Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  This ultimately helped them make the case for taking over some of the content creation and design duties. It also provided the product marketing teams with the flexibility to actually produce the “thinking,” the “stories,” and the material for content, while allowing the creation and curation group to handle the packaging, distribution, and final expression of that content across all of the company functions.

  A PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY PUTS CONTENT ARCHETYPES TO WORK

  As the software company case above demonstrates, we often must evolve into different content models. In that example, there was an immediate benefit from understanding the type of content being created and how it was used.

  But in another case—a pharmaceutical company—the need was to build something from scratch. In this situation, the company was trying to target both customers (from a brand story perspective) and healthcare providers (from a thought leadership perspective). In addition, as a pharmaceutical company, they were under strict compliance and regulatory rules about how and where they could use content.

  First, we worked with them to build a Content Creation Management (CCM) process within their brand/corporate communications office (we’ll get into more details about this process in the second half of the book); this became their central group. With a complete structure and process in place, the company was able to align its goals with its marketing calendar. However, they still needed to determine who would create what type of content for each audience:

  • For brand stories directed toward consumers, they would need “reporters” pulling stories from global regions and then writing them with a “poet’s” eye, in order to achieve the emotional brand engagement they wanted to obtain in different regions.

  • For professor content directed toward healthcare providers, they would need both in-house subject matter experts as well as writers who knew how to create content for highly specialized areas.

  • For promotional advertising about their products, they would need the expertise and feedback from sales teams in each country as well as campaign creation expertise from specific agencies.

  • And underpinning all of that, they would need someone who could take some portion of all that content and transform it into high-velocity, “snackable” content that could be shared across the brand’s social and blog channels.

  Ultimately, the company decided to assign teams responsible for content by archetype:

  • Promoter content is driven by the marketing and sales enablement teams at the product marketing level. They’re responsible for the brochures, ads, and other materials needed to “sell” products in specific regions.

  • Preacher content is managed by the web, demand generation, and social teams, which oversee all the content being produced. They repackage it for promotion through social channels.

  • Professor content is built by an in-house production team in concert with corporate affairs and subject matter experts.

  • Poet content is handled by team members from the overall brand group as well as representatives in each country who share local stories. They work with an agency to bring the stories to life.

  In this example, the archetypes gave the company a way to organize the different groups that were creating content. The central group was empowered to manage the balance, the velocity, the budgets, the calendaring, and the creation of new content that moved the business forward.

  The detailed methods to create a CCM organization are covered in the second half of this book. But, even if your organization doesn’t create a separate governing group, you can benefit by looking at the reasons why you are creating content. What is its purpose? Usually, when you analyze it, you’ll see that you are imbalanced in some way. So, you simply need to reorient your business toward a more balanced content marketing and experience-creating strategy. Put the four archetypes to work in your company, and you’ll be well on your way.

  KEY CONCEPTS IN THIS CHAPTER

  • If marketers are to expand the purpose of content to create value, they will be creating content for diverse purposes. Classifying content by using archetypes helps us see how every piece of content fits into the overall marketing and communications strategy.

  • As we scale with purpose, we will have different reasons to create content-driven experiences.

  We will continue to advertise and describe the value of our brand, our product, and our content itself with promoter content.

  We will evangelize and create great quantities of content that make customers aware of our approach with preacher content.

  We will teach our customers and create trust by demonstrating our authority on topics and sharing our knowledge by creating professor content.

  We will create an emotional bond and empathic relationships with our customers through poet content.

  • Use the four archetypes to help you communicate the different purposes behind the content you’re creating; however, don’t get so wrapped up in classifying content that you lose sight of the end goal (creating differentiating experiences).

  • Even if you’re just getting started with content marketing, looking at the various types of content through a purpose-driven lens can help you to determine your balance of content and develop a strategy for moving forward.

  ENDNOTES

  57 Collins, Jim. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t. HarperCollins, 2011.

  58 Ibid.

  59 https://hbr.org/2001/10/harnessing-the-science-of-persuasion/ar/1

  60 Halligan, Brian and Shah, Dharmesh. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. Wiley, 2009.

  “In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.” | J. Paul Getty

  Right around the time businesses could deploy their first CRM systems (at the beginning of the century), they also started putting in their first content management systems.

  In those days, it was simple. There was one channel, the website, and everyone focused on how to empower marketing people to publish digital content easily to the corporate website.

