Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  Recruit a Team

  There is a huge business challenge: Content, and the idea of creating it as a portfolio of customer experiences (as a practice), is both everyone’s and no one’s job. In many cases, the initial experiment will ultimately fail because longer-term consistency can’t be maintained. The gap between creation of the initial platform and formation of a team to be responsible for it is one of the biggest reasons that content marketing fails in most organizations.

  For example, let’s say an initial blog experiment is launched. The expectation is that “volunteers” from other parts of the business will maintain it. The call goes out via a broadcast email saying that “bloggers” or “subject matter experts” are needed. These people will be expected to contribute content and, in many cases, do so in the short term. Then, over the longer haul, life just gets in the way. Content production is not part of their official job description, so these subject matter experts fall short. In most cases, in spite of their best intentions, they just can’t justify the time cost of creating content because they have their “day job” to do.

  This is one reason that outsourced freelancers are so commonly used by those trying to launch a content marketing or experiential initiative. It’s just easier to pay freelancers than it is to cajole internal producers to create the same content.

  This is why it is vital to understand and map out your entire framework—and then develop a “long game strategy”—prior to (or at least while) conducting your experiment. In other words, you need to have a plan developed for what happens if this hunch actually works.

  Developing an integrated network (or team) that may become a CCM team can be a key to making a longer-term hunch pay off. This might initially be a loose affiliation of siloed departmental leaders, an official “content center of excellence” (CCoE), or a fully functioning content department. But, what really matters from the outset is that you identify the content function so the business will recognize it.

  In her seminal report, “Organizing for Content: Models to Incorporate Content Strategy and Content Marketing in the Enterprise,” Altimeter analyst Rebecca Lieb sums up the importance of organizing the function:

  “Organizing for content is both a strategic and tactical undertaking. Businesses that fail to seriously evaluate how and where content fits strategically and operationally within their organizations will suffer in the short term as they strive to continue to create content without cohesion. They will be at a greater disadvantage in the months and years ahead as content demands accelerate in terms of owned content and converged content hybrids in social media and advertising. Orchestrating and fine-tuning content organizationally is the next, most critical step facing marketing.” 63

  The key is to examine the situation and assemble a group that can act formally or informally as the “keepers of content” from a marketing and communications perspective. This may mean a cross-functional group pulled from public relations, brand, customer service, product marketing, digital, etc. (or some subset of those), that builds upon the experiment. And, very quickly, that loose collaboration must be formally recognized.

  • FIRST, comes the recognized function by the business leadership;

  • THEN, the team forms; it will become the “organization” that tells the story, packages the content, acts as actuary, reuses the content, and aligns content with other marketing functions. In short, it becomes a value-development group to create the valuable product.

  Plan an Evolution

  Once a team has been identified and/or assembled, the true benefit of the CCM approach comes in seeing how a unified content-driven experience strategy helps drive awareness, increase conversion rates into loyalty programs, and provide for greater customer engagement throughout the lifecycle. It should also create operational efficiencies in terms of the amount of content produced in any given area by different groups.

  It’s not yet time to formalize this group and plan for the evolution of a CCM process, which can be managed and integrated into the existing marketing function. Rather, we are now starting to assemble a business case for this team to be formally recognized by the organization. The team will ultimately need real power, real investment, and real responsibility.

  When building the business case for forming the team, consider including these types of benefits:

  • Time savings—a focused team process around content should result in fewer meetings related to content and what to produce.

  • Improved velocity of content and integrated ideas, providing for better SEO, richer customer experiences, and more effective use of content across all channels.

  • Alignment in measurement across different parts of the buyer’s engagement journey.

  • Cost savings on content creation that can be fed into more and better content and experience creation.

  Many activities must be performed as the plan to formalize the CCM team comes together. These activities will naturally begin to merge into the next phase, which is the design of the CCM. But, resist the initial urge to start designing “formal responsibilities” for the CCM team, and just start “doing”—allowing for talents, capabilities, and desires to emerge. This can be the best way to ensure “buy-in” from a cross-functional team.

  The natural evolution of this team will probably look something like this:

  • A steering team—this team builds the business case and is responsible for getting the C-suite to recognize CCM as an “official” function.

  • An editorial team—this team makes decisions about budgets, priorities, platforms, and who will manage them; this is the “core team” that will ultimately manage the entire portfolio of experiences.

  • A contributor team—this team is made up of representatives from various areas that manage and execute the programs developed by the editorial team.

