Content Architecture: Structuring Your Content for Impact, Consistency, and Reuse

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Content Architecture: Structuring Your Content for Impact, Consistency, and Reuse"

Della George
5 years ago
Views:

96% of the marketing executives surveyed agree that the quality and organization of their marketing content is essential to achieving their growth goals.

create content that aligns with their go to market process and the customer journey.

1 Content Architecture: Structuring Your Content for Impact, Consistency, and Reuse A survey of 368 senior level marketing executives makes it pretty clear that effective Brand Publishing requires well organized and structured content. The analysis below shows that marketers who align their content consistently with their value conversations and selling methods are driving much better sales results. 96% of the marketing executives surveyed agree that the quality and organization of their marketing content is essential to achieving their growth goals. And one of the big factors that distinguishes the business practices and capabilities of high performing marketing organizations (who exceed plan by over 25% in the last year) is their ability to create content that aligns with their go to market process and the customer journey. Notably, it is their ability to deliver a consistent brand value conversation in both sales and marketing channels to change the customers perception of value and reinforce value selling approaches in the last third of the customer journey (during sales conversations) that allows them to outperform their peers. This reinforces the findings of another survey of 321 senior executives by Forbes that identified marketing consistency and brand differentiation as the top two goals of the CMO. The Growth Priorities of High Performance Marketing Organizations Content Architecture 1 Brand Publishing Institute

2 But many marketers are struggling to manage the complexity and costs of marketing operations because they lack a structure and strategy for organizing and aligning their marketing content with their core value messages, selling themes, and the customer journey. For example, 71% of companies lack a consistent messaging methodology (source: CVI Survey). And two thirds (66%) of the marketing executives surveyed do not yet target their content by stage of the journey The marketing executives interviewed in this study were looking for ways to structure their content because without a coherent content strategy and structure for organizing marketing content, it is very difficult for them to measure, target, assemble, plan and control the consistency of content across the company. What is a content architecture? A content architecture is a practical way to structure marketing content to help content creators to plan, produce, and target content that supports the customer journey, delivers consistent value conversations, and is easy to reuse across many programs, sales channels and devices. A content architecture is a framework that helps marketing executives to manage content consistency in a large organization while providing product, territory and line of business marketing teams the freedom and creativity to create content that supports their unique markets, programs and goals. For example, the Corporate Marketing Team at Tata Consulting Services uses a framework called the MVP Model Message, Value and Point of View - to direct the development of thought leadership content across the company to ensure it is consistent with the overarching value message and core practice area selling themes. Our content architecture provides swim lanes, guard rails, standards and guidelines for writing effective content according to Raj Banerji the CMO of Tata Consulting Services. It gives content producers within our practice areas horizontal themes that cut across silos, business unites, marketing programs and geographies. A content architecture creates clear linkages between value message and core selling themes to the sales and marketing content assets and elements that support value conversations at every stage of the buyers journey Why is it important? Having a content architecture is important because marketing organizations need a way to balance the creative process of writing marketing content with the structure needed to improve content consistency, reuse, and business impact. A content architecture helps guide the planning, creation, and targeting of marketing content that supports consistent value conversations, aligns with the customer journey, and is easy to reuse in a variety of channels and selling situations. In addition, a content architecture provides the structure needed to execute other Brand Publishing competencies including: Targeting A content architecture provides a blueprint for targeting and tagging content to ensure the right value story can be found at the right point in the buyer s journey to support a selling conversation. Content Architecture 2 Brand Publishing Institute

Sourcing A content architecture provides criteria and swim lanes to direct the sourcing and production of marketing content assets that communicate the value messages and selling themes, and a

Assembly A content architecture provides a structure for defining content elements that can be easily or automatically assembled into sales playbooks, client presentations, or customized web pages or

3 Sourcing A content architecture provides criteria and swim lanes to direct the sourcing and production of marketing content assets that communicate the value messages and selling themes, and a differentiated point of view crafted by marketing. Assembly A content architecture provides a structure for defining content elements that can be easily or automatically assembled into sales playbooks, client presentations, or customized web pages or s using digital marketing and sales enablement technology. Measurement A content architecture defines the Meta tags that describe the purpose and goals of content. Meta tags are essential to helping marketers understanding why content is effective, so marketers can optimize and improve content over time. Governance A content architecture is a practical way for marketing executives to manage content consistency while providing product, territory and line of business marketing teams the freedom to create content that address the needs of their customers. Editorial A content architecture provides a framework for consistently translating high level brand guidelines, value message, selling themes into the articles, stories, case studies, white papers, and infographics that support customer conversations. Exhibit: How a Content Architecture Supports Content Planning, Management, Distribution and Measurement The best organizations are putting together rigorous content architectures to connect their value messages and selling themes to the steps of the customer journey and make it easier to target, assemble, and reuse marketing content. For example, Ricoh is undergoing a major brand transformation theme built around a value story about Information Mobility. They are creating an internal framework to change the way everyone in marketing positions what they sell and talks to customers. The framework focuses on the customer and the business values and business outcomes and are all aligned the same value conversation and selling theme: Information Mobility. This has helped change the way every marketer thinks about what the unique value Ricoh delivers to the customer, and align all the content they create to that value story (information mobility) Content Architecture 3 Brand Publishing Institute

