“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them,” says Doug Kessler, Creative Director and Co-founder at Velocity Partners.
This is how content can create a dialogue, an interaction that works directly with people out there. The purpose of content marketing is to talk with people – to open up channels of communication and get more people engaged in the process.
Content Marketing functions: Clueless or just dysfunctional?
And though that sounds very cool, enterprises and corporate organizations struggle with keeping a centralized role for content. In fact, most companies do not have a model for content marketing at all.
It is a challenge. There are so many departments, many functions and different roles that are producing content in the same company. How can one create harmony in all these channels of communication when everyone is headed in their own direction.
Content is it’s own boss
To address the need for synergy, we must think of content as a an independent entity.
In my experience of working in content functions, I have seen a power struggle between marketing, corporate communication, human resource and customer care departments for their content needs.
Who gets to prepare the content for ambassador programs? Who gets to decide what goes on facebook and twitter? Should every brand be managing their own pages? Should Human Resource be managing their own content? Should correspondence teams in Customer Care create their stream of content? These questions are put forth in meeting rooms, every few months — usually to meet with silence or another discussion on how roles can be divided across functions.
That sounds very chaotic and downright ineffective to me. A better way to decide on how content marketing can be most successful in large organizations is when they create a Center of Excellence for Content with one Content Chief heading the Center.
Let’s work together
It creates avenues for marketing, PR and comms, Customer Care and Human Resource to have clarity on what their roles need to be. They work as one task force, trying to create synergy with uniform key messages, consistent and aligned communication. Their content marketing is strengthened as a result. Moreover, as content channels increase in number, an advisory board of editorial experts can really help in making the more strategic decisions.
If the center is being driven by a content team (a mix of in-house resources and content agencies), content can be produced in large volumes to make lives easier for everyone.
I will leave you to ponder on that theory and as you do, do leave a comment on how you think content can be integrated into enterprises? We would love to know how your company is doing it.
Meanwhile, take a look at this infographic that demonstrates some of the points I have mentioned above. Happy content marketing!
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