapid growth in both the wearables sector and the Internet of Things (IoT). This leads any marketer — and more frequently, product groups — to ask what kinds of content should exist around what types of things.

Fitness trackers, smart clothing, appliances that communicate with service centers and retail locations (my car needs tuning, the printer is out of ink) — what content needs to be there? For whom?

What’s the value exchange for consumers? What about privacy and data protection? (Samsung’s smart refrigerator was recently outed as a possible Gmail security leak.)

Machine-Generated Content

All credit goes to the 4A’s Chick Foxgrover for piquing my interest in content generated by algorithms.

I’ve long known that wire services are using machines to “write” routine copy: stock market updates, sport scores and the like. We also know media empires such as BuzzFeed use algorithms to optimize their stories for maximum virality.

But did you know that a marketing professor authored an algorithmic system that’s written over a million books?

The mind boggles in considering the impact that algorithms will soon have on all the content produced by brands and publishers alike.

Contextual Content

Speaking of publishing and journalism, I’ve been following what I like to term “contextual content,” content that isn’t journalistic per se, but that follows those “five Ws” often mentioned in journalism: who, what, when, where and why. With contextual content, the most relevant content is displayed to the user based on those five Ws.

So when you walk into a resort hotel chain, for example, your phone isn’t just your room key; it’s associated with your loyalty number and uses proximity signals around the property, triangulated with personal preferences and purchase history to shoot you time- and place-specific offers. I may get discount tickets for the show that evening, while you might get a twofer offer at the seafood restaurant.

Increasingly, the places we visit will “know” us via beacons, sensors and mobile devices, taking content to a much more immediately contextual level.

Content Convergence, Continued

Content, which is owned media, continues to co-mingle with its paid and earned brethren in new and surprising ways.

Paid search, native advertising, recommendation engines, asking users to share, paid promotion on social networks — these are all examples of ways in which owned media are combining with paid and earned to create new marketing tools, tactics and media.

We’re a long way from seeing the end of this trend. As new platforms and innovative devices emerge, so too will new ways to combine paid, owned and earned media.

Ad Spend Vs. Content Investment

The topic of a research project I’m about to embark on, the issue of the dwindling efficacy of display advertising versus the rise of content marketing, is one that cannot be ignored.

Certainly, after years of hockey-stick growth, digital advertising wasn’t going to soar forever. (That’s the law of the disruption curve in effect.)

But banner ad growth is flat, and the cost of banners has been decreasingly steadily for several years now. Meanwhile, marketers are moving spend into content, social and forms of converged media.

Many observers are looking for one-to-one parity in this trend, which is an inherent fallacy. One dollar removed from a media budget in no way equals one added to a content budget.

Content is far from free, but it’s much cheaper than paid media, which necessitates a media buy.

This makes research in the field frustratingly difficult; you have to account for “lost” spend, which really reflects savings when investment is reallocated between disparate channels.

What was spent on media (a fungible resource) is often reinvested in a longer-term spend in a different budgetary category, e.g., staff or software to enable or facilitate content creation, distribution, dissemination, measurement, and so on.

Content is far from having reached maturity in digital channels, and it continues to evolve and change as quickly as the digital landscape. What trends are you watching, and which ones did I miss?

This post originally published on MarketingLand

Part of content strategy work is ascertaining what tools are needed to create efficiency. Content creators and managers require repeatable processes for the creation, dissemination, and management of content marketing. As with just about everything else, it's critical to have the right tools for the job.

Deep research I've conducted around the content marketing software landscape revealed no less than eight different use cases for content marketing, each encompassing several sub-categories. There are tools out there that address each and every one of these scenarios.

Yet while vendors (and solutions) in the content marketing space proliferate, there's fantastically low awareness on the brand side -- among the organizations committing content marketing -- that these solutions exist. Too often, when I work with clients to craft content strategy and conduct stakeholder interviews, the answers to my questions around tools and technology belie utter ignorance of how tools can make their jobs easier.

Answers to questions such as, "What tools do you use in your content marketing initiatives?" most often are either absurdly general ("email") or not marketing-specific ("PhotoShop"). There's a real lack of awareness that there's stuff out there that can really help move initiatives forward.

The vendors behind these solutions don't have it much easier. Because content marketing is an emerging discipline that still lacks infrastructure, it's not clear who to approach internally with solutions. The CMO? The head of digital? Rarely (even if this is changing) is one individual charged with overseeing content, unlike parallel disciplines such as social media, communications, or advertising.

