The Biggest Mistake a Marketing Leader Can Make in 2013
The Biggest Mistake a Marketing Leader Can Make in 2013:by
SBI’s CEO Greg Alexander, was recently quoted in Hubspot’s “20 Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2013 & Beyond”. Greg tells CMO’s that “The pressure is on”. “CEO’s are paying more attention to marketing’s contribution and are holding them accountable for revenue generation.”
Marketing leaders need to drive a strong impact to show a return on investment. Right now the biggest mistake a marketing leader can make in 2013 is to not invest in Content Marketing.
Content Marketing is hot for good reason. It produces results. However, marketing leaders don’t always know how to produce content. 39% of Marketers do not even have a content strategy. Often, content creation is outsourced to 3rd party agencies. Don’t fall for the outsource dog & pony show. These agencies claim benefits of having a team of highly trained and college educated writers. Or worst case, make the claim and pass the work to India. You will quickly realize outsourcing content creation requires a significant time investment to make sure it’s done well, it’s expensive, takes too long and the quality misses the mark. Outsourced content simply is not infused with deep domain knowledge.The Biggest mistake marketers overlook when developing a content marketing strategy is that they can do it better internally. Internal resources are the hidden gem that can be leveraged and trained to produce the content that buyers seek. Save yourself time now (and your job) by standing up an Internal Content Marketing Agency team.
What is an Internal Content Marketing Agency?
It’s in a sense, a new department in your company. It utilizes personnel from Sales, Marketing, Product Development and other parts of the organization. When trained and armed with the battle-tested tools, an Internal Content Marketing team can produce high quality demand generation content consistently. A 3rd party will never know the customer like your internal team. Using a content grader tool like this one below (Free to our readers) will focus your team on producing continuous great content. Download it here and try it today.
You may be thinking to yourself that creating an internal content marketing team isn’t easy. You’re right, it can be a heavy lift but one well worth it in 2013. The clients we have helped stand up Internal Content Marketing Agencies have told us, “Content Marketing is now our best Sales Rep.” It’s a fact; the content being produced by the internal team is selling when a rep is not present. This is happening because part of the content production training includes mapping persona content to the Buyer’s Journey.
This is not the only benefit of producing quality content. This new content production practice will naturally boost your SEO and Social demand generation efforts. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithm to find and serve the best quality content to their users. This gives your content the advantage. When your content is found and its quality content, people will share it and link to it.
2013 is a pivotal year for Marketing Leaders. The CEO will be holding you accountable for revenue generation. The sales team will be expecting more from you and the content marketing strategy. Not only will you need to embrace content marketing but you will be introducing new roles internally to support it. This will mean working with Sales to conduct buyer research will be imperative to mapping content to the buyer’s journey.
Call to Action
- Now is the time to define a content marketing strategy
- Don’t overlook leveraging Internal Resources for your content marketing strategy
Comments are welcome below - I would love to hear from those currently running an internal content marketing team. Or experiences from those outsourcing content.
Author: John Koehler
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