6. Understanding the Challenges of Content Marketing
“Tweetable Moment: It’s time to move past the content marketing buzzword. It will not help transition your brand to a media company.”
—#nextmediaco
Content marketing is the real deal. The term itself has been gaining currency over the last several years, slowly becoming the new buzzword for marketers and gurus everywhere and eye candy for brands. But what is it? Well, there are several definitions floating around the Web so I will take the one directly from Wikipedia:
Content marketing is “any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, Q&A’s, photos, etc.”
Using Google Trends, I searched for “content marketing” and the results speak for themselves. Figure 6.1 shows graphically how popular “content marketing” has become over the years based on total number of Google searches. The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (starting from 2004), and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches, globally.
Tip
In case you are new to using and understanding Google Trends, the online (and free) tool shows you how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.
The hockey stick growth of content marketing started a few years ago in 2011 and continues to rise year after year. In addition, doing a quick search in Twitter reveals hundreds if not thousands of conversations, blog posts, and tweets of people sharing content about content marketing. A quick scan of recent headlines includes titles such as
• 12 Challenges that Stop Marketers from Creating Epic Content Marketing
• A Basic Game Plan for Content Marketing Done Right
• 5 Proven Tips for Crafting Relevant Content that Attracts, Convinces & Converts
• 5 Tips for Mobile-Friendly Content Marketing
• Tips for Creating an Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing
• 3 Offbeat Content Marketing Programs that Inspire
Take some time to read these articles (some were even written by a few personal friends of mine). Each article is well written, educational, and informative. They can teach you how to create stellar content, ensure that it’s searchable and optimized for Google, video, and mobile; they also include advice and tips about what not to do in content marketing.
There is no shortage of good “content marketing” content available to you online. And there are several examples of brands that are doing an exceptional job executing content marketing programs. Before we examine the challenges of content marketing, let’s take a look at a few successes first.
Examples of Brands Taking Content Marketing to the Next Level
Brandon Gutman, Forbes columnist and founder of Brand Innovators, published a blog post in 2012 that tells a story about how some large brands use content marketing in different ways. In his Forbes article titled “5 Big Brands Confirm That Content Marketing Is The Key To Your Consumer,” Gutman writes how these brands such as Virgin Mobile, American Express, Marriott Hotels, L’Oréal, and Vanguard are adopting and using various forms of content to achieve their marketing goals.
Virgin Mobile
Virgin Mobile, a prepaid wireless mobile service provider recently launched Virgin Mobile Live. Figure 6.2 shows a Pinterest-like social newsroom that publishes and aggregates a compilation of tweets, photos, and videos several times daily. Featuring new music, apps, web memes, and streaming music player, Virgin Mobile Live shares content across a host of social communities including Facebook, Buzzfeed, Twitter, and Instagram. To date, the site is averaging over one million unique views per month, spreading virally by over 50,000 “super-sharers” on Facebook and Twitter.
According to Ron Faris, Head of Brand Marketing at Virgin Mobile,
...scaling our content efforts isn’t just about expanding the size of our social reach across new platforms. It’s also about deepening the level of engagement we have with our fans in the social communities they hang out in. We’ve been successful so far in rewarding our fans with Virgin experiences on Facebook and Twitter. The next step is to evolve our social platform to allow fans to reward one another with special moments.
American Express
American Express, one of the world’s largest financial services companies, has participated in many content marketing programs. One of their most successful and long-standing is American Express Unstaged—a program that live streams concerts by some of the biggest names in music through the lens of a well-known director, Werner Herzog, to fans across the globe. Fans are viewing not only the event during its live performance, but also exclusive videos before and after the event. When American Express Unstaged presented Coldplay in 2011 it became (and continues to be) the largest single-artist event on YouTube.
“Content is an important piece in all of our marketing efforts...extending our messaging through content is a great way for us to continue to convert our customers from simply seeing a message to considering our brand,” explains Walter Frye, Director of Entertainment Marketing and Sponsorships at American Express. Frye also shares that American Express will continue to invest in content through its partnerships with music but also sports and other entertainment properties:
These partnerships allow us to create memorable experiences for our Cardmembers; through our content use, we are able to scale out that experience to prospective and current customers and ultimately exposing more people to our brand and driving consideration.
