This Content Marketing Stuff is Getting Complicated

6 minute read

Upland Admin

Content marketing in a nutshell:

  • Identify the challenges your prospects and customers face
  • Publish high-value educational content to overcome the challenges
  • Capture leads and nurture prospects into customers

Sales go up. Marketing costs go down. Strike up the music and dance.

If the process weren’t so simple, you’d need help making it work.

Uh, wait. You’ve tried content marketing. It wasn’t quite the walk in the park you envisioned. You found it has all kinds of moving parts, and they don’t always jive perfectly.

Help may be precisely what you need after all.

But isn’t there an app for that?

There is, er, there are. A number of SaaS platforms are now being used by marketers to manage their content. In fact, for B2B enterprises needing to plan, execute, distribute, and analyze content operations, Kapost is the cream of the crop.

But it’s not for everyone. And you may not want it.

Kapost hears you. So now hear this:

Kapost wants to help you improve your content operations—even if you don’t rely on the platform.

There are SERVICES for that. New services. And there’s a process expert by the name of Andrew Walters in charge of developing and delivering them. Andrew and I talked about this new development and the conversation went like this:

Barry Feldman (BF): You have a new title, director of consulting services. Is it fair to conclude you have a new offering?

Andrew Walters (AW): Yeah. We’ve been on this journey at Kapost trying to get higher up the food chain on what we can do for our customers.

My new role is focused on helping customers operationalize or improve their content operations. Rather than just applying a technology to help make things more automated, we want to help marketers take a step back and ask, “Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing it the right way?”

Surviving and Thriving in the Midst of a Digital Explosion

BF: So if these services are to be a paid “product,” how do they differ from the services the customer success team provides Kapost users?

AW: On the customer success side, a lot of the consulting is around best practices: How to best use the tool; how to get the most value out of your investment in the Kapost platform.

We work with a lot of different customers in different industries, so we’re always trying to leverage best practices. However, one of the things we found is there’s definitely a need for more consulting around process…

How do we run our organization? How do we manage? How do we plan versus how do we do it in Kapost?

So our consulting services offering is more around the bigger picture, What is the content operation and how do we drive the most value out of it?

A lot of customers are dealing with a digital explosion. There are so many more channels, so many more tools, so many more marketing teams. It becomes very easy to back into silos or to put on blinders and focus on what’s directly in front of you. But in order to be successful, you need to take a step back and look at the foundation of it all—the new content operation.

We encourage our customers to do that and now we’re providing assistance to make it easier whether you run Kapost or not.

Where Do You Begin?

BF: Okay, I’m a marketer. I may or may not be new to content marketing. I may or may not be a Kapost customer. What’s in it for me?

AW: A couple of things… One offering we’re rolling out is a Content Operations Assessment (COA).

When you look at all the complexity, all the channels and tools, one thing that’s constant across them all is content. Content is what’s driving all of the channels. So we’re focused on the end-to-end content lifecycle.

The Content Operations Assessment helps companies analyze and evaluate their maturity according to the four phases of the content lifecycle: align, execute, distribute, and analyze.

After completing the Content Operations Assessment, we benchmark your maturity, and provide a report, including where you are today, along with both strategic and tactical recommendations. The recommendations are often time phased into a rollout or implementation plan, and our additional service packages are designed to help you implement them.

BF: So what’s the offering look like? How’s it delivered?

AW: We’re focusing on workshops: modular, robust workshops that will align to one or more of the content phases, as well as help with that maturity growth.

So we start with the Content Operations Assessment to inform which one of the modular workshops is best suited. For example, one of our workshops is the Content Governance Board service package. In this workshop, we helps teams set up a governance boar, including marketing team leaders and internal content consumers, e.g., sales, product, and success / services. The result is a tightly aligned, highly efficient, and data-driven marketing department.

In the future, we’re expanding to a more general process strategy consulting that will most likely be offered on an hourly basis.

Improved Processes, Improved Productivity

BF: This content marketing thing is getting complicated, isn’t it?

AW: It really is. We looked at a study that says 80% of businesses are going to spend more time on content operations over the next two years. It’s frustrating to the marketer who wants to focus on the actual marketing effort—creating content, executing on strategy—not tracking or managing the operations. So we want to alleviate that with our services.

But I want to be clear: It’s not to help you identify what content to create. It’s to help you manage and improve the processes for aligning around what content you’re going to create, executing your content, and learning from the analytics.

We’re aiming to help you achieve consistency across all the teams and departments so everyone’s not focusing only their little silo, which will comprise your productivity.

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