What if?

That's the question OneSpot (disclosure: I'm on the company's advisory board) asked top marketers in a survey. What if you had a tool that solved your content marketing problems?

Here are some desires they expressed.

Creating content without first crafting a content strategy that answers two critical questions -- why are we creating content, and how are we going to go about doing it -- is an express ticket into scattershot efforts and inefficiency.

It's time to close the awareness gap when it comes to the tools and technologies that support content marketing, as well as integrate content with other marketing and enterprise initiatives.

This post originally published on iMedia.

I’m honored to have been featured in an interview in the Summer, 2015 edition of Content Magazine

Rebecca Lieb sees a rosy yet crowded future of content marketing through the lens of her exhaustive research.

Content: A year ago you said that the future of content marketing tools will be in stacks that accommodate everything from content creation to compliance. Teradata provides software for these types of solutions. Where are we at now in that evolution?
Rebecca Lieb: When I started doing this research in 2014, in the six months it took me, I saw the software landscape increase from about 80 companies to about 150. Now there’s well over 200 companies in the content marketing software space—and there would be even more if the big players like Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce weren’t buying some of them up. So there’s tons of activity on the product development level and we’re seeing some of these players get very, very successful.

You also said at that time that no vendor has an end-to-end solution but you did mention that Adobe was best poised to do that.
We identified basically three main buckets of content workflow and eight separate workflow scenarios: everything ranging from creation to curation and aggregation through to governance, legal and compliance. Nobody’s got an end-to-end solution, a content stack in the sense that there are advertising stacks that do it all. Integration is very hard when you’re a company like Adobe building software and then getting it to play nice with all the other software. So, Adobe has the most pieces of the puzzle but nobody has integrated these eight different workflow scenarios into one seamless software solution yet.

IBM has not gotten involved. Can you speculate as to why they haven’t?
I think IBM is the proverbial 2,000-pound gorilla in this space. I can’t tell you why but if they wanted to do it tomorrow they could. One thing that IBM has invested in very heavily is the social marketing software space: we call it the SMSS. I’m predicting that over the next couple of years the content marketing stack is going to absorb the social marketing software space and we’ve already seen very big players in social media marketing, like Sprinklr, move very aggressively into the content space and that’s just because social media is really just a platform for content. Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn: they’d all be empty if it wasn’t for content. So that can be applied to IBM. You could argue IBM is in the space in the social respect if not across the entirety of the stack.

Between ad agencies and PR agencies, which do you think has the biggest challenges when it comes to storytelling?
I think they both have equal challenges and the reason is converged media. We’re seeing PR agencies, for the first time in history, make media buys; but, by the same token, advertising agencies are terrific at media buying but really don’t look at content as content. They look at content as creative: something to fill space or time in the context of advertising. So, all of these agencies are learning new skill sets and nearly all of them, certainly all of the major ones, have opened up global chains of newsrooms and grand storytelling plays. At the same time we’re looking at publishers trying to be a content marketing agency. This is a way for them to get incremental revenues and they’ve always done this in the context of advertorials, haven’t they?

Please read the full interview on the Content Magazine website

Over recent years, I’ve dedicated most of my effort and inquiry into content marketing and content strategy.  I’ve written a book on the topic, as well as published more research in the field than any other individual.

Content is the distillation of all my professional passions. I’ve worked as a marketer, editor, journalist and analyst – all media, all the time. Since the beginning of digital I’ve been at the forefront of search, email, social media, digital advertising and digital publishing. All these (and more) couldn’t exist without content. All media, in fact, are containers for content.

I’ve also been studying how content works; how organizations plan, strategize and resource for it, and how content flows between paid, owned and earned media.

Today I put my brand-side hat on again and will begin to practice what I’ve been preaching. I’m proud to join Teradata Applications’ smart marketing team to oversee content for their global marketing operations.

Some friends and colleagues have asked what precipitated the move. Here are my reasons for making the change.