4 Best Practices Leading marketers are taking these steps to structure their marketing content to ensure consistency, differentiation, relevance, and use in day-to-day sales and marketing interactions: 1. Architecting content to ensure consistency and relevance at every stage of the customer journey; 2. Structuring content to differentiate core value messages and selling themes with customers; 3. Architecting content to maximize content leverage, reuse, and personalization. These best practices are explained below are outlined below, and cataloged into a practical action plan at the end of this report. Any references to specific enabling technologies are linked to additional information in the technology Appendix. 1. Architecting content to ensure consistency and relevance every stage of the customer journey. A content architecture is essentially a blueprint that creates clear linkages between value message and core selling themes created by corporate marketing, and the sales and marketing content assets that support value conversations at every stage of the buyer s journey. Sophisticated marketers are able to use this blueprint to map exactly how and where marketing content needs to support the marketing and sales process, including: demand generation, sales meetings and proposal. Content creators then use the blueprint to guide the planning, creation, and targeting of marketing content to maximize impact of content in terms of sales effectiveness and relevance to the selling situation. The secret to creating an effective content architecture is to define content that aligns the value messages and selling themes created by marketing directly with the solutions and services being discussed in sales conversations. Few organizations do this well. Marketers generally do a good job defining and promoting their brand message in advertisements at the front of the sales funnel. Product organizations are prolific at creating collateral that talk about product benefits at the end of the funnel, but not customer value. The trick is to create connective tissue such as sales playbooks, marketing automation templates, and conversation templates - to drive that value messages and selling themes deeper into the customer buying cycle and support day-to-day value conversations. 2. Architecting content to differentiate core value messages and selling themes with customers. Leading marketers are creating content architectures that structure their core value messages and themes to ensure all marketing content effectively differentiates the client experience, reinforces sales force skills. An effective content architecture supports consistent value conversations, differentiates the client experience, and reinforce selling skills in day-to-day selling. According to Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer of Corporate Visions The core connective tissue that maps messages and themes to tactical content assets are conversation templates which are frameworks for packaging content to support highly relevant sales conversations. Conversation templates like these help marketers execute modern sales and marketing program. They help enable targeting and personalization at the point of sale, leverage Marketing Cloud software, support sales enablement programs, and establish a basis for channel measurement and behavioral based incentives For example, ADP created a team of sales enablement, marketing communications and training and development to find ways to align the content created to support the sale organization. They arrived at common structure for defining marketing content called a Power Positioning Messaging Framework. This structure acted as glue that helped content creators in these different organizations to align the content they created with the value conversation skills and selling approach being used by their salespeople. To make this structure operational, they put in place a power positioning methodology from Corporate Visions to develop high level source story assets that provided a physical example of the value conversation in action. Then they provides content creators Content Architecture 4 Brand Publishing Institute

5 with tools, training, and templates - or content wireframes to help ensure every asset created by marketing, sales training and sales enablement supported create content assets that directly support sales. 3. Architecting content to maximize content leverage, reuse and personalization. Sophisticated marketers are investing resources to structure their marketing content to better facilitate reuse in digital sales, marketing and media channels and assembly into personalized content templates. To do this, many marketers are planning and structuring content to be modular so it can be easily assembled into the content presentation templates, drag and drop content blocks, or intelligent content frameworks within their Marketing Cloud software or Web CMS solutions. A content architecture provides the structure content creators need to write content elements such as persona based copy, infographics, or regulatory language - that can be assembled into complete marketing assets such as newsletters, ebooks, and blog posts, landing pages and s. For example, Cisco is using modular content components are the way to manage personalization at scale. According to Mark Yolton, VP Digital Marketing, Cisco We have started writing content elements an introductory paragraph, a side bar, or links that fit the content templates from our marketing automation platform and content components from Adobe Experience Manager Web CMS. But this created an upstream problem as the burden was put on the content team to create content blocks that fit these criteria The table below illustrates how a content architecture can help marketers value messages and selling themes to the steps of the customer journey and make it easier to target, assemble, and reuse marketing content across many programs, sales channels and devices; Create content assets that support a consistent value conversation, differentiates the client, and align with the customer journey Structure marketing content so it can be more easily planned, sourced, targeted, distributed, and reused across many programs, sales channels and devices; Content Architecture 5 Brand Publishing Institute

6 A Framework for Architecting Marketing Content for Impact, Consistency, and Reuse Content Architecture 6 Brand Publishing Institute

Portfolio Marketing. Research and Advisory Service

Portfolio Marketing. Research and Advisory Service Portfolio Marketing Research and Advisory Service SiriusDecisions Team Jeff Lash VP and Group Director, Go-to-Market Christina McKeon Service Director, Portfolio Marketing Tyler Anderson Team Leader, Account