“Ever want to throw your computer across the room?”
When Cathy McKnight asks hundreds of tech-savvy marketers this question at the Intelligent Content Conference, many heads nod. And there’s a good reason.
“We’re expected to be content superstars,” Cathy explains. “We’re caught between automation and the human touch. How do we use AI? Where do we draw the line in automation? How do we keep our hands in the mix and not let technology take us over?”
As a one-time SAP coder who co-founded and now helps lead the enterprise consulting practice Digital Clarity Group, Cathy understands the content-technology overload marketers face. She knows large organizations’ content-tech stacks have many parts: marketing automation, analytics, content management systems, digital asset management, and so on.
And yet many organizations often lack a clear strategy for building those stacks. “A good strategy helps you get more use out of your technology and helps the tech last longer,” she says. “You don’t want to replace technology when you don’t need to.”
Yet, when she asks the ICC audience, “How many of you have a martech-stack strategy that talks about integration and team and training?” only one hand raises.
Would you have raised your hand? If your hand is still at your side (or even if it isn’t), stop asking for or accepting new content tools or technology until you answer these questions, derived from Cathy’s ICC talk, Content Tech Overload: Four Pillars and Five Tenets of a Successful Content Technology Strategy.
1. Do I understand what’s available in the content part of our martech stack?
You may have seen this image, which shows the ever-growing landscape of marketing technology.
Here’s a close-up of the 2017 Martech 5000 chart, which shows over 5,000 logos grouped into categories. Cathy highlights in orange all the categories that affect content professionals – nearly the whole chart.
“You may look at those 5,000 logos (3,500 of which are unique) and say, ‘I work with content. Most of that doesn’t apply to me.’ You might think that only the section labeled Content & Experience Management applies to us,” Cathy says. “In fact, most of these areas do apply to us as people responsible for content that delivers the experiences that our customers and our contacts want to have.”
Even marketers who “never want to get any closer to a piece of technology than the keyboard in front of them to enter content” need to understand which pieces of technology affect the content. If you don’t understand how content experiences are getting delivered to customers, you can’t make strategic decisions.
You probably have much more technology in your organization that impacts content than you’re aware of. Most importantly, Cathy says, “Find out which parts of the content stack your company most relies on and take care of those pieces.”
TIP: Form partnerships with other teams
Reaching across department lines and working regularly with people on other teams that relate to content technology can help make sure you’re getting the most value from existing and new technology investments.
Cathy says, “Get on a first-name basis with people on your IT team. Set up a time – maybe every other week or every month – to talk about things that are…