Marriott
Renaissance Hotels is Marriott’s experiential “lifestyle” brand, designed for business travelers who see travel as a way to explore the world. Hence, the brand designed two platforms to help guests “Live Life to Discover.” The Navigators platform helps guests to discover the local city outside their hotel, and the RLife LIVE program helps guests to discover new music, films, arts, food and drinks inside the hotels. Both programs provide rich content for engaging guests online. In May of 2012, Marriott relaunched RenHotels.com as not just a hotel website but as a discovery site. All the curated local discoveries (over 6,000 and growing) from their 155 hotels around the world now live online. And the brand promotes them to start conversations in their social channels. The brand’s site is seeing record traffic and exponential growth in engagement, and its Facebook community has grown to 270,000 Likes.
Dan Vinh, Vice-President of Global Marketing at Renaissance Hotels at Marriott International, said
As a global brand with limited awareness and limited marketing budget, we have to find ways to be relevant and drive consideration. Content is critical for us because it’s the currency that drives our relevance and therefore consumer consideration for our brand. And content for us lives first and foremost in the offline world through our hotel guest experience. This is how we ensure that what we do and say is authentic. Then we extend it to online to continue the dialogue with existing guests and their network (our prospects).
L’Oréal
L’Oréal, the largest cosmetics and beauty company globally, recently partnered with Rolling Stone to create content around the discovery of new, emerging musicians and their styles. In 2011 they made history by searching new artists in the country and asking consumers to vote and decide who would become the first unsigned artist ever to be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone. They developed specific content around this program, which culminated with the winner artist signing a contract with a record label and looking to engage and connect with consumers throughout the process with the ultimate goal of building stronger affinity and emotional connection.
In 2012, L’Oréal evolved the program to leverage Rolling Stone’s “Women Who Rock” annual issue, inviting consumers to get involved again, voting and deciding which female emerging musician would be in the flip cover of this celebratory issue that featured Adele in the cover. “We are very satisfied with the program having much stronger results this year achieving or surpassing our targets and benchmarks from number of page and video views, earned impressions to brand health tracking metrics,” shared Debora Koyama, AVP Marketing, L’Oréal USA.
Koyama is excited about what the brand is planning for 2013:
My vision has been to take this strategic platform for the brand to the next level by comprehensively integrating all initiatives and touch points and by expanding our footprint on content creation appealing to Millennials in a much stronger and relevant way.
Vanguard
Vanguard, a financial investment and management company, launched a campaign called “Vanguard at the Movies” in 2012, which spoofed classic movie genres of horror, drama, and suspense to convey what using Vanguard doesn’t feel like. The initiative was launched during the summer blockbuster movie season with in-theater trailers and a heavy digital presence on sites like Hulu and Rotten Tomatoes. Vanguard used the movies not only to extend the brand, but also to cross-merchandise its existing video content on YouTube. The movies became a focal design point in relaunching the brand’s YouTube page via a movie theme.
Michael Ma, Head of Retail Advertising and Prospect Marketing at The Vanguard Group, explained that in days after its release, the movies became the most watched video on the brand’s YouTube channel and more than doubled its traffic. “Within weeks the Vanguard’s YouTube channel went from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of views—half of them being our spots, but roughly the other half staying to learn more about our brand through other video content.”
There are certainly more examples of large and small brands leveraging content marketing practices to build brand awareness, reach customers, and drive sales. And many of them are successful. But along with some of these successes comes several challenges as well.
Content Marketing Challenges: What the Experts Say
Creating content is the number one challenge today, but don’t worry. You’re not alone. All brands struggle with creating and distributing relevant content to their customers. Giselle Abramovich, writer for Digiday, wrote an article in 2012, “Why Brands Struggle With Content Creation” that highlighted several leaders from top brands about why they struggle with content. Perhaps you can relate to some of these issues.
Nestle Purina
Julie Brown, Manager of Digital Insights at Nestle Purina, said that speed is a huge challenge for her brand today and that creating quality content at a pace that “feeds the beast” of socially relevant content is challenging. She says there is a need to work increasingly with scrappy production houses to produce great, high-quality content that is timely and will resonate with what consumers are already talking about.