  Consider the example of San Francisco’s marketing organization, San Francisco Travel. This organization is charged with creating compelling experiences for a diverse set of audiences (e.g., travelers, news media, meeting planners, corporate partners, and influential community stakeholders). They recently developed a centralized approach to creating and managing content-driven experiences.

  As Tyler Gosnell, manager of marketing planning and program development for San Francisco Travel, explained:

  “…We evolved what we were already doing—holding regular editorial meetings in smaller groups—by creating broader and more defined structures and a process that holds members accountable for content delivery and quality assurance. Initially, it was important for us to position our Content Center of Excellence and our new team as merely an extension of processes we already had in place—making it easier to get buy-in and not overwhelming stakeholders. In these early stages, our team has already begun to move immediate needs to get content out the door and toward strategically identifying our content gaps and new opportunities. We feel much more focused and less harried about what needs to be accomplished.” 64

  2. DESIGN CCM

  A U.S.-based pharmaceutical and healthcare company with operations in more than 100 countries around the globe designed an innovative content creation management group within the corporate brand department. As a global company, most of their marketing efforts are not only done at the regional level, they are guided by the brand managers for each of the products they produce.

  The company’s vice president of corporate identity led this charge. He is responsible for the complete brand story for this global company with its huge, diverse range of products.

  The company found itself going through a complete rebranding initiative. The goal was to reintroduce itself to customers and to unify businesses that had been recently acquired. The vice president saw an opportunity to create new processes to help tell the company’s story more broadly and effectively. In short, he wanted to use customer-centric brand experiences across a number of channels (including web, social, print, and television) to unify the brand story and feed a more holistic
company story. His goals were to bring more awareness to other company solutions in nascent markets, such as South America and China, and to provide more brand strength to mature markets, such as Europe and the U.S. With every product group running its own marketing and brand strategy—along with the navigating intricacies, complexities, and regulations of different international markets—this was no small task.

  So, what did he do? He built what he called a “content engine” and housed it within the corporate brand group. He appointed a leader of this CCM group, and helped manage and create the organizational process for facilitating the story. The VP then created a charter and a proposed organizational process in which regional offices would (or could) have representation, allowing each to interface with product marketing in its own region. This global CCM group had responsibility for surfacing, curating, creating, packaging, and making available global and locally based stories, which could then be used by local markets. The group was measured on the quality and quantity of stories being consumed by local markets.

  One of the keys to launching this was the VP’s ability to get the company’s new CMO to approve and make this group “official,” so that it would be recognized company-wide.

  This is a deceptively simple, but vital act—making content and its management for marketing purposes an official and respected part of the process. Failing to do so is the biggest reason why content and experience-driven strategies implode.

  Define Roles/Responsibilities

  Once you have obtained buy-in (from both senior management and departmental leads) and recognition of CCM as an official function of the business—as well as agreement that experiences are strategic assets worth managing well—you can begin to formalize the group.

  Remember Gosnell’s point about his experience at San Francisco Travel when he said: “It was important for us to position our Content Center of Excellence and our new team as merely an extension of processes we already had in place—making it easier to get buy-in and not overwhelming stakeholders.”

  In other words, they didn’t architect a group and a process in a PowerPoint deck and then seek permission to create it. They created the function and collaboration of a group and went to management with permission to formalize it. This is a crucial difference.

  Once you are ready to formalize this group and make it “real” in the organization, you need to take a number of tactical actions. These include, but aren’t limited to:

  1. Formalizing the roles and responsibilities that managers will have in the CCM process. With some luck, these will be clear from the functions you already established during the “evolution” step, and the members will be eager to accept them.

  2. Adding content creation and content management to official job responsibilities and bonus structures.

  3. Providing for both accountability and corporate structures for content-centric job functions (e.g., editors, designers, subject matter experts, and reporters).

  4. Senior management recognizing that a CCM process and governing body (perhaps called an editorial board or Content Center of Excellence [CCoE] or even content department) now exists—and is not just a virtual team assembled in an ad hoc way.

  The structures of a CCM governing body can take a number of forms. These include, but aren’t limited to, the following examples:

  The Chief Content Officer (CCO)

  The department of one

  In smaller organizations, this may be the person who is given the charter to create content and experiences with the goal to inform, engage, delight, and differentiate the business. Whether called a CCO, “content strategist,” or “content marketing manager,” this person is responsible for the development of content and its management as a strategic asset within the business.

