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Why Auditing is the Most Important Job of Content Leaders (And How to Do It)

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As a content lead, you care about the quality of content that your team is releasing to the wild. You likely spend a great deal of your time planning content strategy and brainstorming themes. You make sure that everyone knows their role in the orchestration of the content engine. But is auditing a part of your role? If you truly want to improve content performance, you may need to take a closer look at your content—and I don’t mean your assets.

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How Marketing Can Get the Most Out of The Gig Economy

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If you’re a marketing leader, you are likely struggling with more on your ‘to do’ list than your team can handle. Part of that is lack of resources relative to your objectives, but the other factor is inefficiency of internal resources. And while I’m sure most of you work hard to be as efficient as possible, studies show that most corporate employees spend over half their time in meetings and managing email. It’s just part of corporate life no matter how much we attempt to protect our teams from it. So what can marketing leaders do?

The answer is to embrace the gig economy. In this post I’ll do my best to explain what the gig economy can do for marketers and how to take advantage of this growing opportunity.

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How To Fix The Most Common Content Marketing Mistakes

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Content marketing has done wonders for demand generation. If done correctly, it can organically engage, educate and bring target buyers into your pipeline. However, as marketing departments established content marketing groups and processes, often times key concepts slipped through the cracks. This is particularly prevalent in larger organizations I work with where aspects of content marketing are handled across multiple departments.

After working with many companies on their content marketing, here is my list of the five most common content marketing mistakes I see and tactical advice for how to fix them.

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Don’t Make Product Marketers Write—Make Them Outline

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Product marketers. They are the golden goose of software companies. This mythical combination of technical product knowledge and writing prowess. Marketing is depending on them for a steady stream of whitepapers (a.k.a. golden eggs) so they can generate demand for the business. It sounds wonderful, but alas, it is really more of a fairy tale.

The Reality of What Product Marketing Does

According to Pragmatic Marketing’s Annual Survey, on average product marketers work 46 hours per week and 53% of that time is spent in meetings and managing email. Another 20% is spent supporting development efforts and 15% is spent helping sales with existing customer deals or prospects. That leaves a measly 9% of their time spent creating and reviewing marketing materials. Not a lot of golden eggs can be created in 4 fragmented hours a week.

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It’s Time to Socialize Social

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Here we are more than a decade past when B2B companies started using social media as a promotional channel and we still haven’t figured out the best way to manage it. Looking forward, our approach needs to be about enabling all marketers in the process to add their expertise in order to create relevant social posts that your target audience wants to click through. To sum it up—we need to socialize social.

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Survey Says! Personalization is Key to Content Marketing

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Personalization. It’s not just the latest marketing buzz-word. It’s the way to break through the noise and reach your target audience. In fact, it’s a concept that is driving much of the marketing automation technology innovation for both B2B and B2C companies. So, it makes sense that we spend some time figuring out why it is so important and how you can start personalizing your go-to-market. To help us on our journey, I’ll reference key statistics and findings from three well done research studies: the Salesforce State of Marketing Survey, Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer Research and the B2B Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

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The Opportunity Cost of Product Marketing Content Gaps

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After writing an article on the ROI of outsourcing demand generation content, I was asked if the same numbers and reasoning held true for product marketing content. I definitely write a lot of white papers, core website messaging and even sales enablement content so there must be value there too. But what are the actual numbers?

Read on for the hard numbers on more than doubling the output of product marketing with ⅙ of the cost of a product marketer.

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The ROI Case for Outsourcing Demand Generation Content

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The gig economy sounds great, but is it really a fit for Corporate America? Marketing departments have been outsourcing for years to get specialized deliverables. But what about outsourcing the content that defines your message and relationship with your prospects and customers? Should that ever be outsourced?

Absolutely! Here’s why:

  1. It’s 4x less expensive! (Read on for the calculations.)
  2. It can produce a better product.
  3. Higher quality resources are now available to deliver on these promises.

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Successful Business Development Have These 4 Things In the Bag

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One of the most common moves I see a startup do is hire a business development person too early. Yes, there is pressure from early investors (and your spouses) to start making money. However, investing too early will be wasted money because your hotshot business development hire won’t have the right tools to succeed. Read on to learn what you need to figure out and create before making that critical hire or to evaluate whether or not you have the right tools for your existing team.

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