Agency owner Kari Olivier of Jute Creative and digital strategist Jeremy Solly sat down for a short conversation about evergreen content, but wound up in a tactical discussion about the beast that is content marketing. In this first of three mini-episodes, Kari and Jeremy shed light on common issues holding marketers back from success with their content strategy.
Statistics on content marketing from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2017_B2B_Research_FINAL.pdf
and https://kapost.com/b/content-marketing-stats/
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Voiceove: Jutecast, by Jute Creative. We’re curious by nature, and we love to share what we’ve learned.
Kari Olivier: Hi, this is Kari Olivier and you're listening to the Jute Cast. There are a lot of podcasts out there about content strategy, but if you're a marketer who wonders how to put your company's content strategy to work, this is the podcast for you. I'm here today with Jeremy Solly, experienced digital and content strategist, and a good friend. Jeremy sits on the corporate side of the fence, and I'm an agency owner, and we're going to be taking a three-part look at untangling the beast that is content strategy. In this first episode we'll take a look at what stands between companies and their content strategy.
Kari Olivier: Hey, Jeremy.
Jeremy Solly: Hi Kari. How are you?
Kari Olivier: I'm great. How are you?
Jeremy Solly: I'm good. I'm excited to be here today. Thank you.
Kari Olivier: I want to ask you a question, because the stats are pretty startling. 34% of B2B marketers feel their content marketing strategy is very successful. 34%. that's not a very high number. 55% of B2B marketers cite producing enough content as a top three challenge. That's a lot. And 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing. So, when I net it out, it's everybody's using it, half of them think it's their top three need, which is a lot. Challenge, challenge-
Jeremy Solly: Challenge. It's hard to do.
Kari Olivier: Hard to do, and only a third of them think that they're doing it well. I just want to take it back a step or two, and ask you to ... Let's go to the glossary stage. What's your definition of content strategy?
Jeremy Solly: Oh. Well, I'm glad we're starting here, because I think there's probably a lot of, I think, misconceptions, or different definitions, about what's content and what's content strategy. And I've been in places where people talk about content strategy from an umbrella standpoint, which I think that that is a strategic level of like, "Hey, this is our narrative, and no matter what medium we're doing it, or what channel we're doing it in, it's all content, and all ladders up. I think I'm hinting at what I think my answer is. But, I've also seen the other side where it's like some people get tunnel vision around it, and they're like, "Oh, blogs are content, and that's all content is." I think I've had moments where I'm like, "Well, blogs are content, but content is not blogs." You know what I mean? Or social media has content, but content is not social media. Right?
Kari Olivier: Yep, yep.
Jeremy Solly: I think that you actually have to strip away the channel, the medium, the format, and content really has to be, it has a purpose. The content is going to intrigue somebody, going to educate somebody, it's going to move them down a sales funnel of some sort, whether it's B2B or B2C. So, when I think about content marketing, or content strategy, it's content on behalf of a brand that has a purpose to move clients and prospects through this funnel, to help them, to educate them. It can serve multiple different purposes, or can have one very specific purpose. But, at the end of the day, it is helping your business educate people and move them through that funnel, and it's going to happen in a variety of different formats. It's going to happen in a podcast, or on video, or in written word.
Kari Olivier: Right. Makes sense. From your vantage point, where do businesses most often get tripped up with their content strategy, Jeremy?
Jeremy Solly: Sure. I think where I've seen them get tripped up, there's maybe three main areas where it happens. I think ownership is a big one, with who owns what, who's doing what role, who is responsible for what pieces of the content. Not having that clearly defined tends to be an inflection point, for sure. Also, within organizations, the difference between strategy and messaging, right?
Kari Olivier: Oh, yes.
Jeremy Solly: There might be, "This is the message, our brand, our point of view that our brand has, but is that on strategy, or how do we get it to come to the strategy, or how do we get the strategy to incorporate the message?"
Kari Olivier: Or how does your content strategy sit alongside your messaging? Are people conflating the two?
Jeremy Solly: Exactly. There might be compromises that happen in the push and pull between content strategy and messaging. I've definitely seen that happen. I've seen times where a brand might say, "Oh, this is a great content strategy. This'll hook our prospect in and read it." And then you as a brand also have to say, "Well, wait a minute. That might confuse our messaging. And it might confuse-"
Kari Olivier: Right. It's off-brand, or it's-
Jeremy Solly: ... "It's out of our point of view."