As discussed in Chapter 5, “Building Your Social Business Command Center,” the ability to create real-time content is not easy to do and requires a social business strategy in order to execute it flawlessly. A strategy helps you define what the brand is comfortable talking about as well as what the brand isn’t comfortable talking about; identify roles and responsibilities of the team; and identify the internal resources needed to execute properly.
Greg Samarge, Digital Marketing Manager also at Nestle, said that the single largest issue is being able to create break-through content and still have the budget to fund distributing that content. It’s hard enough to justify the budget to create that content, he said, but it’s even more challenging to then push for sufficient budget above and beyond the content creation to distribute this great content.
In this case, the challenge isn’t only creating relevant content, but also finding the right distribution channels for Nestle content. A good content strategy not only helps determine “what” you want to say from a brand strand point, but also “where you want to say it,” which will help solve the distribution channel dilemma. I call this the content supply chain. A social business strategy alone does not guarantee you more budget, unfortunately. But it can help you make the case for it by demonstrating the business value of having a content strategy. It will also help you deliver a specific action plan as you prepare to transition your brand to a media company. Usually a content strategy starts with a content audit that identifies current gaps with existing content, content performance metrics, competitive audit, and recommendations on how to take content to the next level and begin to change your customer’s behaviors in a positive way.
AARP (American Association of Retired Persons)
Tammy Gordan, Director of Social Communications at AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), said that one of the biggest challenges is the blurring of the line between content creation and journalism. She says AARP creates content involving advertising, public relations, and marketing and also produces television, radio, web, mobile, and print content. Figuring out workflow, marketing, and job descriptions has been one of the most interesting struggles of 2012 for them.
A content governance plan (part of a social business strategy) solves the challenge of content approvals and workflows. If done correctly, workflows can be created that manage the entire content supply chain—the creation, approval, distribution and integration of content. This helps ensure brand storytelling across multiple channels is consistent and also prevents disjointed content and community management practices. Platforms like Kapost, which is discussed at the end of this chapter, can help you manage content through these processes.
Kellog
Bob Arnold, Associate Director of Global Digital Strategy at Kellogg, said the biggest challenge for them is balancing adding value to the customer experience and communicating the brand message at the same time.
As discussed in Chapter 1, “Understanding the Social Customer and the Chaotic World We Live In,” creating content that adds value to your customers yet stays consistent with the brand is a huge challenge. The good news is that creating a robust content strategy can solve it. With a good content strategy you can determine the brand’s tone of voice, categorize your content into various themes, and then determine which content should be shared within specific online channels. It consists of a culmination of various inputs:
• Brand narrative (core values, brand positioning, product news)
• Non-business issues that are important to the brand (sustainability)
• How the media contextualizes the brand when they write stories
• How the community contextualizes the brand when they tweet, leave comments, or write blog posts
• What other topics your community cares about
• Historical content performance
• How consumers search for your brand, product
• The top 10 or 15 customer support issues
Chapter 7, “Defining Your Brand Story and Content Narrative,” goes into great detail about each of these inputs.
Cisco
Karen Snell, Content Lead at Cisco Systems, said that the biggest challenge they face is getting buy-in for their approach to content creation from their peers. As storytellers first, she said, our team is dedicated to finding and telling stories that make a connection with our audience and producing them in such a way that they will make an impact, an impression and hopefully result in a social action—sharing, tweeting, republishing, and so on. She went on to say that they are continually explaining their strategy and “selling” their approach to internal stakeholders.
At Cisco, enterprise collaboration presents a challenge, as it does at most companies. Organizational silos have always plagued business progress and continue to stunt the growth of collaboration. But the transition from brand to media company requires internal teams to work together to build a content organization that adds value to all stakeholders—internal teams, partners, and customers. This is why it’s so important to invest in a social business strategy that helps you tear down organizational silos and build collaborative and innovative teams and business models, allowing the company as a whole to become a content machine.
