Should Digital Marketers Own the Content Experience In Your Organization?
As B2B organizations place greater emphasis on their digital presence, content experience takes a firmer seat in the minds of today’s marketers. After all, the vast majority of the content produced and distributed lives online. But as organizations recognize the importance of these online experiences around their content, the question becomes: who is best suited to own the content experience? Who should be accountable and responsible for optimizing those experiences for our readers and visitors?
Because the content experience largely exists in the digital domain, digital marketers are sometimes tasked with this responsibility. But should they be?
A Digital Marketer’s Duties
Depending on the organization, a digital marketer’s duties run the gambit from SEO / SEM, email marketing, social media, websites, and display advertising campaigns. Ultimately they’re responsible for planning, executing, measuring, and reporting on the performance of all digital marketing campaigns and assessing against defined goals.
They collaborate with internal teams to create landing pages and optimize user experience. They have a strong analytical ability to evaluate end-to-end customer experience across multiple channels and customer touch points. Often, they’re tasked with evaluating emerging technologies for potential addition to their organization’s marketing technology stack.
Where Digital Marketing and Content Experience Overlap
So what part of content experience aligns best with digital marketing? Let’s first look at all that digital marketing comprises.
According to HubSpot:
Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers.
With such a broad definition that encompasses so much, it’s easy to see how content experience could live under this umbrella.
Now let’s turn our attention to how Uberflip defines content experience:
Content experience is the environment in which your content lives, how it’s structured, and how it makes your prospects or customers engage with your company.
Certainly, there’s some immediate overlap by virtue of content experience existing in the digital domain. Perhaps, content experience itself can be seen to fall under that same umbrella of digital marketing, at least in some organizations.
How Much Should Digital Marketers Own?
The ability for digital marketing to envelope content experience presents a case for digital marketers to own the content experience within their organization. But upon closer inspection, it’s less clear-cut.
Where ownership makes sense
Because optimizing the user experience and end-to-end customer experience typically fall within the digital marketer’s purview, they definitely have a vested interest in content experience. After all, the second component of content experience is how content is structured, how it’s organized, and how visitors navigate that content—all things that a digital marketer could potentially own. Digital marketers are also focused on finding efficiencies within user engagement paths and leveraging the right tools to optimize them. If they’re building a landing page, for instance, they’re looking at the best way to get a prospect or customer to act. And that aligns with the third component of content experience, engagement.
Where it doesn’t
Digital marketing’s focus on the end-to-end customer and user experience makes digital marketers ripe for content experience ownership. However, their lack of influence on the environmental factors of experience and predisposition toward optimizing different channels of distribution makes the role of digital marketing a less likely candidate for wholly owning the content experience.
In order to fully own the content experience for their organization, digital marketers would need to see content experience as aligned with their distribution strategies and optimizing that experience as akin to tweaking digital ads or email marketing campaigns. If content experience became another tool in their toolkit, or as supplementary to their efforts, they may be in a better position than some to own the experience. But is that really enough?