Recently, our Director of Product Marketing had a revelation. Content marketing, he argued, no longer fully represented what we stood for or what our platform helped companies achieve.
His preferred category? “Content operations.”
The suggestion led us all to do some serious soul-searching. How much difference did one word really make?
A fairly big one, it turned out.
What Is Content Marketing?
The first step was to get on the same page about the precise definition of content marketing. Content Marketing Institute says:
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Basically:
Quality content → quality audiences → quality customers
The term “content marketing” has taken the marketing world by storm over the course of the last decade, spurring the growth of new kinds of companies (like ours) and opening up new conversations about the crucial role content plays in an organization.
Interest in the term “content marketing” over the last decade.
But the idea of content marketing isn’t new in of itself. (In fact, CMI has an excellent infographic that attributes one of the earliest known instances of the strategy to Benjamin Franklin himself.) What is new is the way it’s been applied with gusto to the B2B space.
Allow me to escort you back in time to the distant land of 2009 when Kapost first threw open its doors. Back then, content marketing was alive and well in the B2C world (if not as sophisticated as it is today), but wasn’t nearly as embraced by B2B companies.
As the digital transformation empowered potential buyers more and more, however, it became apparent that traditional forms of enticement (paid promotion, cold calls, product demos) weren’t going to cut it anymore. Suddenly, potential customers started to expect a lot more resources—with a lot fewer strings attached.
In the early days of this power shift, companies that allocated a basic amount of resources and staff time to the problem could stay ahead of the game. Producing some great targeted assets (i.e., doing content marketing) set companies apart from the pack. All these years later, it’s no longer enough.
The B2B sales cycle is as complex as it’s ever been. Prospective buyers expect relevant, personalized content at every stage of their buyer’s journeys. They expect to have a solid idea of who you are and what you offer before ever picking up the phone to talk to a salesperson. They take long, winding paths from initial interest to final decision.
The marketer’s job? Keep up, or risk losing out big to competitors who adapt faster than you do.
Some companies are surprised by the increasingly complex demands of effective content strategy—early content marketing adopters who have watched their success taper off or new players who can’t understand why their intern’s weekly blog isn’t shooting MQL numbers through the roof.
That’s because, as our CEO recently pointed out, it’s impossible to create awesome, customer-centric content that converts if you execute the way you always have.
What I’m really saying (and what we’ve come to realize) is: you can’t do content marketing today without a content operation.
So What Is a Content Operation?
A content operation is the set of processes, people, and technologies for strategically planning, producing, distributing, and analyzing content. When properly implemented, it unifies the customer experience across all departments and channels and allows marketers to focus on authentic, resonant, messaging that drives revenue and growth.
Ready for another defining block quote? Basically:
Right tools, contributors, and workflows → aligned content → smooth buyer’s journey → meaningful insights → quality customers
A bit more robust, right? (If you want a more in-depth definition, check out our blog post dedicated to the topic, here.)
A content operation is the foundation that adds context to the process of content marketing. It’s the beginning, middle, and end that takes a team from tackling one piece of content at a time to seeing their entire content strategy as a coherent message—one that covers all personas and buying stages and is made up of assets that will continue providing value long past their publish dates.
A content operation is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s greater than just the marketing team, too. In fact, we’ve realized that one of Kapost’s strongest features is that it enables cross-team collaboration and visibility because getting all stakeholders into the same platform makes telling a consistent story to your customers a whole lot easier.
What we at Kapost encounter again and again when we speak with B2B companies are teams, tools, and processes that are siloed. The marketing folks may believe they’re doing great content marketing, but if their entire process is constrained within the marketing bubble, the assets they’ve worked so hard to produce are probably
- Vastly underutilized
- Not aligned with the strategic messaging of the company
- Not aligned with the strategic messaging of other customer-facing teams
That’s why it’s so important to us that a salesperson be able to quickly find that awesome webinar to share with a prospect in the Kapost Gallery, that a customer success manager can use the Kapost Idea feature to propose the creation of a missing asset, that a marketer can gain insight into which pieces of content are used most by customer-facing teams, and that everyone, regardless of title, has visibility into workflows, calendars, performance metrics, and final products. Because we know that if teams are disjointed, the buyer’s journey will be, too.
Takeaways
As the B2B marketing world has evolved—and as Kapost has evolved alongside it—we’ve all discovered that success requires more than just individual pieces of great content and more than just the marketing team. That’s why we’ve grown into a platform that supports the entire content lifecycle. Kapost doesn’t just allow marketers to create and distribute content—it sets in place a foundation on which teams, processes, and tools can work together to build a seamless customer experience.
So long, content marketing. Hello, content operation.
If you still define what your team does as “content marketing,” it’s probably time you reassess, too.
Need to pitch a content operation to an executive? We’ve got you covered.
Download Building a Business Case for a Content Operation for all the metrics, talking points, and scripts you need to impress anyone in the C-suite.
