Why content marketing isn't just a strategy for your marketing department
Unless youre completely new to digital marketing (in which case, heres an overview), youve probably heard that content marketing is one of the hottest promotional strategies you can use. But knowing it's important and implementing it effectively are two different things.
A lot of companies mistakenly think of content marketing as an advertising strategy that should be controlled by the marketing department. While these professionals might play a bigger role in terms of overall campaign strategy, the truth is that taking an organizational approach to content marketing gives you more opportunities to connect with target customers than adopting a narrower mindset.
What does an organizational approach look like? Content marketing on an organization-wide basis is, to some extent, self-explanatory. Instead of having a few key players develop and drive company content campaigns, employees at all levels and across all departments are involved in content creation.
The following two examples show this distinction in action:
Why take an organizational approach? As you can see from the two examples above, involving additional employees or departments in the content marketing process offers a number of different benefits.
When content marketing is restricted to a single department, it essentially operates in a vacuum. Once these employees run out of ideas, the content they produce is likely to become stale and uninteresting to consumers.
Instead, bringing more people into the process results in more content ideas generated. Take, for example, your customer service workers. These employees likely have more contact with your customers than anybody else in the company theyre some of the best sources of information for the questions your customers are asking and the objectives theyre presenting to your sales process.
Say your company sells website design services and that one question your customer service team gets over and over again is, What happens once I sign a contract with you? Instead of repeating the same response, your company can release an informative content piece whether a short or long blog post, video or infographic that answers the question once in a fun, engaging way.
Good content marketing campaigns involve plenty of moving pieces. Not only are content marketers expected to create everything from blog posts to viral images, they need to develop an overarching strategy and measure results to ensure that each content piece released supports these initiatives.
If all of these different tasks rest on the shoulders of a few employees, burnout is inevitable. Taking an organizational approach to your campaigns can help to share the burden among other workers, leaving key employees with the bandwidth needed to drive campaign success.
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Why content marketing isn't just a strategy for your marketing department