Structuring your content organization

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Structuring your content organization

- Structuring your content organization is critical to having a content marketing strategy that works. Many organizations have trouble structuring content teams. This is because content marketing is a relatively new thing within the marketing team, and many organizations simply don't know where it should be within the organization and how it should be set up. A question that I get asked frequently is what team within marketing should own content? Should the content marketing team live with demand generation? How about product marketing? Should it be in corporate marketing, inbound marketing, brand marketing? These are all areas of the marketing organization that create content.

So content marketing could potentially live in any one of these marketing orgs. Everyone wants content to align with them simply because of these different teams create content on a daily basis. If content gets aligned with only one team, content then gets created in a silo. What do I mean by that? If content is aligned only with demand generation, then content's goals would be only for, say, lead generation. If content is aligned to only product marketing, then content would only be goaled with the same goals that product marketing has.

So if content gets aligned with only one team, often content gets created in a silo without the other teams being aware and without the other teams' input. No one talks to one another and content messaging is inconsistent and doesn't reflect the brand. This is really critical. Content marketing must be looked at in a holistic way that reflects the brand messaging, the brand look and feel, and the way the brand wants to speak about itself across the organization. But what if we didn't align content to any one team within marketing? What if content marketing was actually a neutral team within the marketing organization so that every team can benefit from centralized content? That way your organization can have a much more holistic view of content and content gets to be much more strategic instead of siloed.

Think about content as a strategic service bureau. What do I mean by this? The content service bureau model determines a content roadmap. So your content team should help determine what the content strategy is. A content service bureau can help support requests from various teams. All those teams mentioned earlier, demand gen, product marketing, your brand team, they all have content needs. Your content service bureau should help support those needs. Content service bureau oversees the content creation process so ensures that there's that consistency of message and voice amongst the content that you're creating.

They help streamline content creation for that type of scalability that you're looking for, and reduces duplicate efforts because all of the teams are aligned. What sort of content should your content service bureau help create? Your content service bureau should span all of those different departments within marketing and support all of them with different types of content. Your content service bureau should create demand generation content. This is content that helps to drive demand for your business, such as ebooks, infographics, slide decks.

This is the content that's being promoted out through social channels as well as through your programs on a daily basis. Your content service bureau should also help create customer content. This is those customer case studies and testimonials that really show the external community how your product or service has helped customers. Your content service bureau should also help create brand content. This is that really high level thought leadership content, such as contributed articles, executive content, the content that you want to put out there to really show who your brand is as a business.

Your content service bureau should help create all of these different types of content for the different teams within marketing. How should this content service bureau be structured? On top of your content service bureau should sit a content committee, which is made up by executives within your organization. The content committee are various stakeholders from those different marketing teams and may help drive the strategy and ensure that everything that the content service bureau is coming up with is on brand and right.

Next you have your content service bureau. This is often made up of that managing editor as well as your associate editor. Your managing editor is the person that is in charge of content strategy. The associate editor sits underneath the managing editor. Then various writers might make up your content service bureau as well. These could be internal writers or external writers. Then you have content requests by various teams coming into the content service bureau, ultimately to determine the overall content strategy. As you're really sitting down to think about what does your content strategy look like, and then once you've hired the right team, sit down and think about how your team is structured.

Content service bureau is a great way to structure your team so that they're a neutral, scalable part of your marketing organization.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-foundations/structuring-your-content-organization