Capri Sun
Orion Brown, Brand Manager of Capri Sun, said that the biggest challenge is creating both consumer-relevant and brand-building content. Some brands (namely, passion brands) lend well to this as they are already ubiquitous and are intimately integrated into the daily lives of consumers. A passion brand is one that delivers emotional equity to its customers and has the following characteristics, according to media agency MediaCom:
• Adventurous/Rebellious
• Desirable/Sexy
• Playful/Fun
• Creative
So their hurdle to find touch points that feel natural and relevant to the consumer might be lower. But for many brands, he said, it’s a delicate balance between creating a branded message that doesn’t sound like a sales pitch but still drives consumers ultimately to purchase. In his experience, he continued, identifying the consumer need that a brand meets, then laddering that back up to a higher emotional need helps drive relevant content creation. But even then, brands need to be mindful of not getting too arrogant in their brand promise to keep the content grounded and believable to the consumer.
Capri Sun, a brand I grew up with and now buy for my family, has the same challenge as Kellogg. But providing meaningful content that builds on the passions and motivations of consumers yet stays true to the brand promise is not easy to do. Finding the right balance is difficult, but it can be done with a sound content strategy.
To dig down a little deeper into some of these content challenges, I thought it would be good to spend some time with several leaders in the space, do my own qualitative research, and get their opinions. I asked them about the challenges with content in organizations today. Although some mirrored many of the same issues as those mentioned above, some were completely new.
Mindjet
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Chief Marketing Officer of Mindjet, a Collaborative Tools and Work Management Software company, explained to me that it’s about lack of resources and priorities. He said that the content strategy needs to match to the business objectives and map to current and relevant cultural and social issues that are important to the brand. Additionally, he stressed that poor organizational design is a huge factor that’s causing brands to miss the mark on creating and distributing content to the right customer at the right time. Most community and content strategies, he said, are splintered among multiple members of a marketing team and have a lack of ownership other than tactical execution.
Sears
Sean McGinnis, Marketing GM at Sears Holdings Corporation, has a slightly different take to the issue. He believes it’s more of a leadership issue and said that a strong leader pushes the need to disassemble silos and have a unified content strategy that delivers value to each of the brands stakeholders and that benefits the business at the same time. Instead, there is too often infighting among departments that results in politics and arguments over budget, personnel, and roles/responsibilities that result in fractured content and communities. He also believes that brands suffer from a lack of a cohesive strategy, a complete investment in the right resources, and a plan to achieve the goals of the organization through content. Workflow and processes are a huge part of the problem, he said, but without the strategy, commitment, and resources, all the workflows and processes in the world will not create a winning content program.
Kinvey
Joe Chernov, Vice-President of Marketing at Kinvey, a Mobile Cloud Backend as a Service Provider, looks at it more from a psychological perspective. He suggests that brands struggle to create relevant content because they can’t empathize. They have a hard time seeing the world through the lens of the buyer. Instead, they insist on trying to persuade the buyer to see the world through their own perspective. Relevant content is the byproduct of empathy. Everything else is just selling.
Ricoh
Sandra Zoratti, Vice-President of Marketing at Ricoh, an electronics company, believes that to create cohesive communities and content, brands need to look at content as a strategic infrastructure instead of a tactical execution. Identifying a brand persona that represents the authentic culture of the company—and its people, products, and practices—is important. Then, she said, a content approach can be crafted that create value for your audience, engage prospects and customers, and cut through the clutter. She emphasized that creating and curating content takes time. Marketers and brands who choose to proactively outline an approach prior to content generation and curation benefit from the harmony of communities and content, thus maximizing engagement and ROI.
ArCompany
And finally, Danny Brown, Chief Technology Officer of ArCompany, a social business intelligence agency, believes it’s a workflow issue. He said that there are still too many processes and hoops to jump through and that company politics are plaguing business progress. When an organization requires multiple sign offs just to approve a tweet, status update, or blog comment, then you know you have an issue with time and context. He stressed that company leadership must deliver trust to their teams so that they can execute content programs that provide value.
So here we have several different points of view from a variety of different perspectives about the challenges of content marketing. On one hand, it’s a matter of not having the right resources or enough time and then balancing the content mix with brand messages and content that adds real value to consumers. On the other hand, it might be more about organizational management—leadership, psychology, company politics, and the amount of processes needed to get things done.
Now let’s take a look at some quantitative data to see if there are any parallels.
Content Marketing Challenges: What Does the Data Show?