Kari Olivier: But it's done deliberately and intentionally from a content strategy POV.
Jeremy Solly: Right. And then at times you may decide as a brand, "If it's not on message, we're not going to do that strategy. We have to pivot a bit." Or, sometimes the content strategy may inform, "Well, maybe it's time to update our messaging too."
Kari Olivier: Right.
Jeremy Solly: And I think the last one is educating and empowering a team. This doesn't come naturally. It's still new. I don't know, content marketing has probably been around long time. I'm not going to put a number to it. 20 years, 10 years, 15, whatever. It's probably been around a lot longer than that. Cave men writing on walls was probably content strategy at some point. But I do think that what does that mean, and making sure that we're all on the same page about what we mean by content strategy. That might be part of the ownership piece, but I think it's more nuanced of when you're putting a team together, and putting content strategy together, or your marketing together. How do you get everybody to the same level of using it in the same way?
Kari Olivier: Alignment. General alignment. I love it.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah. Totally. Kari, those are the areas I see us getting tripped up on content strategy. What are you seeing from the agency side? When you come into a brand, what are the red flags for you, that you know that, "Oh man, this brand's content strategy isn't on track."
Kari Olivier: I see a lot of the same things you're describing in your pillars: the ownership piece, understanding that distinction between messaging and strategy, and then that lack of education. But to bring it in tactically, we are working with companies right now, and I could ask their marketing managers, their marketing directors, the teams that we're working with, what is your company's content strategy? And they'll say, "I don't know." So, Jeremy, that maps to your education and you're empowering. Another very common problem we see on agency side, is that teams, initiatives, and even individual agendas,` are competing with a company's content strategy. They're not supporting it.
Jeremy Solly: Let me add two things onto that. One is, when you're making a content strategy, it's not just the marketing department making it, it's ... The marketing department is tasked with making a content strategy that helps the sales team get more qualified leads. Right?
Kari Olivier: That's right.
Jeremy Solly: The sales team should have a seat at that table in making the content strategy, so then it's-
Kari Olivier: That's right. Increasing it.
Jeremy Solly: ... it's not a mystery.
Kari Olivier: It's not boring.
Jeremy Solly: And then, I want to add one other thing to the educating and empowering teams, is that part of your content marketing is how are you marketing that content internally? Because a lot of the times I see this, and I'm totally bad at this, and I have to constantly remind myself of like, "Okay. Yes. My goal is to make this piece of marketing, and I'm going to put it out on social media, or I'm going to email it out to prospects or consumers," and we're constantly thinking external, and we forget that one of our main audiences is internal, is the 3000 employees we have at our company. How are we letting them know, "Hey, this is about to go out. Hey, we are using this in this way. Hey, we'd you to share this in this way." Right?
Kari Olivier: That's right.
Jeremy Solly: And so we totally forget about how not only the core team that needs to use this piece of content, but everybody at the company who might see it. Right?
Kari Olivier: Right. Yeah. We're counting on our customers to run across our content strategy through social media or via an ad, versus the higher chance that they will talk to one of your employees.
Jeremy Solly: Right. Exactly.
Kari Olivier: Yeah. Exactly. A couple of other things that we see, that there is a content strategy but there are no guard rails put in place in these corporations to ensure that the strategy is executed on strategy, on time, on task. And often, again, this maps to your ownership piece. Too many groups are developing content for the strategy, but they aren't communicating with each other, so it's not being executed efficiently or effectively. You suggested that sales be given a seat at the table. I absolutely agree. It would be great if there were a a good old-fashioned editorial meeting being held, where there's a seat at the table for everyone who could benefit from fully understanding a company's content strategy and having a say and helping to execute it. That would be a win. Including the agencies.
Kari Olivier: This is all great. I mean, we've identified a lot of the really common problems that we're seeing in companies around the institutionalization, if you will, of content strategy. But I think the question is, for me, are we all just learning how to really utilize and understand content strategy? For example, we've been trained for years to utilize and understand messaging pillars, or messaging frameworks, or even brand guidelines. Are we just a few steps behind on content strategy, and is that why we're still a little wild, wild West about it?
Jeremy Solly: You know, I think there's some truth to that, for sure. I think that we have a glut of content, and content marketing, out there, but we don't have is as much discipline and rigor around content strategy, the way that we've created discipline and rigor around messaging frameworks and brand frameworks. And so, I think the opportunity here is for brands and agencies work together and actually develop content strategy and content frameworks that can be applied with that same discipline as we have in the past over messaging and brand framework.
