A few weeks ago, venture capital firm, OpenView Venture’s Director of Content Strategy, Kevin Cain, posted a blog post discussing content marketing service platforms and their necessity in your organization. Kapost was amongst the service platforms he listed.
After thanking Kevin for the shout out, he replied with a basic question about Kapost’s offering and outsourcing content marketing. Kevin’s question was a great one and a must-share. His question is below, followed by Kapost’s VP of Sales, Keith Burrow’s, response.
Please leave any questions about the platform or outsourcing in the comments below.
Hi Kevin,
Great questions! Kapost’s view is compiled on several tenants for the B2B audience we serve.
First, relevant and timely content is critical for both top of funnel (lead generation) and mid-funnel acceleration (engaged in a sales cycle). We are finding that modern marketers are getting away from aggregate campaigns and asking how successful are various types and pieces of content in generation leads and accelerating sales.
Second, content marketing is complex and difficult. Creation, management, approvals, agencies, repurposing, multi-channel publishing, and finally, measurement– this is hard to manage in any size organization. Additionally, Kapost does not believe you can outsource relevant and valuable content creation/ideation (every client will need to be heavily involved), so we don’t have a writing staff as hired guns. We encourage current agency relationship and provide recommendations for best in class content agency providers. Our focus is about the process, approval, re-purpose, publish and measurement platform. (to close the marketing automation loop, we integrate with Eloqua, Marketo, and most CMS platforms)
Lastly, how should organizations start? Persona development, content audit, and development of cross-channel needs, are extremely necessary. This gives your organization a blueprint on requirements and gaps in your operation. Is the company looking at creation, organization, publishing, and measurement, all as priorities? Budget priorities– if you are doing none of the above well, investing in a platform makes zero sense. The Kapost Team is a firm believer that content marketing technology adoption requires an easy to use platform, a well-defined process, and properly informed/trained people to execute. You can’t take a short cut!
Kevin, we compare the Content Marketing platform space like Marketing Automation was 7 years ago: it’s early stage and adoption/iteration is happening fast. It’s an exciting space, and it is maturing quickly. Thanks for the inclusion and thoughts.
Best,
Keith
If you want to learn more about the impact of Kapost’s platform on your content marketing machine, please click here.