In the 2011 Annual Content Curation Adoption Survey by HiveFire, and as depicted in Figure 6.3, 73% of respondents said that their biggest challenge with content marketing was “creating original content” with the same percentage of respondents also citing that they don’t have enough time to do it. What is not surprising is that 39% of the respondents were unsure of how to staff their teams correctly to execute content marketing programs successfully.
Figure 6.3 HiveFire study reveals that creating original content is the number one challenge for brands.
In this case, it’s not just the challenge of creating original content, but it’s the lack of internal resources needed to execute these content programs. This could be a result of your organization not being structured properly, not having a unified vision of how you view content and its importance, lack of prioritization, or just being blind to the opportunity. So perhaps it’s more of a business challenge than it is a marketing one. And although this study is a few years old, I see the same challenge plaguing businesses today, mainly due to the “bright and shiny” object of social media as discussed in Chapter 2, “Defining Social Business Strategy and Planning.”
Also in 2011, the State of B2B Content Marketing Survey by Marketing Automation Firm, TechValidate, reported that 43% of B2B marketers said that the amount of time needed to produce content was their biggest challenge with content marketing (see Figure 6.4). According to the report, the respondents said that it took between four and eight weeks on average to produce relevant marketing content, and nearly 13% of those surveyed reported that they often spend over three months creating content.
Figure 6.4 TechValidate study reveals the amount of time needed to produce content is the biggest challenge with content marketing for B2B marketers.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, “Establishing a Centralized ‘Editorial’ Social Business Center of Excellence,” media companies have several distinct qualities that allow them to capitalize on consumer attention, especially in a world where there is a content surplus and attention deficit. The ability to tell good stories, mass amounts of relevant and ubiquitous content, and agile teams are necessary to build an “always on” content organization.
More importantly, to make even the smallest impression on consumers, you need to ensure that it doesn’t take your company four to eight weeks to create original content. One week is even too long. The ability to move quickly and create good content fast (and in real-time) is a business imperative in today’s environment. Trust is even more important. Without trust from company leadership, you’ll never get things done in a timely manner because they want to see and approve everything before it gets published. Streamlined operations and having the right team structure are also needed to cut down on the lead-time to create high quality and relevant content.
A more recent study validates some of these same concerns. The B2C Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends–North America Report by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs shows that a lack of budget is the top challenge faced by B2C content marketers today (see Figure 6.5). In fact, 52% of B2C content marketers are challenged with lack of budget, compared with 39% of B2B content marketers.
With the exception of budget issues, the top three challenges plaguing content marketers today have to do with the inability to produce enough content, engaging content, and a variety of content. What is surprising is that 31% of respondents are not integrating with other communications channels. This is a major concern. Lack of integration equals disjointed content, failed community management, and irrelevant storytelling. How can you tell a consistent brand story across a variety of channels if you aren’t communicating internally with other teams? Although these are more tactical challenges, they certainly stem from the same root cause mentioned previously—lack of trust and collaboration.
Though many of these top challenges are consistent with the other reports as well as the statements made by those I interviewed, the following study paints a somewhat different story.
The 2012 Content Marketing Survey Report by eConsultancy and Outbrain illustrates a few differences of opinion from both in-house marketers and agencies and what each believes to be the main barriers to effective content marketing. As illustrated in Figure 6.6, the two most commonly cited barriers for in-house respondents were a lack of human resources (42%), followed by a lack of budget (35%); whereas, agency respondents were more likely to cite a lack of understanding or training (46%) and a lack of content creation skills (39%) as areas that prevent effective content marketing. What’s interesting about this study is that the top three content marketing challenges have nothing to do with content marketing at all—lack of human resources, lack of budget, and company politics.
Figure 6.6 The 2012 Content Marketing Survey Report illustrates what marketers (in-house/agency) believe to be the biggest challenges to content marketing.
In looking at the first two studies from HiveFire and TechValidate, it’s clear that the challenges many marketers face is tactical. The ability to “find” good content, creating original content, and finding time to do it are consistent in both reports, and it actually makes sense. If you work in a silo and fail to collaborate with other teams and even customers, you can see why these are such huge pain points.
The more recent reports from eConsultancy and the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs paint a slightly different picture. The commonalities in both dig much deeper than just marketing challenges. Lack of budget, human resources, collaboration/integration, and company politics seem to be barriers to effective content marketing. These challenges were also validated by many of the leaders who gave their points of view earlier in the chapter.
