For Executives: How to Avoid the Most Challenging Hurdle in Your Content Marketing Operation

3 minute read

Upland Admin

Oversight and management of content is a new role at many organizations. This blog post focuses on the challenges and opportunities that come with this position. 

A client recently asked me about the most challenging part of content marketing. This client was just beginning to role out Kapost and content marketing in general and wanted to avoid common mistakes.

There’s a lot to consider when building your content operation: new organizational structures, the intersection between technology and marketing, new skills, scaling across an enterprise. A surprising amount of “big stuff” happens when you take responsibility for a buyer-focused content marketing approach.

Change management is the most challenging part of content marketing, but there are ways to plan ahead to avoid common pitfalls.

But the most challenging part of implementing a content marketing program lurks behind these other complexities: Change management. Getting humans to alter their behavior is difficult on a personal and enterprise level.

This challenge isn’t new. All innovations in the workplace are usually met with resistance. The first typewriter might have been by people who said, “I can write my name in 2 seconds, but it takes 10 seconds to type my name. Where’s the efficiency?” And I bet that was a valid question back then.

Here are a few ways to mitigate the difficulties of change management in a content marketing context:

  • Provide a mandate. An executive mandate is one of Kapost’s leading success indicators. Your team needs to hear your expectations and aspirations from your mouth.
  • Confusion comes from complexity. Dial up or back the level of complexity based on your team’s level of confusion, especially in terms of the platform’s adoption. Kapost’s Customer Success Managers train the staff at the level of complexity they require. Creating a blog post with 3 steps is easier than creating a post with 25 steps—at least wait to introduce those additional steps until the team feels confident.
  • Gauge health like a circulatory system. Your content process is similar to our veins and arteries. Content needs to flow to different parts of the organization. The health of your content operation is determined by content movement between writer and editor or from a subject matter expert to a product manager, for instance. Encourage communication and set team (rather than individual) goals when possible.
  • Stagnation is death. A slow trickle of content is far better than no content at all. People resist change by avoiding it, but don’t let your team give up on themselves. Keep that content pipeline flowing; don’t worry as much about content volume or production speed.

If you are already a Kapost customer, you have the added resource of our Engagement Directors, like me. We help clients outline their objectives, prove content’s value and set up content operations for success.

Even if you aren’t a Kapost customer, use these tips to measure the adoption of a content operation within your organization. Making your vision real will require a lot of work by a lot of people. It is an executive’s constant responsibility to ensure their staff is well-equipped and empowered to carry out that vision. Keeping an eye on any resistance to change is a good way to avoid potential barriers to success.

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