Fall Back in Love with B2B Marketing by Optimising Strategy and Operations
In the Content Marketing Institute’s 11th Annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report for 2021, they included a statistic that likely rings true for many marketing departments in businesses of any size:
Two-thirds (67%) of marketers say their team was asked to do more with the same resources. Whether they were asked to do more or not, content marketing team sizes didn’t grow.
Being asked to do more with less is never welcome. It’s not just the challenge of continuing to deliver results with the same or fewer staff than before. It’s also the sheer number of processes involved in keeping the modern marketing machine moving.
Being able to be creative in your work is most likely why you wanted a career in marketing. Instead, you’re keeping up with the content production line, reporting KPIs and metrics, measuring your marketing ROI, and worrying about being on track to hitting your business goals.
Having a smaller team doesn’t have to be stressful or produce inferior results. Likewise, you don’t have to let measurement and planning dull your creativity.
Fall back in love with marketing
No-one gets into marketing for their love of spreadsheets, managing budget cuts, or having tough conversations about friction between teams. Processes, workflows, procedures, and efficiency probably weren’t the first thing you pictured before you joined a marketing department.
However, we need to undertake process reviews and streamlining exercises so that we really can do more with less. Efficiency allows businesses to meet, or even exceed, their targets in our high-paced world.
Successful content strategies require a content operation that creates a highly efficient approach with fewer areas of friction. If your team can streamline your workflows and create operational efficiencies, you can accomplish more, get better results, and set your time free from tedious and repetitive tasks.
It’s not just for those reasons. These exercises also present us with a more interesting opportunity—to work in better ways so we can create more room for creativity.
Prepare for the great merger of marketing content, content marketing, and content operations. Content is becoming a business strategy. Full stop.
In the view of Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that content strategy and content operations have to work closely with each other to solve many common content marketing problems:
The argument against silo marketing
“A silo mentality is a reluctance to share information with employees of different divisions in the same company. This attitude is seen as reducing the organization's efficiency and, at worst, contributing to a damaged corporate culture.”
If your content operations and content strategy teams currently work separately with little communication between them, chances are you could be duplicating work and overlooking gaps in service. You’re also losing precious time that you could use for getting back to creative output and idea generation.
Working separately just isn’t efficient. You cannot afford for the two functions to be siloed.
Working more closely with content operations helps content strategists to optimise workflows, planning, and execution. With centralised systems, the content team can move onto the next stage and get work done faster instead of spending time looking for the ideal piece of content or ensuring that it meets any legal requirements. With clear statistics and measurements readily available, everyone can be sure what their marketing ROI is and how much they are contributing to the bottom line.
Content operations provides the foundations on which to build your content marketing efforts. With the right framework in place, you can see the complete picture of what you’re trying to achieve and not just what’s next in the content queue. Ideally, you need a system where you can see all of your marketing activity in one place and use marketing automation to take care of repetitive tasks for you.
If your teams are fragmented and disorganised, the buyer’s journey will be too. That’s not something any company can afford.
Streamline and align your content marketing strategy and operations
It’s not easy to realign departments so that they can more easily work together, but it is worth the effort. It’s time to bring your teams closer together and ensure they are communicating and working to common goals.
Until you’ve conducted a review, you can’t bring them together.
Look at how the marketing department currently functions, including how your strategy and operations are currently working and where you could improve workflow. Look at communication, including where it’s good and where it falls down.
Examine every aspect of your content marketing. Ask questions, like whether you should create content in house or with external partners. Decide why you would choose to outsource and how. Define what metrics matter and the KPIs that really show marketing success.
A review of the basics across the department can help you see where there is overlap and where gaps exist.
Read on for where to start with aligning both parts of the equation for a more efficient and creative way of working:
Do you have firm foundations?
It’s worth going back to basics to make sure you cover everything. Start with your marketing goals, your target audience, and buyer personas. You need to market to the whole person, based on real data and not guesswork, so do you have robust processes in place for gathering the data you need?
What do you need to know to address prospects' ambitions for their business, as well as their their own ambitions and concerns? Do you have the information you need to execute on your strategies? For example, an account-based marketing approach that allows you to market to exactly the right people in each organisation and target content specifically to decision-makers and buyers.
As always, you need to think about the experience you are giving your customers on their journey with you. Is your marketing engaging? Are your approaches to tone and creative consistent, appropriate, innovative?
Review your content strategy
A top-to-bottom review of your content strategy will help you see where your teams are misaligned, surface fresh ideas, and lay the groundwork for working more closely. You’ll also have a clearer picture of all the content you currently have and how best to use it.
Start by analysing not just your content, but the content in your market:
Look at your competitors’ content and the channels they use. What types of content do they focus on? What topics are the covering? What keywords are they targeting?