  The Content Center of Excellence (CCoE)

  The cross-functional, “dotted line” team

  In larger organizations, it may make sense to create one or multiple CCoE’s to facilitate and manage the creation of content in a more holistic, cross-functional way. For example, in a midsized organization, the CCoE may be an assigned cross-functional team that spans public relations, brand, digital, and field marketing—each with content creation and management responsibilities. This group then provides best practices and acts as a governing body to ensure consistency, reuse, and effectiveness of content. In a huge organization, many of these may actually be enabling groups arranged by region, industry group, or other separation.

  For example, in 3M (a mammoth organization), Carlos Abler is the leader of online content strategy for global eTransformation. He has created and manages a content-enablement group. His charter is to teach, and ultimately enable, the creation of other CCoEs across 3M. As he sees it, it’s not unlike the way a non-profit enables local governments to build successful economies. As Abler said:

  “I realized that it was essential to have a framework that could apply to any level of the company, from leadership, to corporate CCoEs, to business service groups, and divisions themselves. The emergence of content champions, and initiatives where pain-points are tightly bound up with the content can and do emerge from anywhere in the company.”65

  The Content Department

  The dedicated team

  This may actually be the future for most organizations as we enter the seventh era of marketing. Currently, content departments are in-house or even outsourced groups dedicated to creating, curating, managing, packaging, and using content strategically for marketing purposes. In many cases, these groups find homes within more traditional parts of the marketing and communications infrastructure.

  Consider how Julie Fleischer, director of content, media, and data for Kraft Foods, leads a dedicated group of content development managers. They create multiple online websites, a print magazine, videos, and social media content supporting a distinct content brand. Fleischer has established a “home” within the media department of Kraft, providing customer research insight and programmatic advertising data services to the product managers, who are responsible for marketing Kraft products.

  Authors’ Note: Stop here for a moment and reread that last paragraph. Notice how, from a content experiment, Fleischer was able to lean in and build an entirely new business leadership function out of a traditional brand-marketing job, and now has multiple functions as part of her value-creation position. This is the quintessential example of someone who has recrafted her career by focusing on change, inspiring a revolution, and then building an entire dedicated marketing team as a function of value.

  Of course, at the other extreme, you’ll find companies that have set up their own media operations. For instance, there’s Red Bull Media House, a separately run division of the sports drink company. It has been said that Red Bull is really a “media company that also happens to sell an energy drink.”

  The key to all of these models is that others in the business MUST also have content as part of their job function. In the same way that the company accountant has the power to make everyone in the organization responsible for the processes around costs (e.g., filing expense reports, complying with cost policies, purchase orders, etc.), so too must content become a measurable and accountable asset.

  Design a Charter for CCM

  Whether the CCM governing body stems from the success of an inspirational prototype or is a uniquely created group, once it is ready to start operating, its focus should be on executing against a global editorial strategy.

  This strategy will be developed singularly by the team and executed by contributors networked to the group. Or there could be a group that curates the different experiences being managed in other functional areas, serving as a collaborative and communications hub for the company.

  Writing a charter for this group will be critical to its ongoing success. Therefore, time should be spent on developing an intelligent set of business goals. The charter can be as straightforward as ensuring that content across the entire buyer’s journey (e.g., all customer experience touchpo
ints) will be delightful, consistent, effective, and measurable. Or perhaps the group will be chartered with creating entirely separate content brands that will support the full continuum of the business, from awareness through loyalty (e.g., the Red Bull model). Multiple groups also could be formed with individual charters that span the gap between different CCoEs (the 3M model).

  Independent of the size of the charter, the group’s main responsibilities can be wrapped around four main tasks:

  • Planning. Using long-range calendars to provide budget and executional plans for the types, tone, and categories of content to be created for the business.

  • Storytelling. Determining, as a group, the overall narrative and experiences that will be created for the brand. What is the company’s story (or stories) beyond the products or services it offers? How will these stories be told cross-culturally and cross-functionally in the business?

  • Production and publishing management. Aligning to global marketing and communications calendars and business goals, this group should be balancing the mechanics of content production against the overall operations of the business. Everything, from new product launches to major corporate events, should be aligned within this group to ensure that stories align to the greater business needs.

  • Engagement and measurement. This group is ultimately the keeper of the “purpose of content” within the business. It should be tasked with the business case for new platforms, new stories, new content initiatives, and determining how they will be mapped and measured as effective structures within the marketing and communications infrastructure.