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Get Common First If You Want To Develop a Great Content Strategy [Rose-Colored Glasses]

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Get Common First If You Want To Develop a Great Content Strategy [Rose-Colored Glasses]

How much did you spend on content last year? How much should you spend on content this year?

You can’t know.

Outside of the most abstract of estimates, you can’t know the answers to both questions.

As I’ve shared, “content” is a big word. I describe it as the operating system of a business and the water you swim in. It’s everything that encompasses communication.

So when someone asks you, “How much did we spend on content,” they’re really asking, “How much money did we spend communicating?” You can argue the answer is “everything in the company’s total budget.”

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Now, I get it. That explanation of communication expenses is clearly hyperbole. My point is this: You can’t ever know how much your company spent on the entirety of “content.” Further, you have no way to predict how much you will ever spend because the answer is always “more.”

Knowing the answer to the total content expense question isn’t anything other than trivial. Ironically, that very conundrum makes a content strategy important to your business.

Defining your content strategy

I worked with a global technology company last month. During the stakeholder interviews with both practitioners and senior leadership, we talked through their perspectives on how content could be more strategic in the business.

The head of marketing had a common comment and question: “I don’t think our business has a good handle on what we mean by content. For some, it means every headline, email, and social post. For others, it only means the long-form white papers, brochures, e-books, and videos we do … How is it even possible to get our arms around all of that?”

You won’t. You can’t. And you don’t have to.

Let me borrow from author and Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter who says in business, “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” The essence of any great content strategy is choosing what NOT to manage and measure.

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The essence of a great #ContentStrategy is choosing what NOT to manage and measure, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Given the scope of content in the business, it is inevitable that you will make tradeoffs. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need a strategy because you could do everything.

A great content strategy creates a clear link between the actions people take based on a business’ well-defined set of content and the financial results of those actions. It is simply a choice.

Making the choice yours

My first and most important message for the head of marketing was that they must define “content.” That definition helps frame the necessary actions to put a strategy around it. Then and only then can you make choices about further actions or new areas of content to build into your strategy.

This exercise helps you define the content and informs what you’re not going to address in the initial strategy.

Step 1: Define content types

We worked with one company that saved $500,000 a year by having a common definition of an e-book. Previously, one global region defined an e-book as a 50-page, designed thought leadership piece produced as a PDF. Another region used that definition for a research report. A product group budgeted for an e-book as an interactive HTML-driven digital experience, but other groups called that a microsite. Still, another defined an e-book as a three-page article with an infographic. Others called that a market outlook. Those wide-ranging definitions meant they required a wide-ranging amount of work. You can see e-book development would lead to dramatic budget differences across regions and groups.

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A company saved $500,000 a year by having a common definition of an e-book, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Take the time to define your content types and formats. What is a white paper? What is an e-book? What is a blog post vs. an article? What is a campaign vs. an initiative vs. a theme? Whether you are a marketing department of one who reports to the CEO or have 85 people in a global, cross-functional group of teams, you must ensure everybody across marketing and communications uses a common definition for each content type.

Step 2: Identify content purposes

You can’t put a strategy around a content format, so this step focuses on your content’s purpose. I call it the content class stack.

I strongly encourage you to see these as “content classes” based on business purposes (e.g., thought leadership vs. advertising) rather than content formats (e.g., text vs. video). Sort them by priority – content that changes often and/or has a high level of velocity behind it should be at the top. The goal is to create clarity for your major content classes, not identify every single thing created.

Common definitions of #content formats and classes are necessary to build a successful #ContentStrategy, says @Robert_Rose. Click To Tweet

Though your content stack will be unique, this visualized generic example may help in understanding. It starts at the bottom with a content class of data and then moves up to application-level content (account information, internal instructions, etc.), followed by client-customer-level content (client services, training, emails, invoices, onboarding). Then it moves to product-level content, sales content, and standard marketing content (campaigns, web copy, events). Premium content marketing (presentations, blog posts, infographics, white papers, etc.), PR/comms content (press releases, news analyst relations), and social content round out the content classes.

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Content Classes (The Content Stack)

Working from the content class priority list, you can begin to define the scope of the first iteration of the content strategy, the second phase, and so on.

Where do you start

The tech company’s head of marketing had one more question: “What is the best practice for where to start?”

I replied, “Yes.”

In other words, make a conscious choice about what is most important to your brand, not which or how many content classes to tackle first.

Only after you have agreement and a business-level decision on what you are and are not going to put a strategy around can you plot the responsibilities for creation, management, flow, and measurement.

With all that in place, next year, when you hear, “How much did we spend on content last year?” You will have a better and more useful answer because everybody knows the choices that were made.

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It’s your story. Tell it well.

Get Robert’s take on content marketing industry news in just five minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Watch previous episodes or read the lightly edited transcripts.

Subscribe to workday or weekly CMI emails to get Rose-Colored Glasses in your inbox each week. 

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute



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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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