Look at the quality of their content and how well it’s going over. Are they getting engagement, shares and comments and what do those comments say?
Record your findings on a spreadsheet so you can get an overview and analyse what they are doing well, what isn’t working for them, and where the gaps are. This will form part of your content roadmap, and show where you can differentiate yourself and provide different and better content.
Look at your own content and content ideas. Assess whether your current efforts are working and whether there are other platforms that could work better for you.
Are you considering video marketing, or partnering with influencers or other organisations to amplify reach and authority? Do you plan to experiment with native advertising, paid search or social media posts? Do you want to focus on developing your knowledgebase content or to break a new social media platform?
Looking at every idea in the round, you can weigh up the pros and cons. With operations and strategy working together, you can decide what is most likely to get the results you need without spreading your resources too thin.
Ask the important questions:
Will this resource intensive project bring in the quality leads the business development team and sales need?
What impact will it have on improving your conversion rates?
Does it improve the experience for your existing customers and add value to the brand?
Is your idea strong enough to get engagement and build brand authority? And if not, how can your team work together to rework and refine it.
Finally, prioritise only the highest quality ideas that you can execute to the best of your ability
Make the best use of what you already have. Optimise your existing content assets.
Refresh evergreen content.
Boost or retire old and underperforming assets.
Look at high performing pieces of content that can you could enhance and repurpose.
Syndicate content to gain further reach, attention and traffic.
Finally, prioritise only the highest quality ideas that you can execute to the best of your ability.
Review your content operations
While you didn’t sign up to be a marketer so you could juggle spreadsheets and pore over processes, the fact is that robust systems free your whole department up to be more creative.
If you have systems in place, you aren’t wondering what to create next. You’re not worrying if you’ve got the right content for your audience. You’re not thinking about what you should measure and how. You’re just doing it, leaving toom for the satisfying creative work that, as Marie Kondo would have it, “brings you joy.”
A well-put-together content operations framework allows you to speed up all areas of content creation and delivery.
The team responsible for content operations could do this exercise separately and produce a framework. But, with content strategists and creators involved, the framework will be richer and more solid, encompassing every aspect of marketing content. Everything will be clear, fully laid out, and considered from both sides of the equation.
“43% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, and 60% of the most successful B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy” - Content Marketing Institute
The devil is in the details, so think about the information everyone needs everyday and make sure that stuff is instantly available to everyone through shared workspaces. Document your processes so no-one has to question who clears editorial or what the brand voice should sound like. Give everyone access clearly labelled brand assets, filed by campaign, to minimise duplication of effort. Centralise your editorial calendar so there is transparency on what is required to produce content to schedule.
Review your operations to free your team’s time up for more creative work. Look at the content you can outsource to make the most of your resources and make space for the content that can’t be. A robust briefing process can allow you to outsource writing for your blog posts, social or advertising, but no-one can substitute for your team going live on camera.
Another part of your review of operations should look at how you can automate repetitive tasks. The gathering and managing data, reports and analysis, and workflows can be largely delegated to your marketing automation software. Build reporting dashboards so everyone has your marketing’s vital statistics to hand all the time. That way, your meetings can be about strategy and creative, not about statistics and processes.
Now think about the tools you use. A clever Excel formula can be very satisfying, but spreadsheets aren’t renowned for their creativity.
If you want to make your marketing more creative, you need to consider how you can work together in a way that facilitates creative collaboration. While Zoom and Teams have proved vital for remote working over the past few years, they don’t fulfil the brief of creative workspaces.
So, what can you do to make remote work more personal, fun and engaging? How can you make asynchronous collaboration smoother and more creative? Is there room in your workflow for more visual collaborative tools, like Miro? Do VR workspaces, such as VSpatial, MeetinVR or Horizon Workrooms, have something to offer?
Your team is bound to have some ideas, so ask them.
Bringing it all together
Once you’ve completed your reviews, look at everything you’ve learned. It’s likely to be a lot. Any team, no matter how tight, can always find new and better ways of doing things.
Bring everyone together to discuss a shared vision and shared objectives everyone can work towards. Look at overlaps and gaps to ensure maximum efficiency.
Schedule regular, focused, to-the-point sync meetings between marketing teams and with internal departments. Plan how you will work with business development, sales, and customer service. Strategise for how marketing will report its results through senior management, up to board level. Ensure that everyone at every level knows what the plan is for this year, this month, and this week.
Following your review, you should be able to unify your teams and unify your customer experience. With optimised workflows, the right technology to automate repetitive tasks, strategic outsourcing, and good supporting processes, you can ensure optimal efficiency and creativity for everyone.
If you like to find out how to make sure you’re focusing on the right things that really make a difference for your team, your customer, and your business, get in touch.
Finding the right content strategist can transform B2B content marketing from an underperforming tactic into a strategic driver of business growth.