1. The opportunity to practice – and to put into action – the principles I’ve been studying and the analysis I’ve conducted.
2. Getting my hands dirty. As a strategic advisor I’ve been helping organizations from agencies to publishers to big-box retailers, financial institutions, healthcare and non-profits with their content strategies. Now I can be there for execution, too.
3. Going global – as a marketers, I was always involved with bringing brands across borders. While I speak internationally, the lion’s share of my work has been US-based since I crossed over from the brand side. Having lived and worked abroad extensively, I’m looking forward to taking up global initiatives again.
4. The position – organizations are only just beginning to organize for content. Few are a forward-looking as to put an executive in charge of content initiatives. I’ve researched this trend, and am excited to be one of the very first (of many to come) senior content marketing executives out in the wild.
5. The organization – I believe in Teradata’s product, and in its people. The company is consistently called out as one of the best in its field, most ethical, and most sustainable companies in the world.

So wish me luck, keep in touch, and I’ll keep you posted on insights from the inside.

Oh, and don’t think for a moment this move with move me out of the traffic. I fully intend (and am fully supported by my new employer) to keep speaking, writing, and staying thought-leader involved in all things digital marketing and media.

The foundation of content strategy is goals. Without knowing why content will be created and published — to what end, for whom, where, and how — content marketing is at best a spurious, ad hoc activity.

Yet when my colleague and partner-in-research Susan Etlinger and I sat down around a year ago to discuss the state of content measurement, we quickly realized growth in that sector is nowhere near commensurate with the overall growth of content marketing. This lead to research into what KPIs marketers should be working toward and measuring for in content, the subject of our latest research report titled Content Marketing Performance: A Framework to Measure Real Business Impact (free PDF download).

Content can indeed lift sales, but it can achieve so many more measurable, revenue-linked goals associated not only with marketing, but with other business areas, from product development to customer service.  Our research outlines some of these KPIs, but goes further in that it helps marketers determine not just what to measure, but how to measure it.

Following, the key recommendations that resulted from our research:

Measurement must be the foundational principle of content strategy

In fact, there is no content strategy without measurement strategy. Before embarking on a content initiative, irrespective of medium or platform, it’s important to know what you want to achieve. Is it to drive more awareness? Build an audience? Encourage people to convert? Reduce call center expense by deflecting appropriate queries to a digital channel? Each requires different metrics — for content, yes, but also to calculate whether you have achieved your goal. Set and prioritize goals and desired outcomes, develop KPIs to track these, and measure and iterate constantly.

Every measurement strategy must focus on business outcome

Content metrics can be notoriously volume- or vanity-based, rather than outcome-based. This means that counting likes, shares, or organic reach in and of itself likely doesn’t demonstrate business value. To do that, you need to show a business outcome, using the compass in Figure 1. For example:

1. An increase in reach can show audience growth.
2. An increase in shares (preferably combined with other measures of engagement) can show engagement.
3. To understand whether a content strategy has affected brand reputation, you must have a benchmark, measure sentiment, and look at the before and after. It’s critical to have an analyst who can perform this correlation with an eye to other confounding factors. For example, a “viral” video may be immensely popular, but if there is a product recall, pricing change, or other factors, it may be difficult or even impossible to assess the impact on the business overall.
   

Know your metrics and your data

Some signals, like click-through rate, are clear and relatively easy to assess. Measuring sharing behavior requires that an analyst assess multiple platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. — to define what “sharing” actually means. Compounding this issue is the fact that some of the most valuable data — for example, private Facebook data, or Snapchat data — are not available for privacy reasons. So analysts must take that into account as they assess impact and create defensible benchmarks as part of their process.

Be realistic about organizational capabilities and tools

Because content performance data comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, from various platforms, it often requires a great deal of manual intervention to analyze properly. This is simply a reality of the market today; content vendors often supply their own analytics dashboards, while social media tools also serve to measure content reach, resonance, and other (content-specific) outcomes.

It is not uncommon to require a mixture of web analytics, content measurement, marketing technology, and social media tools to assess the impact of content. As a result, content strategists should work with their analysts to develop a realistic (short-term) and aspirational (long-term) measurement strategy. Otherwise, content strategists and business leaders will inevitably become frustrated, while analysts will burn out from all the manual work needed to deliver reports.

This post originally published on iMedia

inShare

Content has become pervasive. It fills websites, social media, advertising and collateral. It comprises words, images, audio-visual material, infographics and a host of other form factors. As media and channels proliferate, so too does content.

Yet, according to recent research I conducted, measuring content effectiveness remains the single most daunting task facing (content) marketers.

On my content marketing maturity model, applying measurement and strategy to content initiatives is the third of five levels of maturity.