  Fifteen years later, it’s a different story. The enterprise now manages innumerable mobile, social, and web platforms. On the day we arrived for our consultation with a global technology company, they were celebrating the culmination of a six-month process, in which they went from managing 360 campaign microsites to fewer than 50. That’s right, they were happy to be down to 50 websites.

  According to an Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) study conducted in 2013, more than 80% of companies lacked an enterprise solution to manage content across different channels.61 However, even a number that big pales in comparison to the percentage of companies that lack a process behind the creation of content.

  As the enterprise adds more “owned media properties” (e.g., blogs, websites, print magazines, etc.) to its portfolio, the more critical it is to develop a framework to create, manage, and measure these properties. Content Creation Management (CCM) is that framework.

  CONTENT CREATION MANAGEMENT DEFINED

  Here is our simple definition of CCM:

  Content Creation Management (CCM) is a conceptual framework to facilitate the organization, creation, development, and management of owned experiential content platforms for marketing purposes. Its goal is to structure an active, functioning and scalable process for marketing departments to create content-driven experiences that differentiate and create value.

  Every organization thinks they know how to create content. But when asked how they do it, most companies can rarely explain the process. Somehow, content just “happens.” Very few actually understand CCM as a strategic, repeatable process for creating unique and valuable content.

  As we have discovered in our research and interviews with more than 100 companies, both large and small, there currently is no one right way to construct a CCM function within a business. Just as there are myriad ways to structure a newsroom, movie studio, or creative media agency, each
company structures the CCM function uniquely for its individual culture and goals.

  So, the process of building CCM into your organization will be a journey—one that can, and will, be populated with any number of practitioners within the business. Success will depend on creating a culture that accepts and implements new and innovative best practices.

  While undertaking this marketing process journey, the winners will replace the ad hoc “value creation” with processes that value the quality and execution of ideas. In fact, CCM is all about reusing innovative ideas to continuously improve the company’s skill at operating as a media company rather than operating in an endless “campaign creation” mentality, which results in a constant re-forming of the idea of “value creation,” rinse, and repeat.

  In short, the CCM framework transforms content from ad hoc sets of disconnected experiments into a measurable marketing function. CCM is an idea-creation factory—one that manages a portfolio of experience-driven ideas. CCM is a factory expressly built to create a profitable business result. However, its function is to create delightful experiences for the customer—through education, entertainment, or general usefulness—pure and simple. It is innovative in nature and built to differentiate the business.

  Prior to developing the CCM framework, we studied organizations that are already gaining traction in this area. Some of these companies share commonalities—a finding that suggests a clear way forward. We also pulled best practices from methodologies that center on product development and media management. And we have incorporated ways that media companies operate and manage digital assets. The result is a 12-step framework that is segmented into four main activities that group the steps:

  THE 12-STEP CCM FRAMEWORK

  1. CREATE CCM

  • Inspire a Revolution in the Organization

  • Recruit a Team to Lead

  • Plan for an Evolution

  2. ORGANIZE CCM

  • Define Roles and Responsibilities

  • Write a Charter for CCM

  • Create a Content Mission

  3. MANAGE CCM

  • Map the Experiences You Will Create

  • Build the Experiences and Their Purpose

  • Operate a Portfolio of Experiences

  4. MEASURE CCM

  • Assess the Experiences for Meaning

  • Evaluate Stories and Experiences

  • Balance the Portfolio of Experiences

  The 12-Step CCM Framework is a process that helps us describe how to manage and measure content-driven experiences within organizations.

  Let’s look at each of these.

  1. CREATE CCM

  Content-driven experiences are becoming increasingly important in propelling our businesses forward. But, ironically, we find that the strategy for creating these experiences is rarely driven from the top down. Rather, the earliest glimmer of the process usually has roots deep within the business where a manager is achieving “pockets of success” with a series of ad hoc projects. Eventually, something happens that surfaces that project to full visibility in the organization. In short, that secret little thing off in the corner eventually gets somebody’s attention. Then, the inevitable question comes. “That’s the way it’s always been done” is challenged with “is this the way it should be done?”

  Changing long-held beliefs within an enterprise is, obviously, more difficult in some organizations than others. In some engineering-driven B2B companies, for example, simply getting buy-in to try something that isn’t sales-enablement-focused can be a huge task. Yet, fundamentally changing these long-held beliefs is the essential first step. Content practitioners within enterprise organizations must take that early step so that content-driven experiences gain broad acceptance as a viable, successful approach.

