Your Burning Content Strategy Questions Answered by Movéo and Earnest – Part One: What is Content Strategy and Why Does it Matter?

DS

Something we talked about earlier was influencers. If you think about an ecosystem of influencers to decision-makers and we may think we know what that is. [BS1] One of the great things about a good content strategy program is that it’s going to allow us to capture a lot more sophisticated understanding about who is touching the decision-maker and who participates in the process. It might be someone whose relationship with the decision-maker is currently invisible. Think of it as the next cubicle over, “Aren’t’ you working on such and such? I just saw something that would be great for you.” Those pieces of information influencing the process are much more available to us with a good content strategy.

PH

In today’s modern age, when you see how people are rating and reviewing things today, I think we bring some discipline with content strategy as well. To actually try and stand back and let go and see how the audience responds, what they value and what they don’t. I think that’s absolutely brilliant and actually sharing that with their colleagues, the stuff they’re evaluating — if it’s 5 stars — are other people interested in that as well? It works. Ultimately you just have to kind of, I suppose, go with it. Some of the content may not be effective but fine, and then learn from that.

CW 

There’s also another area that is certainly missed within the wider content landscape and certainly something that content strategy should look at right from the onset. It’s a huge area that marketing doesn’t always like to get involved in but it’s the sales force. There’s a great statistic that we discovered several years ago — 90% of marketing deliverables are not used by the sales team so we’re valiantly creating allegedly useful content for our sales partners that is being ignored. Content strategy should address that because it should look at what they’re challenges are when they’re out talking to their prospects. Some of those pieces fit much further down the pipeline and benefits that doesn’t necessarily get fed back to the organization. Why didn’t that sale happen? Why did that lead stay in the pipeline for the last 9 months? Some of the reasons are that we are not equipping the sales team with the right content to help push those leads over the edge and turn them into a full sale. Content strategy can bridge that gap as well. There’s a big gap between marketing and sales — still — and content needs to support those guys as well.

PH

Further than that, a lot of people think that content today is about position but what about existing customer programs and your own CRM programs? And how do we enrich that? OK, for years people have said we have a customer magazine, but it’s “one size fits all” and it’s a print-based magazine. And OK, we might add a regular email we send out, but it’s not segmenting audiences, looking at how all content is used by different customers at stages in the lifecycle of products as well how you can get them to buy new products and get the most out them as well.

BD

I think the point about sales marketing integration and content is right on. We’ve definitely experienced that with many of our clients. Another area we can connect with content strategy is messaging. A lot of our clients, we feel if they can really formalize and nail down their messaging that can turn into the core of almost all their content. This goes back again to sales presentation materials — is it on message? Is everything saying what we want it to say? With an ad hoc strategy of development, sometimes things go off-message or sometimes things might go down a direction a particular salesperson might want to do. So incorporating messaging into content development and using that as a check – have we said this? Have we said this? Those types of things are really important parts of the overall content program.

DS

That gets back to brand journalism. So when you’re assembling a content strategy program, there has to be a viewpoint that guides it. When you think about it as journalism or publishing, somebody who publishes a magazine or has a particular publishing imprint, there’s a point of view associated with that, an ethos, a take on the world and that should be the brand’s point of view on the industry and problems associated with it and that, as exercised in messaging, is going to be very helpful as far as not only selecting content but how its constructed, and even how it’s distributed because all of those things should be in harmony with what the essence of the brand is and how the brand feels about the world and its customers.

BD

Well, that’s a great segue because we’ve talked about content being a bridge between the brand and communications. I know you’ve had some thoughts on that as well Chris.

CW

Exactly the right point. Where brand efforts and investment falls short is when it’s just a thin veneer. In B-to-B it’s pretty painful. You can take a random set of 10 technology companies, for example, take their strapline (tagline) off and you could sort them around. They’d be about as meaningless as they are currently. That’s the challenge — if you’re going to make the brand really mean something, the sort of classic “here’s our logo, here’s our strapline” — that just doesn’t cut it anymore. Today’s sophisticated buyers need more than that. They need a lot more proof, a lot more substance, and that is the beauty of what content strategy can do. It can build that bridge. It can take what you’ve worked really hard on, what’s the essence of the brand, and then you can really bring that to life. You can really make it mean something and use it to show your commitment to those values and those beliefs. Then, the next stage of communicating is very natural as opposed to “here’s the brand and lets do a load of campaigning” and there’s nothing in between to give it any substance. An example of where this is done well is IBM’s Smarter Planet. It’s worked hard to understand what its angle is, what its point of view is and then there’s a huge program that backs that up. We all can see there’s a lot of investment and resources behind it but, regardless of this fact, they’ve shown a real commitment to it. They haven’t dropped it after a few months. They’ve kept it going and they just come back to that the content they’ve generated. The Smarter Planet focused content is fantastic! It really shows that they actually back up what they say, and I think that’s what buyers are looking for. Can you back up your promise? That’s what content does.

PH

What’s interesting is, as organizations say, “We have these content gaps so what should I do?” they sometimes approach journalists to write for them, but journalists write like journalists do. So ultimately, they write about the issues but they find it very hard to get the positioning piece in there without going too heavy on that or not talking about it at all. So it’s a careful balance bridging between the brand and the communications piece. It’s a fine line getting it right, but if you do get it right, you create something really compelling and valuable to the audience.

BD

We call it a lens; we have to look at the journalism through the lens of the brand and positioning. Another thing I was just thinking — if you have a hard time filling in your brand with content, if you can’t support your brand tenants with content —that might be very telling. That might give you and indication that you need to re-look at some of that.

DS

That’s a very interesting take on it. In an exercise to get your content strategy together, it becomes a diagnostic for your brand. You find there’s no “there” there once you try to apply this lens and you can’t see anything through it.

CW

That’s a really good point. Where content can really work, when you do get that test moment, “Does this promise that we’ve created, is it real, is it true?” It’s almost like it tests a fundamental shift that people have got to move from. Marketing tends to be a department or a function at the moment, and actually, it should be something that the whole organization has a part in, and content strategy almost requires that to happen because it can’t just be marketing people creating the content. We need these other people contributing to it. If you can get other people contributing to it, and that content is interesting and valued and supports the brand promise, then you know that you’ve got that bit right. If they don’t, then they’ve got to completely re-think this. And that is a hard task that requires stepping outside the marketing department door and seeing what’s going on in the field, seeing what the sales guys are saying, what’s being driven at board level, what’s happening in R&D and what’s happening in customer service. Harvard Business Review last year did a piece around that — marketing can’t just be the marketing department anymore. It’s got to connect all these different areas and be embedded in all these areas and that leads directly to a successful content strategy as well.