But measuring only for sales and leads – or simply relying on volume or vanity metrics such as “likes” and “views” that contain little innate business value or meaning – undermines investments in time, media, employees, technology, and vendor relationships.

Content Metrics That Matter (Beyond Sales)

Together with my colleague Susan Etlinger, whose area of expertise is data, measurement and analytics, I’ve been researching content metrics that matter beyond those applied solely (and rather bluntly) to sales.

Clearly, sales matter. But as participation in content initiatives increases and permeates outward-facing and non-marketing divisions such as human resources, customer service and support, product groups, research and development, etc., which we call the Culture of Content, the metrics and KPIs that are applied to content correspondingly shift.

Non-marketing divisions don’t directly support sales but instead have their own success criteria. To encourage participation in content initiatives company-wide, content marketing must support these other departments’ goals that clearly, while not always in a manner that ties directly to sales, are of high value to the organization. Demonstrating this value only occurs through measurement.

In the course of our research we repeatedly found most organizations are at a loss for how to create and deliver useful, insightful and business-building content, and they’re equally puzzled about what KPIs to put in place to measure content benefits.

Content Strategy Is Fundamental

Content strategy would solve for this as strategy is, after all, founded on establishing goals and benchmarks for content marketing, then selecting the tools, processes and governance that will best achieve these goals. But since most companies still lack a documented content strategy, they also fall short in knowing what they want to  (or can) measure. Additionally, they lack the tools and expertise to understand how to measure it.

Our recently-published research (free with registration) is a portfolio of case studies and examples of metrics applied in ways that illustrate the less-obvious benefits of content across a variety of scenarios: e.g. improved customer service, operational efficiencies, marketing optimization, etc. The reality is that content can support these goals, and all these goals can, in turn, correspond to monetary value.

It surprised both of us how much we had to struggle to find these case studies and examples, which underscores the underdeveloped state of content metrics.

Content Marketing Is Becoming As Integral To Business As Is Social

In 2011, Susan developed  “A Framework for Social Analytics,” in which she introduced “The Social Media Measurement Compass.” We updated that graphic in our current report to apply to content. The intent then was to demonstrate the many ways in which social media could deliver value for the business.

Now, the market has evolved to a point where content — which resides not only in earned media channels, but also in owned and paid media — has become a separate entity that is integral to organizations’ ability to scale their communication efforts.

Beyond marketing and sales, content can play a critical role in improving brand health, augmenting the customer experience, reducing cost and risk, and many other goals of the business.

Here is the updated compass, illustrating the key value propositions of a well-crafted content strategy.

Each point represents an opportunity for business-centric measurement; that is, measurement that directly ties to business objectives and strategies. For example, operational efficiency metrics may refer to cost savings, risk, crisis management, or even productivity improvements.

These six points are by no means exhaustive, but provide a starting point for organizations eager to derive deeper insights from their content performance.

In many cases, the same “raw” metrics can be used as ingredients to answer many types of questions. In other cases, there are business or strategy-specific metrics that require data from other tools or sources, such as web analytics, business intelligence, market research, email marketing or CRM systems.

This post originally published on MarketingLand

As a research analyst covering digital technology, companies routinely (to the tune of up to a dozen per day) reach out to request briefings — even if that’s not the terminology they use. It might be an “informational meeting,” “our CEO would like to meet you,” or “an advance look at the new product-or-feature we’re launching.”

You can call them what you want to. In the analyst community, they’re briefings. The best ones provide value on both sides: to both the analysts and researchers, as well as to the tech firm (or in my case, agency or publisher, too, as I cover advertising and media).

We analysts conduct briefings to further our research agendas. We constantly monitor developments and companies that operate in our sphere of coverage. We’re looking for trends and patterns, for case studies, and often, to make introductions or connections between businesses or people operating in the same sphere who really ought to know one another. (This has more than once led to investments, acquisitions and partnerships.) Analysts are influencers and a form of media; we might write about your clients or business model, or highlight one of your case studies in a speech or webinar.

The big tech players have analyst relations departments to keep the briefing machine well-oiled. Yet a surprising number of start-ups and even well-established firms are unfamiliar with the briefing process. So herewith, some insider tips to get the most out of this very important component of a communications strategy process.

