b2b-research-roundtable-content-workflows-bottlenecks-solutions

Is content creation a challenge for your company?

It is for one-third of B2B companies, according to the recently released B2B Content Marketing: 2018 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends — North America.

How do those problems develop? What bottlenecks do they create? And, more importantly, how can you address them?

Chris Bondhus, senior director of demand generation for Brightcove, posed those questions to a panel of marketing experts at Content Marketing World 2017. This roundtable included:

  • Ardath Albee, B2B marketing strategist with Marketing Interactions and author of Digital Relevance
  • Drew Bailey, manager of content strategy and curation, FedEx, and a 2017 Content Marketer of the Year finalist
  • Carla Johnson, president of Type A Communications and co-author of Experiences, the 7th Era of Marketing
  • Monica Norton, senior director of content marketing, Zendesk, and a 2017 Content Marketer of the Year finalist

Let’s break down their insight to explore problems they’ve seen and the steps they took or advice they have to solve them.

Failure to get on same page

“The first thing I see is people don’t agree with what it is you’re trying to accomplish with content marketing,” Carla says. “Having a common purpose or mission that everybody is behind and supports is probably the biggest (solution) I see (to overcoming) a bottleneck.”

Drew agrees. “When you put that story around a clear path, you get (C-suite) buy-in and it just makes it a whole lot easier,” he says. “Sometimes competing priorities may happen at the manager level, but we just work through that.”

Starved for proper direction

No process or too much process often bogs down content creation, Ardath says. “People get confused, and they don’t know when the handoff should occur, to who, and who’s responsible for what.”

Five years ago at FedEx, the C-suite put all the go-to market teams responsible for marketing to U.S. customers under one director to implement a new “go” process. “That was a good first step,” Drew says. “We didn’t have a process. Then we kind of over-processed. About two years in, it was like, ‘Wait a minute. It’s too many processes.’ ”

As Drew and his team reviewed the situation, they focused on two questions:

  • How can we empower the team responsible for creating content? (Benefits include saving time and money, and increasing customer experience and engagement.)
  • How can the team get more time back? (If team members follow the streamlined process, they can have three to four hours of time to create really good content.)

As an example, the review led to the conclusion that weekly meetings with the content and whole team were part of the over-processed system. Now the FedEx group has a monthly meeting where all are welcome. “As the content leads are drafting content, we share that … As we’re discussing as a team, we send an invitation to all channels: ‘Come listen to this conversation. Provide input. Provide suggestions,” he explains. And fewer meetings gave back time for the content team to spend on content creation.

Forgetful of the smaller stuff

Zendesk found a sweet spot between not having any processes and having too many. It also has mutually agreed upon goals and mission around content. But, Monica says, the occasional bottleneck still arises.

Often the challenge occurs around the goals for an individual piece of content or specific messaging. “If it is either not clear or not agreed upon in advance, sometimes you have to go back and redo things over and over because you didn’t lay that out in the beginning … or it wasn’t laid out for us clearly enough by the person we are creating the content for,” she…