Marketing Leadership

Strategic, goal-driven and impactful content propels your brand forward — amplifying brand awareness, generating a trail of leads and ultimately elevating your revenue to the peak of success. It serves as the compass and map that guides your audiences through the buyer’s journey.

The linchpin? A marketing team that navigates the terrain with the precision of a cartographer and the creativity of an explorer. 

There is an art and science to transforming your internal marketing team into a content powerhouse. Here’s an overview of how to get started:

Define Clear Content Goals

We’ve all been there: marketing teams churning out content without a clear direction. Don’t let your marketing team get lost in tactics without a compass. It’s all too common for marketing teams to focus on tactics without ensuring each idea links back to the organization’s goals. 

Start by ensuring your content team has a clear understanding of the organization’s objectives, which may be to:

• Increase revenue by driving lead generation and sales
• Expand into new markets
• Enhance brand awareness or demonstrate thought leadership
• Improve customer loyalty, satisfaction or engagement
• Promote social responsibility

The team should anchor every initiative to your organization’s core objectives, as well as your content strategy. Encourage your team to rigorously vet ideas, ensuring every effort is purposeful and aligned.

Conduct a Content Audit

Sometimes content creators are trapped on an endless treadmill — cranking out new pieces of content and fulfilling every request from across the organization. 

Pause and conduct a thorough inventory of your existing content. Assess and identify opportunities to refine and repurpose what you already have. 

A comprehensive content audit should catalog:

• Title: What’s the content called? This may be a title of a white paper or an internal title, such as “Product Overview PDF”
• Location: Where is it stored or linked?
• Date: When was it published or last refreshed?
• Type: What type of content is it  (one-page informational PDF, guide, white paper, infographic, etc)?
• Audience: Who is it for? 
• Funnel Stage: Where does it fit in the buyer’s journey?

Consider expanding your audit to encompass use cases, performance analytics or other insightful metrics. 

Following the audit, you can take a critical look to see where you have gaps. You may be missing a critical piece of content for a certain audience or have significantly out-of-date content that needs to be retired or updated. 

You also may want to explore ways to repurpose existing high-performing pieces into different formats. For example, an infographic may play well as a social media video or a recorded panel might be a treasure trove for future blog posts. 

Forge a Streamlined Process

Creativity thrives within a structured process. It may seem counterintuitive, but a well-defined workflow provides the framework necessary for creativity to flourish, ensuring predictability and stability in your content creation.

Start by mapping out the current process and pinpointing bottlenecks. Then, streamline the workflow from conception to completion.

Address common hurdles, such as:

• Idea capture and organization: Implement tools like an intake form in Asana for seamless idea intake.
• Workflow bottlenecks: Eliminate unnecessary review stages and enforce deadline adherence.
• Content distribution: Enhance collaboration with social media and sales teams to maximize content reach.

Implement Robust Measurement

By implementing a robust measurement system and fostering a culture of data-driven decision making, your content team can continuously refine its approach and ensure your content remains a powerful force driving brand awareness, lead generation and business growth.

Whether it’s through sophisticated dashboards managed by analytics experts or simply tracking interactions via UTM parameters using Google Analytics, measurement is key to understanding and enhancing your content’s performance. Data you might consider looking at includes:

• Leads generated
• Customer acquisition cost
• Unique website visitors, page views, bounce rate and average time on site
• Social media shares and engagement
• Email open and click-through rates

Encourage your team to build practices of regularly evaluating content performance to ensure they focus on high-impact ideas and steer clear of low-visibility efforts.

Hire the Right Writers

While it’s true that anyone can write, not every content creator has the same skillset and experience. There are writers with specialized skills, giving them the muscle memory to create stronger content that will perform — often at a faster pace due to years of experience and knowledge. 

For example, if you’re taking a brand journalism approach to your marketing strategy, a former journalist may be a great fit. They will bring extensive storytelling experience and a nose for news to the table. A content marketer often brings an innate ability to write email subject lines and calls to action that drive engagement and a skilled copywriter can write impressive digital ads in under 125 characters. If web content is your most important driver of success, you’ll need a writer who has a strong understanding of SEO with a flawless ability to weave keywords into their copy. 

In an ideal scenario, you would have specialists to support specific types of content. However, it’s common for smaller content teams to be expected to wear multiple hats and you may not have the budget to hire specialists in each type of content or channel. In that case, you will need to invest in a talented content generalist — a Swiss Army knife of writing talent — or prioritize hiring based on what content is most critical to the success of your organization. Alternatively, you might need outside support in the form of a consultant.

Embrace Progress Over Perfection 

Content creation is an iterative process and your team should embrace a culture of curiosity, learning and continuous improvement. Here are a few ways to ensure your content is on the cutting edge:

• Actively solicit feedback from your audience through surveys, comments and social media engagement. 
• Experiment with new content formats — like podcasts, interactive infographics or video explainers. 
• Test edgy ideas with a small audience segment and see how they perform before potentially scaling up. 
• A/B test different headlines, calls to action and content formats to see what resonates best. 
• Break down large projects into smaller, manageable pieces — allowing your team to adapt future, iterative pieces based on feedback and data from your customers.
• Acknowledge and celebrate your team’s successes, but don’t shy away from analyzing content that underperforms. Host brainstorming sessions to identify areas for improvement and strategize how to optimize future content based on learnings.

By following these practices, your content team will transform from a crew simply taking orders off the marketing menu into a team of curious explorers, constantly seeking ways to improve and optimize their content strategy. This ensures your content stays relevant, engaging, and drives real results for your brand.

Interested in learning more about marketing leadership?

Share your email to be the first to hear about our new “Leadership & Management in Marketing & Communications” course, which will help new marketing and communications leaders learn how to set goals, balance workloads for others, hold team members accountable and manage conflict. This on-demand course, which includes downloadable exercises and templates you can put into action immediately, will be released in Summer 2024.