A marketing leader's guide to keeping your content team aligned with business impact
Includes examples and six easy ways to focus your content team on the right things to grow the business.
B2B content marketing is at an interesting crossroads.
On the one hand, it is true that copycat content and content created only for search engines doesn’t cut it anymore. Your content needs to be unique, creative, and give people a reason to consume your content over someone else's.
On the other hand, content marketing’s object is not simply to stand out or be the most creative. The business invested in the team and/or agency to make a return on that investment, not to impress its peers.
Moving forward, the teams that will win understand how to be creative and stand out in the right ways, while remaining focused on driving business impact. It simply cannot be one or the other. It has to be both.
Examples of business impact > preference
At Ten Speed, we have the opportunity to review GSC and GA data for a lot of B2B SaaS companies. One thing that is consistently true is that the pages you would think drive the most awareness, backlinks, leads, and/or revenue, tend to be average performers.
Nearly every company has this random page or blog post that drives unexpectedly high numbers and is highly valuable to the business. Here are a couple of examples:
A landing page that doesn’t conform to best practices
A blog post designed to be a simple resource
While at Sprout Social, Kevin King (co-founder of Ten Speed) saw in the data that there were a lot of fragmented searches for all kinds of social image sizes. Inspired to satisfy that in a robust way, he led the creation of a lengthy blog post that contained every image size for every social network, a simple corresponding Google Sheet, and a commitment to maintaining the freshness of information.
The belief was that a highly designed, creative resource would be really cool and useful, but the scrappy version of a blog post and Google Sheet would still satisfy their need and prove the business value.
This page went on to generate millions in revenue for the business, spawned variations, was the driver behind creating the free tool “Landscape,” and, to this day, is the number one thing people mention when they find out I worked at Sprout Social.
Keep your team aligned with business impact
So, how can a marketing leader with a million things going on ensure that the content team is marching down the right path?
We have assembled a list of things you can do with your in-house team or agency to give them the context and tools they need to succeed.
1. Establish clear objectives
The simplest and most obvious is to give the team a clear objective. If you tell them to create the best content in our industry, they will make different decisions than if you tell them to increase revenue by x%.
Content has a ton of value beyond direct revenue generation, and I wouldn’t recommend that being the sole objective of a content team, but make sure that what you and the CEO are expecting to happen from content is made clear.
2. Share the investment math
I’ve talked with a number of marketing leaders who don’t share the investment math and business case with the content team. Some intentionally and others, the idea of doing so didn’t cross their minds.
At some point in the budgeting and staffing process, a case was made for investing in content marketing as a way to grow the business. Sharing this case with the team is an easy way to ensure everyone is on the same page that this isn’t a creative endeavor to do stuff that makes us feel good. Company leadership has expectations tied to this work and failing to meet them will negatively impact the company.
3. Question motives
Don’t be afraid to ask “Why?” a lot with your team. Why is this part of the strategy? Why do you feel we need to create this?
Someone might say the content needs to be 10x all other content on the topic.
Okay. How do you define 10x? Does it need to be 10x better if 2x better will still accomplish our goals?
Also, keep an ear out for “I” being used. I don’t like that type of content. I want us to put everything we have into this.
4. Require reporting
You’d be surprised how many content teams are not required to report on progress, results, or business impact. 🤦🏻♂️
I’m an advocate of less is more with reporting, so I’m not suggesting you bog down the content team with tedious and extensive reporting. However, a simple report each month showing progress and data on 4-5 key metrics can be enough to keep a team aligned.
To make it simple, make sure the reporting covers these three areas in some way:
Output/execution
Awareness metrics
Business impact metrics
It only takes one or two times of having to report sub-par numbers for someone to think, “I don’t want to have to do that again.”
5. Audit processes
At least twice per year, if not quarterly, you should sit down with the team for 30 minutes and have them walk you through every step of their process.
As a content program grows, more people will want to be involved, unnecessary steps will be added, manual tasks will creep in, etc.
Audit frequently and keep your team in check or you may end up with a few examples we’ve seen:
a 49-point publishing checklist
seven rounds of review/revision before publishing
a process that takes five weeks to go from creation to publishing
Catching these issues and coaching your team to streamline things will help prevent the slowing of progress and the focus on business impact.
6. Require collaboration
As a leader, you should require your content team to collaborate with customer-facing departments on some sort of regular cadence. This will keep them aligned to what other teams need from content and ensure they are aligned with customer needs.
Sales and customer success will be blunt about what they need and the questions that prospects/customers often ask.
Customer support can have great insights into where people get stuck and detailed ways that customers are using the product.
As a bonus, your content team can also help other teams understand existing or upcoming content that fits what those teams need to educate and enable prospects and customers.
Getting started
If you’re leading a large content program that’s already in motion, we recommend getting started with #1 or #2 and building from there.
If you’re building things from the ground up, now is a great time to leverage all six to get started on the right foot.
We’re always happy to chat through this with you or answer your questions. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
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