4 Steps to a Scalable Content Marketing Operation

April 16, 2015

If you’ve tried to build and manage a content marketing operation, you know how challenging all the moving parts and conflicting agendas can be. Without a cohesive operational framework, you’re facing a world of ad-hoc campaigns, missed deadlines, unclear results, and, ultimately, wasted effort.

As the Senior Director of Content Marketing at Kapost and former Managing Editor at Eloqua, Jesse Noyes has hands-on experience turning this kind of chaos into a well ordered, smoothly functioning content machine.

Noyes has previously shared his thoughts on the strategic importance of building a scalable content operation rather than just randomly “doing content.” Assuming you’re sold on the big picture concept of establishing a content marketing operation, this post will walk you through the four-step process for getting started on the right foot.

Building a Scalable Content Marketing Operation

“You put buyer needs first, operationalize around those, and then use technology to connect all the dots.”

— Jesse Noyes, Senior Director of Content Marketing at Kapost

Step 1: Take Stock of What You’ve Got

According to SiriusDecisions, 60 – 70% of content produced by B2B marketing goes unused. That’s a lot of sad, abandoned, and neglected content.

Before you dive into creating new content, step back and take a good hard look at what you already have. Noyes is willing to bet it’s more than you thought. A thorough content audit will not only identify your existing assets, but also who they’re for, where they live, where they came from, and how they performed.

“Content audits expose gaps, gluts, and gutter balls,” explains Noyes. An audit helps you look at your content holistically. Instead of considering each piece of content separately, you can see how it fits together to tell a bigger story and engages your customers in an on-going conversation. With an audit report you can identify places where you’re dropping the ball as well as opportunities to guide and shape the customer conversation moving forward.

“Content audits expose gaps, gluts, and gutter balls.”

A content audit also provides a critical reality check. You or someone else on your team might have prejudices about certain types of content or a particular piece of content. An audit takes an impartial look at performance based on data, not perceptions. This can provide you with some unexpected and valuable insights about what kinds of content topics, formats, and channels are working for your audience.

Kapost is so invested in the importance of a good content audit, that they developed the Kapost Content Auditor, a free tool that helps brands uncover, organize, and categorize their content in order to discover key insights that help improve content performance and take advantage of untapped content opportunities.

Step 2: Line Up Your Distribution Channels

Once you have a handle on your content assets, the next operational consideration is which distribution channels you’re going to use to get that content into the hands of your customers. This is a question you should approach from a couple different angles:

Which Channels You Want To Use

  • Paid. Owned. Earned.
  • Blogs. Social Media. Your Website.
  • CRM. Marketing Automation. Partners.

There are almost as many possible points of distribution as there are types of content. You need to determine where your most effective distribution channels are today, and also where you want them to be tomorrow. You want to gain an understanding not only of which channels you’ll be using, but also who owns them, what kinds of media are the best fit, and exactly how your customers engage with each channel.

How to Adapt Your Content to These Channels

Once you have a sense of which channels you’ll be using and the content formats that are most appropriate for each one, you can begin strategically repurposing content.

In their eBook, The Blueprint of a Modern Marketing Campaign, the Kapost team explains how their “content pillar” approach transforms one piece of pillar content (such as an eBook) into a wide variety of inbound and outbound content assets suitable for a multitude of channels.

From blog posts and social media updates to webinars, infographics, landing pages, and videos, each derivative piece of content serves a purpose at different touch points throughout your buyers’ journeys. In essence, you are building a web of content that spirals out from that single piece of pillar content and draws your customers back in, one piece of content at a time.

How to Create an Effective Customer Experience

Breaking your pillar content down into derivative pieces is most effective if you organize the individual pieces into a cohesive collection that helps guide your buyers back to the pillar and into your sales process.

Using this “web” of content assets, you want to map out the ideal flow for buyers to follow. Whether they are first engaging with your content through social media, your marketing database, or a paid media channel, you want to make sure you are creating an easy-to-follow path with your content.

It isn’t enough to have a lot of content. You need to know how to use that content to create a customer experience that drives movement along an engagement path towards purchase.

Step 3: Gather Your Stakeholders (Don’t Skip This Step!)

Noyes’s approach to content marketing operations is built on three keys to creating value: alignment, accountability, and insight.

Of those three keys, alignment must come first. To achieve it, you need to gather all your stakeholders together and create a “content board” to identify goals, assign roles, and pinpoint priorities.

Members of your board should be recruited from all the different business functions: marketing, sales, product management, customer success, etc. They should also include both senior and junior team members in order to facilitate a conversation where ideas flow from both the top down and the bottom up.

The goal is to give yourself a perspective that includes all the different dimensions of the customer experience. Pay special attention to what you’re hearing directly from customers. What needs are they voicing, and how can you create content that serves those needs?

Once your board has identified objectives (awareness, lead generation, demand generation, retention, up-sell, etc.), you can then define the customer themes that are relevant to those objectives.

Remember to keep your eye on the themes, and avoid getting bogged down in details about specific assets. Your content development decisions should never be based on statements like, “we need more video.” They should always be driven by larger, thematic customer needs.

Step 4: Build Out Your Workflows

A strong content marketing workflow provides a repeatable and adaptable process that a) ensures nothing falls through the cracks, and b) keeps you from reinventing the wheel each time you go to create a new piece of content.

In the same way that all your individual content assets are part of a larger, holistic content ecosystem, the development of each piece of content is also part of a larger workflow that brings all your efforts and resources together to work towards a common objective.

Technology can provide critical support when it comes to process development and workflow management, but Noyes is quick to remind brands that, ultimately, a successful content marketing operation gives your people a process and a platform that empowers them to create and distribute content efficiently and strategically.

“You put buyer needs first, operationalize around those, and then use technology to connect all the dots,” he explains.

With the guidance of your content board, and the advantage of tools like editorial calendars and regular meetings to review results and progress, it won’t be long before you start to gain valuable insights into both process and performance.

Photo by: KellarW

Senior Content Manager

<strong>Jonathan Crowe</strong> is Senior Content Manager at <a href="https://www.barkly.com/">Barkly</a>. He was previously the Managing Editor of OpenView Labs.