BD
Welcome to our roundtable discussion on the topic of content strategy. Today, our panel will include participants from both Movéo and Earnest. When you talk about content strategy with your clients, and admittedly it’s somewhat of a new construct for many people, how are you met? Do they understand it? Do you have an effective method of explaining it?
CW
We do tend to start with explaining what’s it’s not. This typically does come back to the overriding campaign programs that people have in place. Marketing teams are under a lot of pressure for return on investment, so first and foremost, how are they generating pipeline business? How are they generating leads? That’s number 1, 2 and 3 on their priority list. Jobs depend on it, bonuses depend on it, so the starting point is to try and look at content away from the purely campaign perspective and look at it as a long-term piece. Content strategy is definitely not about building things purely on a reactive basis for campaign requirements. Everyone in marketing clearly understands that there’s a value exchange. If you’re going to get a qualified lead off the back of a campaign, you’ve got to give them something useful and valuable for them to give you their details. That’s sort of fundamental Direct Marketing 101. Everyone understands that. But in order to move that up a level so that you are connecting it much more deeply in the organization, with everything the organization is trying to do and everything the audiences are trying to do, content should try and marry those together.
PH
Sometimes there are conversations across from us that are around this small thing called social media [laughter]. Clients are trying to formulate their social media strategies and, increasingly, the market we saw was at first skeptical about social media but they are now embracing it. They are realizing it isn’t simply about flooding their social channels with news feeds, press releases and those sorts of things. It’s actually about how we can use social media to share content and engage people in conversations. Then they realize they haven’t got this regular flow of content coming through. How are they going to create this content and how are they going to sustain it over the long term? I think once they reach this point, then we can have serious conversations about content strategy.
CW
Another challenge we see around this is that it doesn’t quite exist at a budget line yet. Whether or not it’s earned the right to have a budge line set against it, I’m not sure. One of the biggest challenges is that the content budget tends to be coming from the campaign budget which, unfortunately, drags it straight back down to the tactical. We’re creating this piece — whether it is a video or white paper — and we need to do that because we need to drive leads. Again, this goes back to the buying cycle. Content should support — right from the start — that journey. When you get qualified leads, with the emphasis on the word “qualified,” it is toward the end of that. It’s quite a big and brave step to say that content strategy is a year-long, two-year-long program that generates value above and beyond the quarterly sales targets. That’s a huge task. Clearly, you’re not going to turn off lead generation to switch on content, but I think that’s the biggest challenge to making content strategy happen at the moment.
BD
That’s why I love the phrase, “brand journalism” for content. I so much wish I came up with it. That phrase allows people at high levels of the organization to perhaps make that connection between the brand and what content strategy can do for them. We’ve had this conversation before, too. Content strategy seems that it’s not quite as a top-down an initiative, if you will, as say branding was. A lot of C-level people were reading about the importance of brands as business drivers, and in some cases, they were pushing down on marketing to get their brands together. They were certainly more receptive to that than hearing about content. I’m not sure it’s a top down — quite yet — subject. I don’t know if it’s different in Europe but, here, it’s something that’s being brought to the fore by marketing and it’s making it a little tougher sell.
DS
To follow on that point, content is often getting discussed in the context of tools and software and things like that. That’s part of a content strategy but it’s not a substitute for nor is it a full explanation of it. To the extent that content is bubbling up, it’s getting a bit confused with people who are selling you solutions for content in terms of something like a piece of software or a fancy CRM program and things like that. One of the great things about that phrase “brand journalism” is that implicit in that is that there is a human being, and judgment, and those sorts of qualities. Essentially the content strategy is something that is very much about human beings and judgment — there’s a curatorial aspect to it as well. That means there is no “silver bullet” for it. It means, also, that there requires a bit of effort and skill and so on. Unfortunately, it is not something easily solved and you can take it out of a box and say it’s done.
BD
All content is not created equal.
DS
Yes, exactly.
