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Content Marketing Blog - News, Tips, and Strategies for Serious Content Marketers

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Building An Effective Corporate Content Marketing Infrastructure

 

As your content marketing strategy matures, you will find a need to deploy workflow content marketingprocesses just as you do for any other work requiring an administrative channel. And you definitely need to put into place an infrastructure designed not only to keep content flowing but to keep it on-brand, relevant, and staying on track with your overall marketing strategy.  This has been compared to becoming a publisher.

And like a publisher, you need to think primarily about 3 things:

  • creation,

  • organization, and

  • optimization of content that speaks to your marketing message.

Then, you need to contend with distributing it and measuring its success according to your predefined parameters. In some cases, all these parts may be fulfilled by one or two people, but for larger businesses content marketing will require a larger investment in resources to get the best return. You are going to create a team to handle the operational aspects of content marketing.

The Content Marketing Team
One thing to remember is that not everyone on the team will create content. This team will have a variety of members, each of whom may play a specific role that is similar to roles throughout the organization. You need a manager; someone to help creators develop the product (your content); people to make the content look good and format it to be consistent with the rest of your branding; and somebody to gather and handle feedback.

Keep in mind also that each of these roles requires a different set of skills. The manager will be watching all phases of content development and delivery, establishing deadlines, style guidance, and topic control. Increasingly this person is given the title of Chief Content Officer. The CCO owns the entire content marketing strategy and is responsible for the quality of the final product as well as its performance.

Those helping the content creators could be called managing editors. They will be the ones actually dealing with internal and external sources of content, ensuring the right topics are addressed, assigning content creation to the appropriate person, and generally helping creators meet marketing goals.

The content creators are expected to become the face or voice of the organization, which is accomplished with help from the managing editors. Once the content is complete, it is sent to someone for polishing and formatting to make it match the look and feel of the rest of the site and of the marketing message. The content is now ready for its public debut.

Listening has become a defined role within content marketing strategy at this point. The content is in the wild and you need to dedicate a resource to listening to the type of feedback it is causing, how effective the content it, and engaging with potential customers on social media. This feedback will become one of the measurements you use to determine the performance and ROI of the content marketing process.

Shifting Roles and Responsibilities
Depending on your content marketing strategy, a single person may perform multiple roles. Conversely, a particular role may require more than one worker. In any case, you will likely be reorganizing and changing the way your marketing department functions. Content marketing requires a deeper talent pool in editing, project management, and writing than previously. The types of content used in your strategy may already be familiar:

  • Written content for scripts, blogs, white papers, case studies, and articles.

  • Video content for Vblogs, podcasts, advertising spots, videos, and interactivity.

  • Artistic content for formatting and visual appeal of written or otherwise static content such as banner ads.

Those already involved in these areas will be a good resource for building your team. If there is a lack of expertise, you can either choose someone for additional training or hire into a newly created role. In any case, your team will need to work together seamlessly for this to be a successful venture. The content manager needs leadership skills along with project management. Your managing editors must be able to work with a variety of subject matter experts and content creators to get the best out of them. And you need someone comfortable with social media and metrics to engage as the voice of the company as well as determine performance.

Together this team is your infrastructure. It can set an editorial calendar with specific topics over the course of time and ensure that the flow of great, relevant content continues smoothly, integrates across channels, and has the necessary information to improve performance.

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