Over the course of 18 months, Rachel Schickowski and Stan Miller implemented a content marketing platform – a hub for all the marketing content of Rockwell Automation – for a team of 600 marketers around the world.
Most of us wouldn’t have a clue how to accomplish such a feat. Luckily for us, Rachel and Stan shared their story at Content Marketing World, Implementing a CMS in Global B2B Organization.
(Note: While they used the term “CMS” in the title, they later clarified that the term “content marketing platform” better fits what they’re talking about.)
Why they did it
Rockwell Automation – a 100-year-old company with over 22,000 employees, the largest in the world dedicated to automation technology – generates a lot of marketing content. That content (white papers, videos, case studies, brochures, advertising, magazines, blog posts, and more) used to be scattered among servers and hard drives all over the world, and the content processes used to be disconnected and uncoordinated.
Editorial calendars, too, were all over the place, as Stan describes:
Our customer magazine’s editorial calendar sat on an intranet site. Our blog calendar sat on a shared drive in our U.K. office. Our case-study program was being managed on a SharePoint site run by our agency. Content calendars were managed by various business units on various shared drives and desktops.
When tools and processes are that fragmented, no one can get a strategic view of the enterprise marketing content, and the enterprise can’t fully realize the value of that content.
Rachel and Stan wanted a tool to manage all the content and processes for all the marketing teams, from idea to creation to distribution to governance to analytics. They wanted to know what content their marketing teams were creating, how well it was working, and whether they had enough of the right thing. They needed a digital way to hold all that content and all that information about the content.
They needed an enterprise content marketing platform.
A content marketing platform is a hub for planning, producing, distributing, and analyzing content. It works with all content formats, including video, HTML, PDF, and zipped source files.
Rachel and Stan describe it as “a huge filing cabinet in the cloud, giving everyone access with a real-time view of the latest content revision or workflow update.”
How they did it
Rachel, who has played various content-related roles at Rockwell Automation, oversaw the platform’s implementation, developing the infrastructure and leading the effort. Stan, editorial lead for the company’s Global Customer Communications group, provided the content and developed the processes.
Here’s their approach to researching and implementing a new platform.
Form a steering committee
“Find some friends,” they advise, and form a steering committee. Include stakeholders who bring a variety of content perspectives. Examples:
- People from various regions
- People who own budgets
- People responsible for content strategy
- Content creators
- Lawyers
- Translation coordinators
Choose people who can poke holes and show what they would need in the tool, what gaps they see so that they can help you assess tools as you go through product demonstrations.
Get support from leadership early
Keep your company’s leadership apprised. You need their advocacy when you roll out the new platform.
Clarify your requirements
Find out what each team needs from a content management platform. “After you understand your requirements, you can be on a demo call for five minutes and know right away, ‘Nope, not the right one for us,’ and move on,” Rachel says.
If you aren’t clear on your requirements, you can waste a lot of time in the vetting process.
Compare platforms
Determine how each platform would manage your campaigns, fit with your workflows (which vary from group to group), and integrate with your tech stack. How easy is it to use? “Find a platform that people will embrace,” Rachel says.
Decide which content to migrate
You can’t bring your whole content repository into a new platform. Consider using the platform, at least at first, for new content only. If you bring in legacy content, focus on your best content.
Learn from pilot projects
From the beginning – in tandem with your other activities – create pilot projects where the need is greatest in your organization.
For example, Rockwell teams in Asia Pacific and Latin America managed emails in Eloqua and wanted help. They created a pilot using the B2B content marketing platform Kapost, which supported them in dealing with translations, time zones, and their own vendors.
Since Kapost integrates with Eloqua, they could connect the process of creating content and the process of building email assets. (In this case, Eloqua emails were the content, and Kapost was the platform that managed that content.) Content owners also had access to analytics.
Stan suggests stress-testing a platform in multiple ways. His team followed on the heels of their colleagues in Latin America, doing a pilot project with the Rockwell Automation blog. “Integrating our processes and content development into the platform helped us refine our processes, find ways to save time, speed up reviews, and activate our content more quickly and efficiently,” he says.
Stan also did a pilot with Rockwell Automation’s long-running case-study program, which followed strict processes…
