“Peek behind great content marketing efforts and you’ll nearly always find a driven, well-organized team.”

I adore this sentiment from Cameron Conaway because it succinctly illustrates the power of your content marketing team. Regardless of how much content marketing know-how you ingest, here’s the dirty little secret: Those ideas only work if you have the right people on your team to implement them.

In short: Your success (or failure) in large part depends on your team.
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Each year, CMI founder Joe Pulizzi covers the essential roles you need on your content marketing team. It’s one of those posts that is consistently well received because it hits a nerve: Whom do you need on your team to make content marketing work in your organization?

I had the pleasure of thinking through this question in more detail when Joe asked me to speak about creating the ultimate content marketing team at Content Marketing World 2017. While I shared a framework useful for restructuring your team and/or making hiring decisions (which will be published shortly on this blog), today we’re digging into the various skill areas your team needs to cover.

But before we do that, a bit of explanation …
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Audience first.

Are you tired of hearing this mantra? I am.

But, here’s the thing: Too many marketers say and even think they are all about the audience, but when you dig into their programs, you see it’s still all about them.

While it’s not easy to make a genuine shift, here are four twists in perspective to truly make sure your audience is at the center of everything you do.

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The concept of content marketing has been around for hundreds of years (see this example from 1672), and the discipline has gained incredible popularity since 2007, according to Google Trends. Continue Reading

Each year at CMI, we survey marketers about how they use content marketing and how they find success internally. The insights are useful, but what we also want to know is what’s going on in the minds of the people who consume the content?

So, we were happy to join forces with SmartBrief when approached about doing a joint research project on how content influences the purchasing process. The survey represents the views of 1,200 SmartBrief subscribers who are involved in the purchasing process. The research focuses on what type of content is most influential, how these decision-makers perceive content coming from a vendor, and more.Continue Reading

Questions.

At CMI, we get a lot of them, and we answer them in blog posts, interviews, one-on-one conversations, etc.

We (still) are often asked what content marketing is, how brands truly find success, and how to get started.

We field a lot of questions about how to generate leads with content marketing, but our answer isn’t focused on leads — it’s about the real value in building a subscriber.Continue Reading

Anyone involved in the planning, creation, distribution, or measurement of content knows how time consuming and expensive it can be. It doesn’t make sense to simply publish something, promote it, and never look back. That’s a terrible way to get the most from your investment – not to mention that approach often results in a poor experience for your prospects and customers.

Think about the last time you went to a website looking for answers, and instead of stumbling upon something current and helpful, you found ROT – redundant, out-of-date, and trivial content. Did you poke around to find better info or did you go someplace else?

ROT occurs when you fail to plan what happens to your content after you hit publish and do the initial promotion. This one-and-done approach is costly to businesses – and, as your content library grows, it often makes the readers’ experience less than ideal. Continue Reading

I love talking and waxing philosophical about productivity. Knowing how we work is so essential if we want to create that resonant content we crave – and feel like we are all making a positive difference.

But I realized recently that I think a lot about my individual productivity instead of the productivity of the team. Of course, working together as a team is ridiculously important – and it’s one of the reasons I’m interested in Agile marketing.

While individual “tricks” continue to be useful, what does your team need to make sure they are working in the best possible way? Continue Reading