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Although some firms consider hiring a chief content officer (CCO) a best-practice, it turns out that bringing an executive on board at that level hasn't been realistic at most companies.

Most B2B organizations (other than publishing, communications, and media companies or agencies) don't have a person with chief content officer title who has a seat at the CEO's table.

Not to worry, though: similar to the results of a Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study, a 2016 study conducted by Curata found that 75% of companies are increasing their investment in content marketing, and 43% are increasing staff levels.

Chief marketing officers have recognized the need for a core content marketing team, led not by a CCO but by a content executive (typically with a marketing operations manager or writer/editor title), who develops and orchestrates a content strategy across the company.

Content Marketing Works

Let's be clear: Content marketing works. It consists of non-egocentric (i.e., end-user-focused rather than product- or company-focused) content that helps buyers with their jobs and careers, along with the more traditional product-centric content vendors have historically created.

Marketers are seeing the positive impact of their content marketing across the entire buyer's journey, from awareness-building to demand creation and sales enablement. The proof of the business case for content marketing is that 74% of marketers indicate that their company's content marketing investment results in an increase in lead quality and quantity.

After all, marketing automation, account-based marketing, and sales enablement, absent content, are like a car without gas. Content is needed for everything from a website, to email campaigns, to even pay-per-click landing page offers.

If not for content, many of marketing automation's key components cease to function. Drip campaigns come to a halt if there is no content to drip to leads. Lead scoring stops without content for a lead to browse on a site. With no content, many demand generation campaigns come to a halt because there are no enticing offers for lead-capture landing pages.

CMOs understand that high-quality, relevant content is a must-have. Establishing a content strategy is at the top of their priority list. However, though many say they have "a" content strategy, a cohesive, well-documented content strategy continues to elude many organizations—63% of them, according to MarketingProfs and CMI.

And although content marketing works even without a strategy, it works much more effectively with a strategy—and even more so when that strategy is documented.

Who's Going to Lead Content Marketing?

Developing and driving the content strategy that CMOs desire require that an executive be in charge. That organizational need has been spoken about by thought leaders and consultants for years. And having that lead in place is certainly one of the indicators of a high-performing marketing team.

According to Curata research, 42% of companies have an executive of some kind in charge of content marketing today, with that number expected to reach 51% in 2017. (Part of the reason for the lack of CCOs may be that 68% of content marketing teams currently consists of three members or less—a smaller team than executives typically preside over.)

Absent an advocate at the senior-management level, companies under-invest in content marketing, which then ends up being performed in an ad hoc fashion by disparate groups of people in departments or units such as product marketing, social media, demand generation, and public relations. The resulting content, though better than no content at all, is invariably egocentric, inconsistent in messaging, and less effective. That leaves a tremendous amount of opportunity on the table.

Of the companies Curata surveyed, 53% of the content marketing leaders have an executive in charge of content marketing today, versus 32% of the laggards.

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The Chief Content Officer Is Dead; Long Live Content Marketing

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Pawan Deshpande

Pawan Deshpande is the founder and CEO of Curata, a leading provider of content marketing software. He is an accomplished entrepreneur, marketer, and technologist.

LinkedIn: Pawan Deshpande