In the three and a half years since I joined the Altimeter Group, I’ve conducted hundreds of briefings with companies large and small, all active in digital marketing, advertising, and media. My Fridays are pretty much reserved for briefings. Briefing calls are scheduled from morning to night, generally starting in Europe and ending somewhere in Silicon Valley. We all limit briefings to 30 minutes to keep them on-topic, and almost never conduct them in person. Most companies requesting briefings ask to do them on site, but travel time is a luxury. It would radically curtail the number of companies with whom we’re able to talk.

At Altimeter, we have a system for sharing tagged, cloud-based briefing notes that puts all briefing information at the fingertips of all the company’s analysts and researchers. That makes our jobs easier when we’re trying to find information on specific types of companies or business, and benefits the companies we speak with, too. They’re made more visible to more people.

The above illustrates the value exchange of a briefing. Yet compared with the hundreds, if not thousands, of briefings I’ve conducted as both a journalist and editor, I’m too often disappointed at how many companies that brief me now that I’m an analyst fail to take full advantage of an opportunity that could benefit us both.

Some suggestions for getting the most out of an analyst briefing.

• Half an hour goes quickly. I begin every call by telling callers at exactly what time I have a hard stop. Please don’t be late. Don’t focus on the information available on your website. I’ve already read it. Too many briefings end with revealing the really new and compelling idea two minutes before our call ends and the next call must begin. Don’t bury the lede.
• Five executives on a call are at least three too many. Again, those 30 minutes elapse quickly. Everyone wants the opportunity to talk. This results in too much noise and very little signal.
• Provide names, titles, and email addresses of who will be on the call — in advance. We can look up their bios and LinkedIn profiles. This saves a ton of time on intros, and allows me to prepare better, more focused questions. PR people, take particular note. If your name is on the call invitation, but not your client’s, I won’t dial in.
• Provide any deck, presentation materials, or online meeting URL at least one day in advance. The sheer number of companies that send presentation materials literally seconds before (sometimes, during) a briefing is Pet Peeve No. 1. A company did this last Friday via a service that required me to establish, then verify, a new user account in order to download their materials. It’s unfair (not to mention impossible) to ask an analyst to do this in what’s often literally a 45-second window between two briefings. Let’s both agree to be locked, loaded, and ready to go when our briefing is scheduled to begin.
• Don’t assume we’re online for the presentation. Probably we are. But it’s not unheard of to conduct a briefing from an airport gate or at a conference with subpar wifi. So really do send those show-and-tell materials in advance.
• Please talk clearly and into the phone. Please talk directly into the phone (not the speakerphone), particularly if one of us is speaking a non-native language. We’re trying to understand one another. The analyst is also taking notes.
• A briefing is not a speech, it’s a conversation. In briefings I far too often can’t get a word in edgewise, and I’m a person not known to be shy about piping up. Some executives get on a roll and cannot — will not — be stopped until they’ve delivered a message from beginning to end. (Most often, they’re working from a deck and a bit nervous, which they try to cover by being overly verbose.) A briefing is a presentation, but it’s also a conversation. The analyst has questions, as well as a research agenda. So pause. Make an effort to throw in questions such as: Any questions? Is that clear? Does this relate to any research projects you’re working on now? Try to make the briefing even more relevant to the analyst than they hoped it would be when they set it up with you.
• Listen to us, too. We analysts make our living as strategic, research-based advisors. We’re very well connected and ahead-of-the-curve informed about the industry sectors we microscopically cover. A briefing is hardly an advisory session, but we may well make an observation, comparison, or remark that could serve you well. Listen for those nuggets.
• Go through the proper channels. Every day I send over a dozen canned responses to the briefing requests I receive personally from companies and PRs alike. I won’t accept an emailed request for very good reasons. Like most analyst firms, we have a briefing request form that is designed to capture the information we need to determine if we’ll accept a briefing. Moreover, the form alerts all my analyst and researcher colleagues to the opportunity, so one briefing (if accepted) potentially goes much further inside the company. It also greatly streamlines the scheduling process on our side.

That’s it from me. What about companies out there that are veterans of analyst briefings? How can we make briefings easier, better and more valuable for you?

This post originally published on iMedia

Todd Wheatland just published a very in-depth audio interview with me that he conducted for the Content Marketing Institute late last year.

It’s not like me to post an interview with myself on my blog, but this one’s unusual in that I open up quite a bit personally, and discuss my path from film critic to digital media analyst.

