How Leaders Can Rally Their Team Around the Content Experience
The content experience is an essential part of today’s marketing strategy. Why? Because content is the focal point of nearly all of our marketing efforts. So it’s time to focus on how that content is consumed, engaged with, and experienced by the audience and end-user, also known as your prospective buyer.
Your content experience can either compel your prospects to engage with your company or cause them to look elsewhere. As a marketing leader or strategist, it’s on you to ensure you’re getting the most out of the content your team produces, distributes, and promotes. After all, what good is investing in content if it doesn’t leave your prospects feeling understood?
As an often neglected part of the buying process, content experience touches the entire marketing team and spans across a wide variety of positions—from your content marketers, to your demand generation team—and can be as far reaching as product, UX, and sales. In order to create optimal experiences, we need to rally the entire team and all invested parties. As they say, many hands make light work.
So how do you get your team to rally around the content experience?
1. Set Expectations and Prioritize the Experience
In the same way we focus on content creation, distribution, and promotion, so too should we focus on the content experience. As a leader, you’ll need to clearly articulate why the experience matters, and how it fits into the larger picture. It’s tough to get your team to align around this or any new idea without explaining “the why” and getting their buy-in. Otherwise, it’s just another thing to do on their already long list.
One way to get that buy-in is to zero in on the aspects of content experience that more closely align with the individual marketer’s role and objectives, in addition to the organization’s greater goals. For example, let’s say as an organization, you have a monthly lead target of 2,000 per month.
On top of that, lead generation is a key metric for both your demand generation and content teams. If you want buy-in from those teams, show them how optimizing the content experience through contextual CTAs will lead to greater conversions. If you’re unsure how each marketer’s role aligns with the content experience, we break it down for you in this ebook. Once you’ve established content experience as a priority, set expectations for the role everyone should play in managing and maintaining an optimal content experience.
2. Engage Stakeholders Within the Marketing Team and the Entire Organization
Start by identifying all stakeholders. Who currently leverages content within your marketing team and the larger organization? Once you have that list, think about content experience as the environment in which your content lives, how it’s structured, and how it compels your audience to engage with your company. In this definition, stakeholders may include graphic and UX designers, and / or marketing developers. To what extent should they be involved?
Set an agenda for the meeting (this is a good rule of thumb for all meetings!) to discuss the current state of your content experience. Break it down into the three aforementioned elements and benchmark yourself from Day One. Determine roles, who will handle what, next steps, and pick a cadence for the meeting.
Once a month is a good cadence for reviewing the state of your content experience as a larger group. But more frequent meetings with smaller groups of stakeholders will likely make sense, as you divide and conquer the content experience as individual portions and projects, like revisiting the navigation, an audit of all CTAs, a review of prospect email nurtures, etc.
3. Determine Your Content Experience Priorities
Determine what the priorities are based on your business objectives and how optimizing your experience can help get you closer to reaching those objectives. It’s not uncommon for a group of marketers to be divided on what the priorities are and which should be tackled first. Everyone has their own interests.
One way to determine your content experience priorities is by creating a list of projects and using the RICE test used by product managers to prioritize projects. Using this test, projects that stand to benefit the greatest number of people (or have the biggest reach), that move the needle towards larger goals (or generate the biggest impact), that you have the most confidence in (i.e., data to back up the idea), and require the lowest amount of effort are prioritized first.
This check ensures you not only stay focused on what matters most to the organization, and what will make a difference to the largest number of customers but that personal feelings, interests, and bias are checked at the door.
4. Continuously Review the Key Elements
This last step is an important one. In the same way we monitor and tweak our marketing campaigns, we must monitor and review our content experience.
Understand that what works for some may not work for you. It can be tempting to find aesthetically pleasing content libraries or fun and quirky emails to emulate, but what provides results for some B2B businesses and audiences may not pay dividends for you. Develop your own best practices through A/B testing and let the data guide your decision making.
Finally, use your review time to celebrate small wins, review priorities, and initiate new projects as they ladder up to your larger business objectives.
VPs, CMOs, and Directors can leverage their key players to align around the content experience and by doing so foster greater collaboration between teams within marketing and within the larger organization. What’s more, marketers are empowered to see content through from creation to consumption.
Leading your team as they rally around the content experience is an important step toward content experience ownership which yields better results, better content performance, and ROI. It also sets up your marketing team to do all that’s at their disposal to win.