Kari Olivier: Yeah. It's great. It's great. I think it's coming. I think it's necessary-
Jeremy Solly: I think so too.
Kari Olivier: Develop a content strategy, develop a content strategy framework, guidelines, socialize it across your agencies and across your marketing team. Voila.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah. The hard part of that is leaving enough flexibility for the channels as they continue to evolve and develop, but having the discipline and rigor that sets your brand on its true north, and that's what a framework is, right?
Kari Olivier: Yep. So, yeah, exactly.
Jeremy Solly: Even this, to me, is a huge opportunity for agencies, because I think, even brands, we get too siloed and blinded into what our branding is, or whatever, that it's hard for us to see what a content strategy framework would look like. And so I think that that's a huge opportunity to lean on a partner that can be an objective outsider looking in, and helping to develop that content framework. Right?
Kari Olivier: Yep. I totally agree. I think agencies, at their highest and best, are always advocating for their client's audiences. And in this content strategy arena, it's just a brilliant place for agencies to hold their clients just really accountable for what matters to their audiences. Absolutely.
Jeremy Solly: There's a ton of work to do in this space [crosstalk 00:00:11:41].
Kari Olivier: For sure.
Jeremy Solly: I think every brand can admit to that, and it might be every agency's opportunity to help level up those brands. Right?
Kari Olivier: Yep.
Jeremy Solly: Now, obviously the brand have a relationship with you, to trust enough, and you have to have enough trust so that you can tell them when they're, say, "Hey, that's horse shit. Whatever you're saying right now, our agency has come to you with this work, and with this history, and this metrics, and that's wrong." You got to be able to have that kind of a healthy and constructive pushback and criticism, that you can work together to get to [crosstalk 00:12:16]-
Kari Olivier: You're saying you have to know your client well enough, your client has to trust you as your agency, you have to know your client's brand, to be able to call them out on it, and hold them accountable for-
Jeremy Solly: Because I think the problem we've hit internally at brands, is that there's politics at play, there are executives at play, and there's sometimes too much of drinking your own Kool Aid-
Kari Olivier: Yeah, people talking to yourself.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah. You're talking to yourself, and you're like, "Oh yeah. Let's rah, rah, rah. Let's say that content. Let's do that content thing, because we all love it." Cool. The 300 people at your company love it, and everybody outside doesn't give a shit. And it's being able to really take a step back and say, "What kind of content is going to work for our consumers, our prospects, that is aligned to our brand and our brand values?" And just constantly calibrating back to that, and being able to say no to the shiny objects, and being able to say no to, "Hey, this opportunity fell in our lap. Let's just spin this up real quick." And it's like, "Whoa. Does that really make sense? Is it aligned with our content strategy?"
Jeremy Solly: I think every marketer has seen it, where, "Well, executive so-and-so said do this. And so I guess we're going to do that today, even though it's totally out of left field, and then it wasn't on our content plan. It wasn't on any of our marketing strategy plans, but I guess we're doing it today, right?"
Kari Olivier: Right.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah. And you do a certain amount of that, and you might justify it within a, "Well, this might fit under this content strategy pillar." But I do think that that's where discipline comes in around content strategy.
Kari Olivier: Yes. To that end, we've got all kinds of time-worn catchphrases. So, think about if you've got a well-defined brand, visual brand, for a known company. You've got brand standards that are built out, you hand them out to everybody that's going to create anything, any designer that's going to sit at a Mac and create anything for your brand, you're, "Here's our brand guidelines.' You've usually got a brand team that's charged with maintaining the integrity of your brand. You've got history, we've got precedents set around maintaining a brand. Same with brand frameworks, and messaging, and positioning. And I think now that content has become such a important force for brands, don't we need that same rigor around content strategy?
Jeremy Solly: Yeah.
Kari Olivier: Because it feels that's the third leg of the stool.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah, totally. That is absolutely the third leg of the stool, and there's definitely some concrete things that we as brands, as agencies, can come together around these strategies to bring that rigor and discipline to the content.
Kari Olivier: Sure. But, before we get into that, we're going to need some wine.
Jeremy Solly: Sounds good.
Kari Olivier: This is Kari Olivier. Thanks for listening.
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