  So why doesn’t this happen more often? Why is it so difficult for people to make this change?

  To get insight on this question, we recently talked with innovation expert Thomas Asacker, author of the fantastic book, The Business of Belief. He shared a story about meeting with a CEO client with whom he had worked a year earlier. The CEO was lamenting the devastatingly poor results of his company. Asacker asked, “What did I do wrong the last time I was out there?” The CEO replied, “Tom, you didn’t do anything wrong. It was great information. But you have to understand, when you left here, everybody had to go back to their jobs.”

  These people understood the change that Tom had suggested and agreed with it. Unfortunately, that understanding didn’t drive change. “That’s not what drives action,” Asacker told us. “People do what they do because they want to do it. And that’s it.”

  In our view, this is just like the classic quote from The Simpsons when Homer tells Lisa, “Oh, honey, just because I understand doesn’t mean I care.”

  So what’s the answer? How do businesses actually change and create the actions that will drive new approaches such as investing in expensive, differentiating customer experiences? Asacker summed it up well in our conversation when he said:

  “Where I’ve seen success is where there’s been some outside force—just someone who has figured out how to push a particular leader. It could literally be a brand manager. They lead this leader down, if you will, that bridge of belief, making them comfortable the whole time until they actually release something that’s powerful.

  “The interesting thing is that once they get recognition for actually releasing this creative endeavor, they can then use it as an example for everyone else, saying, ‘See, we can do it.’”

  We couldn’t agree more with Asacker, as this is how we’ve seen the process unfold time and time again.

  Over the last few years, content marketers have been intensely focused on building a business case and the facts that support their efforts. But, while we need logical arguments for WHY the experiences we create can be justified as investments, we also must INSPIRE people to create those experiences.

  The last few years have been focused on how we can actually build the intellectual business case to try a content project as a means to engage, help, inform, and change beliefs in customers. But, the next few years should be dedicated to learning how to inspire the company to actually create a strategic, repeatable process to do just that.

  So, let’s look at each of these major steps in their entirety.

  Inspire a Revolution

  In almost every case, content marketing, and the idea of creating delightful experiences for customers, starts from a pocket within the business. In a B2B setting, it might be a demand-generation marketer looking to create more value or more leads. Or, it may be a social media person in a consumer packaged goods company looking to feed the social media machine with more valuable, engaging, conversational content. Or, it may be a brand marketer looking to turn the corner on a troubled brand by using a newly constructed story to deliver a novel approach.

  Whatever the case, the idea for an organizational approach to CCM rarely starts from the top down. It usually starts with a hunch of inspiration that a practitioner has about improving the world within the business. And from there the idea must either spread up the ladder into corporate branding, sideways into other business units, downward to customer loyalty or other parts of the organization—or all of the above.

  And whether this initial idea is one that is fully realized and then used as a prototype to expand the effort, or whether it starts as a more integrated idea that will be spread, it’s often done so without seeking permission first.

  A great example of this is what SAP, a global software corporation, experienced when launching their new customer-experience thought leadership portal, The Customer Edge. As Gurdeep Dhillon, global vice president of marketing at SAP, said:

  “It is very often the case that you need to act first and seek forgiveness, rather than try and build a business case that spends its life in analysis paralysis. We decided that we had two of the three pieces in place needed to execute on a content strategy: the team and a modest b
udget. So, we set to work addressing the third piece, which for us was a platform upon which we could deliver and measure a customer experience. And once we made that decision, the path to launching the Customer Edge became very clear.”62

  This initial inspiration is often a disruptive and innovative new approach. It is commonly a highly experimental project that is created to test a hypothesis. Approved or not, an experimental project can be a great way to begin building an organization-wide approach to developing content-driven experiences.

  One of the best ways to determine where to build this experiment, or receive the hunch, is to look at the existing funnel and ask, “Where does it hurt the most?”

  • If the business has an awareness challenge, maybe that’s a place to start.

  • If the business has no problem drawing leads into the funnel, but fails at nurturing them, maybe that’s the place.

  • If the business has a challenge in keeping customers loyal, perhaps that’s the inspiration.

  • If one particular product group, or office, is ready, willing, and able to experiment, start there.

  No matter where you begin, know that this seed can spur the business to completely revolutionize what it is doing from a marketing perspective.