And here lies the issue at hand with content marketing.
Content marketing is by nature, tactical. It can easily be done in a silo. If you are a marketer, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from creating, aggregating, and curating content and then posting it up in social media channels without having a strategy. You can hire consultants, agencies, and even third-party journalists and bloggers to create content and campaigns on your behalf. It’s fairly easy and affordable to use services like Poptent or Genius Rocket to crowdsource highly produced video content. And guess what? You can do all of this without actually talking to anyone in your company. Now, the content itself might not be epic or change any specific consumer behavior but it’s not hard to do, and it’s not that expensive.
The reason why many of the companies surveyed struggle with content, storytelling, and scalability is because they are looking at content from an elementary point of view. Content is not a box you check, a bubble you fill in, or a bullet point in a PowerPoint presentation. It’s more than SEO (Search Engine Optimization); it’s more than videos, Infographics, Instagram photos, and real-time marketing. You can’t learn about content from clever blog titles like “10 Proven Tips to Learn This” or “5 Smart Tricks to Learn That.” Content must be considered a strategic imperative for your business. You must become a content organization if you want to take your business to the next level.
Just as there is an art to storytelling; there also needs to be a strategic and operational plan that can help you create and distribute content; integrate it across paid, earned, and owned media; and measure it effectively. As a marketer, brand manager, or small business owner you must move beyond the content marketing buzzword and commit to building a content strategy that will allow you to execute your tactical content marketing initiatives flawlessly and at scale.
Moving Past the Content Marketing Buzzword
So let’s recap.
As previously mentioned, content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, Q&A’s, photos, and so on. This is a self-explanatory definition, and there are thousands of resources that can help you create compelling content.
But this book isn’t about content marketing. This book is about change. It’s about helping your brand evolve into a media company. This change starts with understanding how to implement a social business strategy (Chapter 2). It then continues on to help you build your centralized editorial team—the Social Business Center of Excellence (Chapter 3). The next step to facilitate this change involves building your army of content contributors and brand journalists—employees, customers, and partners (Chapter 4). And then it’s about building a real-time listening center, also known as the Social Business Command Center, which allows you to react to conversations about your brand and also be proactive in capitalizing on real-time content creation based on what’s trending in the news cycle (Chapter 5). This change must also help you think beyond the content marketing craze and focus on building a content strategy instead.
Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder of Brain Traffic and coauthor of Content Strategy for the Web has a robust definition of content strategy:
Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. The content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why they are publishing it in the first place. Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants. Content strategy is also—surprise—a key deliverable for which the content strategist is responsible. Its development is necessarily preceded by a detailed audit and analysis of existing content.
A content strategy also requires support, collaboration, and integration from a variety of internal teams—marketing, public relations, customer support, brand and/or product teams, analytics, IT and even internal communications. Each of these teams play a pivotal role in helping you deliver a content strategy with a strong operational plan that can help you scale. That is, if you want stellar content that actually changes consumer behavior.
The deliverables of a content strategy include the following:
• Storytelling principles and tone of voice
• Content themes and storytelling pillars
• Distribution and frequency of content
• Platform-specific content and engagement considerations
• Creative newsroom and converged media modeling
• Content supply chain (that is, content creation to distribution workflows)
• Key insights and observations from a content audit
Each of these content strategy deliverables is discussed in depth throughout the rest of this book. And as a result, you will be able to deliver a robust plan that will help turn your brand into a media company.
Vendor Spotlight—Kapost
Imagine you work for Intel as their blog editor or community manager. Now, Intel has well over 100,000 employees globally, many of whom engage online on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Now imagine if some of those employees want to become brand journalists and write stories on the company blog. This is certainly a good thing. Those employees understand—and can write knowledgeably about—a variety of topics related to Intel’s expertise and that potential customers would find interesting. But how would you manage the workflow from content ideation to content distribution and all the processes and approvals in between?
You can certainly test the waters with your collaboration and community software, but it probably won’t work for you. Collaboration software is meant to collaborate and share documents and knowledge but not manage a process as robust as this. And email is certainly out of the question. These workflow challenges alone will not only contribute to your lack of sleep at night, but might also discourage employees from wanting to contribute in the first place. And while you are trying to make the transition from brand to media company, the last thing you want to do is give publishing authority to every employee who wants to contribute. Doing so leads to a whole new set of marketing and business challenges. In a situation like this, you need a platform that can automate editorial workflow, and this is exactly what Kapost delivers.
