Will Humphries — March 19, 2017 Follow @JustCallMeWillAlthough production often takes place on the front lines, content marketing success is often dependent upon the level of senior leadership involvement in the planning stages.
Your content should align with the overall vision and mission of the organisation.
The following is a look at why senior leadership involvement impacts your ability to use content to create business leads, and how to make this happen.
Make Content a Company-Wide Initiative
You may only have a few people involved with generating content for your company, but one way to establish a culture that supports quality content is to get everyone involved.
A recent Content Marketing Institute study showed 61 percent of businesses that succeed in using content to produce business leads have significant interactions between marketing leaders and writers.
More importantly, to align your content marketing strategies with overall marketing and branding, let other employees participate in story contributions.
To succeed with this approach, offer guidelines on formats and message types, and even have managers coach workers on contributing useful ideas.
Leadership Defines Roles
No company initiative succeeds without senior leadership setting its goals and the roles and responsibilities of each department.
In your content endeavour, leaders need to convey the importance of content to the company’s success and explain expectations for all departments.
Motivate and incentivize people who offer input on your brand and story ideas.
Getting other employees involved helps them feel like a greater part of your company and its story, and potentially enhances loyalty.
Invite Ideas Through Enterprise Communication
Content creators have talent in taking ideas and putting them into a cohesive message.
However, to achieve broad and intelligent topical coverage, senior leadership can include content idea suggestions in companywide communication.
At meetings, leaders can encourage people to share ideas on a story that projects with a particular marketplace.
Company newsletters and email memos are other platforms through which senior leaders can encourage all employees to get involved.
Include Content Conversations in Strategic Planning
Marketing directors often sit on executive leadership teams, but a content strategy isn’t necessarily a part of strategic planning meetings.
This point is proven by a 2014 Altimeter study showing that 70 percent of marketers lack a consistent and cohesive content strategy.
Achieving consistent and coherent content messages aren’t much different than producing these qualities in other strategic areas.
It requires top-level emphasis on planning, and discussions between senior managers and marketing directors on the relationship between company goals, marketing objectives and content strategies.
Wrap Up
Senior leadership involvement supports the premise that content marketing is a priority in your business.
Top managers also help align content messages with broader organizational goals and help motivate all departments and employees to participate in the development ideas that tell the brand story.
As the research from Fractl and Moz demonstrates above, success in content marketing is measured in different ways, dependent upon the KPI’s set by your management team.
For the majority of marketers, though, it appears to be about driving new sales leads.
Ultimately, content marketing is about putting the reader first. Nonetheless, content can either build your brand’s credibility or destroy it.
Therefore, you need to ensure you have senior leadership involvement.
If you can do this, you can drive real success for your content marketing, your leadership team, your company, and of course, your prospects.
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