CW
That lies at the heart of the challenge for the organization. Where is this issue going to be sponsored? Who’s going to drive it? Who’s going to really care about it? By the nature of content, it can’t just be marketing. This is the real challenge. Organizations and marketing are really well versed in coming up with great creative campaigns, and we do that and we get them out there and we drive things from that perspective. We really don’t need much help from other parts of the organization to do that. Content really requires marketing to go out and network within their own organizations, find out who those hidden subject matter experts are. Find all those people who can help on the content piece. That’s another big step, because it’s not campaigns as usual, not business as usual. It’s very different. Also, terminology can sometimes hurt us as well. To talk, certainly at the C-level, and to say we really need to develop our “content strategy” — it’s going to be interesting — blank face you get, isn’t it? As always, marketing terminology can hurt us a bit.
BD
Although they like the “strategy” part of it [laughter].
CW
Yes, strategy is always bandied about. One of the challenges to do this is it needs to be rooted in what the organization is trying to do and one of the things, certainly, that has really helped organizations move on their content discussion and make things happen is to start looking much harder at their metrics — but in a much more objective fashion. To look at lead generation, “Is this lead generation genuinely bringing in enough business to merit what it’s doing on its own?” “Are we taking into account cost of sales?” (which a lot of marketing budgets don’t actually do). And then you look at some of the metrics going on out there, some of the cost numbers going on out there, and then suddenly content strategy can be a topic that’s elevated further up in the organization. There are some good statistics around this change in dynamics and the cost per lead, outbound vs. inbound. And this then starts to look at content in the context of inbound marketing. For outbound marketing, the cost of a lead is $373. That’s the aggregate North American figure that came out from e-marketers last year against $143 for inbound. So that’s a huge cost differential. And then when you start looking much harder for ROI, you can suddenly start seeing some moderately successful direct marketing activities and brand activities, some start looking like they are less good. Content strategy and inbound marketing, and things like social media, all come together as an overall…we need to change the way we’re going to market. And that’s going to be a tough one. Local metrics are still at quite an early stage on this. You do struggle to find enough metrics around the value of content strategy vs. brand advertising, for example.
BD
With a couple of our clients we have created digital publications that — with the technology platforms with these publications — are true content delivery vehicles that enable us to really get some nice insights along the lines of what your talking about. They can even help us shape what future content comes out so we’re not kind of guessing in that area. As mentioned, if there’s a piece on “security,” for example in this one industry, we can actually see what parts are read most and what was of most interest to the readers in terms of the entire publication. Those types of things will go a long way to help marketing departments justify the increased investment that is going to be required if they are going to put programs like this together.
CW
The other thing that is the sort of missing trick out there — if your looking to simply look at the actual strategy, that process of creating a content framework, a content plan, the amount of duplicated activity that goes on within organizations — it will pay for itself many times over because you are going to cut duplication. You’re going to really promote re-use. One of the big problems is you can create content in the context of a campaign, the campaign finishes, but the content lives on. That’s great and wonderful because it’s still out there, but are you still maximizing the value of that? Are you reusing it with a content strategy so it doesn’t just die?
BD
This speaks to the idea of C.O.P.E. – create once publish everywhere. Basically a content strategy that started on the Web but clearly has application well beyond that to almost every piece of content.
DS
We’ve all had the experience, also, of beginning an engagement perhaps with a new client, or even with an existing client, and taking a look at something — looking at an audit, or somebody new is brought into a department and says, “Here’s what we’re going to be doing,” and says “Get smart on this issue.” We take a look at what they have, and going through stuff that has been sequestered away, created before, and going “This is brilliant. This is fantastic. Why didn’t you tell me you had it?” “Well, I didn’t think it was relevant” or whatever. A good, consistent strategy is going to (a) help you harvest those pieces that have been lost in the “mists of time,” if you will, and (b) prevent that from happening going forward, so what you do create under strategic initiatives for content is going to be maintained, and be catalogued and kept alive and so forth. So those things don’t just wind up in a drawer or sort of mislaid.
PH
We talked earlier about content themes and the importance of message and positioning and getting that right. The other important side of it is content distribution and how, over time, distribution of your content…as consumption patterns change you tune into the preferences of different audiences as well — how they like to receive and engage with your content. The beauty of digital is that you can capture insights into how they are consuming that content, and which bits they like, so you can fine tune that moving forward and maximize your strategy ultimately.
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