Kapost is a content marketing software platform that organizes complicated content marketing operations into a structured business process. Their platform manages the entire content marketing process to include
• planning (persona/buying stages)
• ideation (crowdsourcing form shared with internal or external ideas)
• production (marketing calendar, workflows, and approvals)
• distribution (including social media channels, marketing automation software, and CMS platforms)
• analytics (such as lead conversions, shares, earned links, and pageviews)
Kapost centrally organizes all your content, including emails, landing pages, blog posts, white papers, eBooks, infographics, videos, and social media content into a single platform. The platform also integrates with all major content platforms like Marketo, most CMS platforms, social networks, YouTube, Brightcove, and Slideshare to name a few.
The Kapost platform is built to manage four key areas in the content marketing process: planning, production, distribution, and analysis.
As depicted in Figure 6.7, Kapost has a robust content dashboard that displays a set of columns that can be easily customized based on the details that are important to you or any user that has access to the platform. As illustrated, the columns have several pieces of important information. Because these column headers are customizable, you can set them up as you and your team see fit:
• The type of content: Blog post, article, tweet, YouTube video
• When the content was last updated: Important to quickly see when that content was touched last
• The author: In case there is any follow-up needed
• Next task: Where the content currently stands in the workflow
• Publish deadline: The date that the piece of content is scheduled to be published
• Submission deadline: The date that the piece of content must be submitted for approvals
The dashboard gives you a high-level overview of all of your content, the status of each piece of content, and where it currently stands in your customized workflows. This is extremely important regardless of whether you have a small team or several hundred contributors helping you execute your content strategy. You can quickly get a status check without having to sift through Excel data, and the worry about whether or not you have the latest version is non-existent.
One of the most challenging aspects of managing content is streamlining all of the great ideas that keep you up at night, hit you while you are driving in traffic, or come to mind during a conference call. Even if you are taking notes in an old-school paper notebook or if you use the note-taking application Evernote, the content ideas still must go from concept to fruition. And as mentioned many times in this chapter, the ability to manage this process from beginning to end is a major challenge for many.
Still today, much of editorial planning still happens in multiple Excel or Google Docs. The good news is that Kapost has a calendar feature that helps you get rid of Band-aid solutions (see Figure 6.8). At a glance, you can see all of the content and campaigns planned by the day, week, or month. The calendar has unlimited views, and customizable filters allow you to slice and dice your content by specific dimensions. For example, you could filter your calendar by various employees’ content submissions, business unit, region, brand, and more. The calendar items drag and drop, open with a click to provide more information, export to a PDF for reporting purposes, and sync to your inbox calendar (Outlook, Gmail, for example). This makes the editorial process much easier to manage and scale.
Also as you publish content across multiple channels, Kapost aggregates performance metrics from all those channels and displays them in one central reporting dashboard. The system aesthetically displays metrics from every step of the process in any specified date range including
• Ideas submitted
• Content published
• Links (to content) earned
• Content views
• Content conversions (that is, the number of leads or sales that the specific content has generated)
• Social analytics (Likes, comments, shares, tweets)
Kapost can further slice and dice this data by any dimension (that is, by author, category, business unit, brand, buying stage, or persona).
A favorite feature of Kapost is that the platform can be easily customized to automate various types of content and approval workflows based on your company’s structure and needs. So if you work for a large company with several brands and need multiple approvers before a piece of content goes live, the platform can support it. Or if you work for a smaller company and need legal approval before any and all content goes live, the platform can support this simple workflow as well.
Also for global organizations with different needs based on business units and regions or agencies managing multiple clients, the Organization feature allows each division, business unit, or client to have its own platform. These platforms operate independently of one another, and users can only see the content within their specific instance. However, each platform falls under the supervision of a “parent” instance, which means the managing body or agency can see all content, analytics, and workflows in their “child” instances. For example, if Intel wanted to have separate instances for their teams in China, North America, and Argentina, this feature makes it possible. Or an agency can see how each of their clients are doing without different clients having access to one another’s content.