You can give it a listen here (since I can’t figure out how to embed it).

How many major brands want to create their content marketing in-house?

One hundred percent.

That isn’t a made-up statistic. This was an actual finding a couple of years ago when I was conducting content marketing research, interviewing senior executives from over 50 brands such as Nestlé, GE, Adobe, IBM and Coca-Cola.

The next finding was even more interesting. We asked these brands what type of agency they were likely to select for content creation: an ad agency, PR agency, social media agency, or one of the much smaller breed of storytelling agency (e.g., Story Worldwide) when they did outsource.

Once again, a result was universal. While responses were divided more or less equally among the shops they would consider, some 95 percent of these executives said social media shops would notbe considered candidates. “Too boutique-y” “too trendy” were the top reasons provided.

There’s no shortage of agencies of all stripes that are eager to get your content business. In addition to the aforementioned flavors, there are also the custom content divisions at established publishing brands, as well as more channel-specific tactical expertise from any number of companies that formerly branded themselves as email or search engine marketing providers, but are now in the content marketing business. Finally, of course, there’s no shortage of smaller, more local content marketing agencies.

The trend really picked up momentum around 2013 when, in the PR sector alone (just to pick one of these verticals at random) Weber Shandwick launched Mediaco, Porter Novelli birthed PNConnect. In early 2014, Waggener Edstrom created Content360. The momentum is still going strong – at CES just this month, FleishmanHillard unveiled FH ContentWorks, a global initiative. (As an analyst covering content marketing, I’ve worked with Edelman, Ketchum and their clients on content marketing training and initiatives).

So what should you look for when engaging a content agency? There are many criteria you should consider – here are the primary ones.

Why Do You Want An Outside Agency?

Content creation? Technical expertise you lack in-house (e.g. video production or mobile app development). Strategy development? There are myriad reasons – nailing yours down will help to limit and focus the range of candidates.

Industry/Vertical Expertise

Don’t expect them to be peers in the knowledge sector, but they should possess a fundamental understanding of your vertical and/or industry, audience, region, or other individual criteria that are essential to your strategy.

At the very least, they should be great listeners who are genuinely interested in you, not just the job.

Strategy Before Tactics

If a documented content strategy doesn’t already exist, you need one in hand (or to commission one) before diving into tactics with an outside provider. If you need to create one, make sure you choose an agency with a proven capability for developing strategic frameworks.

Reminder: “You need a Facebook page” is not a strategy. It’s a tactic.

Are The Cobbler’s Children Wearing Shoes?

Does the company practice what it preaches? Look at its own content marketing: the quality, quantity, channels and responses to it.

Its dedication to both strategy and practice will be demonstrated if it is as dedicated to content marketing as it likely claims to be.

Relevant Case Studies

Request them and evaluate them. Discuss them with the firm. Even if they don’t reflect your industry or vertical, the shop should help you to understand how they relate to your issues.

Talk With Current & Former Clients

References matter. A reluctance to put you in touch with former (or current) clients also speaks volumes.

What Are The Success Criteria?

Any plan or proposal should be accompanied by success criteria and key performance indicators (KPIs).

How will the plan be measured? What indicates success? Look for metrics that impact business results (e.g. increased leads, revenue, shorter sales cycle), not mere volume metrics (30,000 likes!).

This post originally published on MarketingLand

Fundamentally, content has become bigger than marketing; it spans across the enterprise, particularly in public-facing divisions such as sales, customer care, recruiting, PR and product groups.

All these constituencies have the capability to create and to distribute content, to contribute to the overall content pool, and to become part of the content circulatory system.

But how does an organization foster a culture of content (CoC)? We identified the following seven success criteria.

1. Customer Obsession Guides Content

An obsession with understanding customer wants, preferences, behaviors, trends, passions, and so on, helps drive a culture of content (CoC) because these data inform how brands use content to serve customers.

Whether listening to customer feedback directly or monitoring customer interactions across various touch points, companies with a well-defined CoC are equipped to optimize rapidly based on customer insights.

This is embodied in the convergence of media, where paid, owned and earned must work together because the consumer sees only one brand, not specific departments. As such, content helps define the human side of a brand – creative, helpful, passionate, contextually sensitive, even vulnerable.

Instead of letting editorial calendars dictate content cadence, try the following:

• Listen for consumer insights across channels.
• Design content to unify the customer-brand experience.
• Assess all content for worthiness.

