Strategic Public Relations

Who Should Own Content Marketing In Your Organization?

Read enough industry opinion on content marketing, and you can start to determine each author’s professional background. If their point of view is focused on:

• Interactive: the author tends to be in digital marketing or may work with a digital agency;
• Creative: a traditional marketer might be chief storyteller, perhaps working with a creative agency;
• Editorial: the expert could come from public relations or might work with a PR agency;
• Media: someone with paid media background, who takes a media-neutral approach to building an audience or may be working with a digital agency.

Read Between the Lines
If I’d written this article just a few years ago, you could easily tell my roots are in public relations. By their name alone, my two personal blogs would confirm this assumption.

But over the last 10 years, my focus became more broadly focused in marketing. And in the last five years, I’ve witnessed content morph into a clear mix of editorial, design and development. My last four years at a media agency have further evolved my point of view.

Marketing’s True North
This experience has taught me that the focus should always be on the audience – regardless of your background. While this isn’t an epiphany or a deep thought, it’s critical to remind ourselves of this timeless rule. It tends to fade into the background when the marketing industry, inevitably, debates who in an organization should own a new practice area.

Content marketing can’t live anywhere in the building, but it does take a variety of stakeholders and skill sets to make it work. Regardless of where content marketing lives in your building, make sure the team has the skill sets needed for each phase of content marketing.

• Plan: The planning phase requires strategists with an a deep understanding of the brand and its audience as well as an appreciation of content and media.
• Publish: Publishing requires a mix of editorial, design and creative that taps technology to distribute and share the content as relevant.
• Promote: All content needs help being found. In addition to paid media expertise, analytics, search marketing and social media mindsets are required.
• Optimize: The key to sustainable success is constant, informed iteration of the entire process and the platform. A team capable of drawing insights from analytics and relevant search data is critical.

Story or Science?
Each member on a content marketing team, based on their background, will focus on the left- or right-brain aspects of content marketing. That’s understandable. The point is simply to make sure you’ve got the right mix of team skills and that the focus is, first and foremost, on the audience.

And if anyone asks who should own content marketing? The answer is: the audience.

An Important Tip for Sustainable Content Creation

At the recent, inaugural #solopr conference, I really enjoyed the other speakers' presentations. One of those individuals, Tom Martin, served up a simple but powerful tip regarding content creation.

Whether you're blogging, part of a brand newsroom or just creating content - think in terms of cornerstones and not just cobblestones.

Star Wars as Cobblestones and Cornerstone 
Star Wars offers the simplest way to understand the cornerstones vs. cobblestones concept. Each episode in the Star  Wars franchise is a cobblestone. All six movies together are a cornerstone. George Lucas made one movie at a time. But he knew the entire story before he started with Epsiode 4.

Rock Solid Content Strategy
You can take two approaches to the cornerstone strategy, depending on your approach to content.

Star Wars Approach: Think the larger story through, as part of a larger strategy, but then produce this content in pieces. The other benefit to this approach? Your final piece, that aggregates each article into a larger piece of content, will benefit from reader comments and other industry news that unfold along with your ideas.

Reverse Engineer: Literally producing the entire story and then chopping it into pieces to distribute over time is a  more traditional, long form approach. To be honest, it's working harder than smart...especially if you were to publish all of it immediately as a single, longform "white paper."

Regardless of how you employ the cornerstone/cobblestone approach to content, it ensures a steady pace of publishing relevant content. In fact, it's a concept I need to employ at this blog. My publishing frequency is guided solely by quality vs. quantity. If I'm not inspired, I don't write. This approach to articles on this blog would have a positive impact.