The customer is in control. The digital revolution has shifted the balance of power from vendor to customer. So much so, that we’re now, according to Forrester, living in the Age of the Customer.
As marketers, we’re all reacting to this new reality, and the consensus is that we must build and deploy customer-centric strategies.
Forrester tells us we need to build customer-centric cultures. SiriusDecisions prefers the term audience-centric, imploring us to transform to audience-centricity from product-centricity. Gartner calls us to build a customer experience worthy of our customer-centric strategy. And the consulting firms are going gangbusters on engagements crafting customer-centric strategies for clients.
The Strategy-to-Execution Disconnect
Most modern marketing departments are making progress on their customer-centric strategies. They’re mapping buyer journeys, developing customer segments and creating buyer personas. Many are even defining the proper messaging to be delivered at the various points within these frameworks.
But most marketers are struggling to make these new strategies become a reality in their customer experience. At Kapost, we work with hundreds of B2B marketing organizations at this point in their customer-centric journey, as I’d summarize their process like this:
Marketers develop their new customer-centric strategies, but they launch them into an organization accustomed to operating in the old, product-centric way. Teams remain in silos. There’s no visibility across functions and departments.
Most importantly teams haven’t adjusted to focus their efforts on creating content and touch points that focus on the customer, and they revert to their old product-centric ways. No systems or metrics exist to drive accountability and track progress.
A Content Operation: Executing on Your Customer-Centric Strategy
Analysts like SiriusDecisions and Forrester are also calling for marketers to develop content operations. Content operations are not reorganizations; instead, they’re a set of processes that govern how content is planned, produced, distributed, and measured.
But why now? Why are content and content operations so important at this juncture?
It all relates to customer-centricity and the age of the customer. Because the customer is now in control we must produce the right content for the right customer at the right time. And thus, what a content operation really does is enable the execution of your customer-centric strategy:
Yes, marketing leaders must lead the customer-centric journey and define the strategy. But they must also enable execution by setting up a content operation that:
- Allows the larger team to see how their content efforts fit within the customer-centric strategy
- Enables collaboration and visibility across silos so that teams can work together in producing customer-centric content
- Distributes content effectively to internal stakeholders and to external channels
- Measures how the content operation performs to drive accountability and improvement
At Kapost, our mission is to enable our customers to build and manage content operations that produce the right content for the right customer, at the right time.
Marketing leaders today are responding to the imperative to make their companies customer-centric. They’re doing the hard strategic work of segmenting their customer and defining their messages. Once that work is done and they’re ready to execute their strategy, we invite them to work with us.
No company approaches our experience and expertise in working with B2B marketers on building content operations. Kapost’s software and our services are uniquely able to guide marketing organizations to build the content operations that will bring their customer-centric strategies to life.