2. Align Content With Brand

Every company should have its own understanding of purpose, differentiation, philosophy, and vision — and brands must be able to articulate how content serves those elements underlying the very identity of the brand.

How content embodies brand values must be clear to every level, from the C-suite to functional leads to practitioners. This alignment should be a guiding force and benchmark for what constitutes worthy and authentic branded content.

To align the content with the brand:

• Crystallize how the content supports the brand vision.
• Incorporate that vision into training and evangelism.
• Only publish content that supports the brand vision.

3. Drive Content Leadership From The Top Down & The Bottom Up

The content leader must facilitate a top-down and a bottom-up approach to drive a culture of content.

Top-down content leadership helps drive investment in content marketing initiatives and promotes a company-wide mentality of the value of content. Simultaneously, a strong leader or advocate is nearly always required for education, evangelism, training, and testing, which drives buy-in from the bottom up.

Bottom-up content leadership can manifest through greater departmental buy-in, alignment, demand for content, and internal participation down to the practitioner level. As the value of content is translated across other business functions through evangelism and small, inexpensive programs supporting those functions, hard numerical results aligning with business objectives help justify deeper executive support.

To drive content leadership:

• Evangelize and test department-specific initiatives to drive bottom-up support.
• Leverage cross-functional results and support to drive top-down support.
• Both C-level and content leaders must reinforce an ongoing culture of content.

4. Culture Requires Constant Evangelism

While culture is pervasive and powerful, it is not built overnight. It slowly gains acceptance and takes steady reinforcement. Terms such as “constant,” “relentless,” “frequent,” and “reinforcement
” are commonly used to describe the process of creating a culture of content.

Why? Because content leaders must constantly demonstrate business and consumer value across the organization. Securing participation from divisions, groups, and territories is based heavily on WIIFM (“what’s in it for me?”) and demonstrated by metrics that relate to their goals.

This evangelism must continue over time through results, case study and best (and worst) practice sharing as well as centrally shared tools and resources. To create a CoC:

• Content leaders must lead the content evangelism.
• Articulate and demonstrate WIIFM, both bottom-up and top-down.
• Commit to ongoing cross-functional evangelism, support, communication, and optimization.

5. Test & Learn

Brands must be willing to take risks in the content they produce. This requires a spirit of piloting small, tightly scoped content initiatives with predetermined key performance indicators that align with business objectives.

These initiatives, especially early on, don’t necessarily have to be resource intensive. Testing and learning are less about new channel, device, or content plays and more about creating ostensible business value that can be reported back to leadership in order to drive program and resource expansion.

These tasks are inherent to a CoC because they require taking risks, which may result in failure or in tangible justification to use when evangelizing content across functions and to leadership.

6. Global Must Enable Local

Whether you’re a large multinational corporation with presences across dozens of countries or a company with numerous locations in one country, a CoC must be enabled locally.

Divisional authority and autonomy with strategic oversight is important; large brands must empower local practitioners with local content that reflects local tastes, context, and language.

Perhaps a local division would like to use a case study better suited for a German-speaking audience. Or perhaps they wish to tweak branded content to reflect regional realities, such as weather or news (for example, promoting snow tires in New England and beach umbrellas in Florida).

As brands are forced to become publishers, enabling local authority is critical to standing out. To enable local:

• Global must provide strategic oversight, support, resources, and direction.
• Enable local teams with appropriate cultural, linguistic, and contextual resources.
• Appoint regional and/or local content leaders to scale training and ongoing evangelism.

7. Integrate Across All Cultural Components

In a true culture of content, integration and shared insights should exist across every component of the culture: people, processes, mindsets, and the content itself. A CoC doesn’t work in an environment rife with silos.

Integrated workflows across teams, business units, and internal and external parties help streamline and scale content deployment. Integrated technology systems with shared access, reporting, data, and automation enable agility and meaningful measurement.

Even media itself must be connected through workflow and divisional coordination, designed for optimizing resources, as outlined in Altimeter’s report, “The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Will Combine Paid, Owned, & Earned.”

Integrate Insights:

• Integrate across people: workflows, tool access, collaboration, best-practice sharing.
• Integrate across technology: data sets, systems, third-party tools, and analytics.
• Integrate across media: paid, owned, earned, local, and so on.

This post originally published on MarketingLand