Situation
A company that I worked with wanted to use their already successful blog to achieve better engagement, attract more visitors, and convert more leads. They saw content marketing as a way to create a competitive advantage and raise their profile as a thought leader in the industry. Their strategy involved turbocharging their content marketing efforts, but they first had to address their organizational and technological challenges.
CHALLENGES
- Creating good content was not a problem , but it was often expensive and time-consuming because they lacked a common content creation, distribution, and marketing process.
- The content management system, which was custom built and almost a decade old was cumbersome and nuanced.
IMPACT
- Lower quality content or content that was not in alignment with an established content strategy or editorial standards.
- Higher than necessary content creation costs. In fact, the cost of creating content was unsustainable because the workflow was disjointed and included unnecessary steps.
- Focus on content creation rather than content marketing. Teams published multiple pieces of content, but had little time to promote it.
- Reduced content effectiveness. Content performance suffered. Sometimes because content that was created missed the mark. Other times because no mechanisms were in place to optimize it.
Action
- Conducted current state analysis to understand state of existing people, process, technology and design.
- Created and evangelized foundational tools/ guidance documents including: content principles, content style guide, templates, etc.
- Revamped content creation, publishing, marketing, and optimization processes.
- Reimagined experience design to support desired user experience and create consistency across content.
- Updated content management system to support new workflow, authoring needs, and user experience changes.
Results
With a streamlined process and supporting technologies, the organization found that:
- It needed less people to manage the routine parts of the routine parts of content creation
- Less people needed to be involved in the process, and people that were only involved at the appropriate times
- The performance and effectiveness of content increased, generating better engagement and higher conversions
- Teams could refocus their time and budget savings into content promotion and optimization