Tale of a Broken Content Marketing Process

3 minute read

Upland Admin

Image Credit: Shawn Allen

Want to hear something crazy?

SiriusDecisions estimates that 60-70% of content produced by B2B organizations goes unused. 

Maybe you’ve heard that statistic before, but the reason I’m introducing it today is to compare it to another one.

Content Marketing Institute reports that 64% of B2B marketers say that it’s a challenge to produce enough content.

Well that’s weird. How can B2B marketers produce too much unused content while they’re simultaneously unable to produce enough content?

Because right now, B2B marketers are wasting time and resources producing the wrong content. They’re creating content that neither sales nor marketing uses because buyers don’t want to consume it. Content that focuses on product features and long lists of product benefits. The valueless and boring kinds of content.

While I’d love to say that marketers can solve this problem with a swish of their magic content wands, that’s not actually the case. Looking at these two statistics side by side shines a revealing and unflattering light (the fluorescent kind, most popular in gas station bathrooms) on a bigger problem facing content marketers.

Content marketing has a process problem. 

Most departments, particularly in large organizations, are responsible for establishing their own independent ideation, creation, and distribution processes to meet their content needs (which are growing every day). While this sounds good in theory, this method leads to sub-optimal content creation across departments.

When every teams tries to produce enough content, they struggle to create a bunch of unique assets to fuel distribution channels such as blogs, social media, marketing automation, and paid media. And as each team distributes this unique content, it ends up being inconsistent with the messaging and content produced by other departments, resulting in a confusing experience for buyers.

To maximize efficiency and effectiveness, marketing needs to establish a single, transparent content operation that organizes and governs buyer-facing content across departments. A unified content process means better visibility, more time for strategy, open lines of communication, and higher quality content.

And of course, the big question is, “HOW?” (Note: I don’t use all caps often, but when I do, I really mean it.)

There are 10 steps to establishing a unified content marketing operation:

  1. Define your strategy
  2. Identify important roles in your organization
  3. Create an editorial board
  4. Hire someone who “owns” content
  5. Generate content ideas
  6. Plan quarterly campaigns
  7. Create content pillars
  8. Manage content workflow and responsibilities
  9. Distribute content across departments (so they can distribute to buyers)
  10. Measure the results

Toby Murdock, CEO of Kapost, will be giving a full rundown of each of these points in a webinar over at Funnelholic on August 14th. It’s actually part of a full online summit titled, the Keys to Content Marketing Success. You can register for one session or all sessions. Up to you. But if you’re having trouble managing content marketing, or even having trouble getting started, there’s going to be a lot of great information to digest. Toby will also be answering questions, so if you have any nagging content marketing problems to get off your chest, send them his way.

In the meantime, take a hard look at your content. How much of it are you actually using? If you were a buyer of your product or solution, would you take the time to consume it? Chances are, there’s a decent amount of content that’s juts sitting on those online shelves, going unused.

What can do about it? Start building a unified content process. Otherwise, this broken system will continue to monopolize your time and budget.

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