building a marketing operations program

with contributions from Aha Media, LLC Global Marketing Operations

Locally Optimized. Globally Consistent.

A Publication of Lionbridge

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Building a Marketing Operations Program

Introduction

Conclusion

Overview

About the Authors

Governance

Strategy

Create

Analyze

Plan

The Content Lifecycle

Publish and Promote

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The demands on a marketing organization are rapidly changing. The digital marketing era of today is complex and dynamic. There are many channels that require investment and continuous attention. With frictionless communication, trends happen faster and are shorter lived. Without continuous attention, your digital presence decays rapidly.

Browsing through corporate websites, it is clear few companies have adapted to effectively manage their digital marketing operations. Branding and messaging are inconsistent, mobile device support is non-existent, and aborted initiatives, such as corporate blogs and social pages, linger as embarrassing reminders of poor follow-through. The problem is that most organizations still see digital marketing as a series of projects: a web redesign, setting up a blog, publishing a whitepaper. They can mobilize resources to complete these projects, but cannot sustain the level of effort necessary to keep a program going. And without that effort, these marketing assets become liabilities.

If you want success in digital marketing, your organization needs to operate like a publisher by identifying high value audiences and operationalizing processes to serve them. This means delivering the right content in the right format and getting irrelevant/outdated content out of the way. Known as marketing operations, there is a field whose purpose is to keep content initiatives performing after launch. Marketing operations encompasses a wide array of skills and activities that stand in between the development of a content asset and its consumption by an audience. This includes post-production for target channels, tagging for targeting, search engine optimization, localization, instrumentation for analytics and performance measurement.

Our previous whitepaper, Three First Steps for Operationalizing your Content Marketing Strategy, introduced the concept of marketing operations and recommended some preparatory steps to building a team. This whitepaper will outline the details of how a marketing operations group works.

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Operational Model OverviewAt a high level, a marketing operations team is organized around a content lifecycle; it is guided by strategy and governed for consistency and compliance. You can think of marketing operations as the coordination of purpose, velocity and control. If marketing operations were a road trip, strategy would be the itinerary, governance would be the driver and the content lifecycle would be the car.

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Governance – Know the LimitWhen building the operational capacity of your marketing organization, the first things to consider are standards and constraints. Inconsistencies and poor quality control are more visible when your output increases. Potential for waste grows if priorities aren’t properly set. Most organizations have guidelines and other constraints to ensure consistency, quality and regulatory compliance – few fully operationalize them. Examples of constraints include:

Style GuidesStyle guides help to ensure a cohesive user experience across channels and provide direction on language and branding imagery use, as well as voice and tone. Complying with a style guide strengthens the relationship between the message and brand.

BudgetOrganizations with limited budgets need to have realistic expectations and accept the challenge of maximizing cost-effectiveness. Prioritization will ensure that important initiatives are supported before new ideas are considered.

Regulatory ComplianceCompanies in highly regulated industries need to accommodate increased scrutiny for compliance. Everything published may require legal review and could be obligated to support several official languages. If that is the case, plan for the additional cost of translation when publishing.

Internal PoliciesSocial media policies may restrict what can be done on these networks. Maintaining a Facebook page could be difficult if access is prohibited, unless exceptions are made on your network.

Collectively, adhering to these rules is called “governance” and should be a pervasive element in all phases of an operational model. Companies with solid governance look more professional and consistent and provide a consistent user experience across all channels.

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Strategy – Set your SitesA content marketing strategy addresses fundamental questions about who you are trying to reach and how you will connect with them. This helps you decide what kind of content to produce, the languages required and the distribution channels and formats.

Your content marketing strategy must support your organizational goals, such as building brand awareness, facilitating the sales process with product information, building customer loyalty, or reducing support costs. All of these goals can be achieved with effective use of content. Once your goals are in place, the next step is to figure out what audiences will help you achieve them.

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Identify your Audiences Your audience is the reason businesses create content. Content serves, informs and influences people important to your business; and is capable of educating and motivating them to take action. The more your company understands its audience, the better the content will be.

While a firm can’t personally meet every single member of its audience, it can build models of important segments. These models, called “personas,” are fictitious characters that represent a particular audience member a company aims to target. It’s unnecessary to write a biography for each persona, but it’s helpful to empathize with them and look at your content through their eyes. This includes understanding how they make decisions, the information they are looking for and what formats are most accessible for them. Would they find an email newsletter useful, or do they already see their inbox as overwhelming?

Hit your TargetsOnce you understand your audience, the next step is to develop a strategy for reaching them. This should be organized along three dimensions: the target audience segments (as illustrated by your personas), the topic (what your business wants to say), and the format (blog posts, microsites, marketing emails, videos, webinars). An effective content marketing strategy will support audience segments in all phases of the buying and customer lifecycle. Managing Content Marketing by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi outlines a great approach to targeting personas with content.

This can feel intimidating when considering the devices and networks today’s consumer is accustomed to. Base priorities on your understanding of the audience and the contexts they are likely to favor. By clearly defining and prioritizing your personas and understanding how they access and consume content, you have won half the battle.

Callout: Who is InvolvedWhen developing a content marketing strategy, you should involve two types of stakeholders: business owners who can represent the business strategy and “customer advocates” who have the closest connection with the various audiences. Customer advocates are usually people who work in various sales and support groups and regularly interface with customers.

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The Content LifecycleConstraints and strategy set the context, but execution is the engine. Many companies have a brilliant content marketing strategy languishing in PowerPoint or staining whiteboards, but few are executing well. Execution is a process that requires sustained commitment and continual learning.

The process involves four phases: plan, create, publish and promote, and analyze. It is iterative. Some organizations use the word “campaign” for an iteration, others borrow the agile software development term “sprint.” The advantage of working this way is that you focus on a set of net term objectives and are more conscious of their results. At the conclusion of each cycle, the learning is applied to the next iteration.

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Plan

The plan phase is when you decide what elements of your content marketing strategy to work on next and sort out the execution detail. Planning encompasses all the groundwork for deciding what types of content to produce in the current publishing cycle, who will create them and when. The planning process typically has four inputs:

Your overall content marketing strategy, including your target audience segments and how you intend to serve them.

Business intelligence gained from earlier iterations through the execution lifecycle.

Hypotheses that you want to test to further refine your strategy.

Your constraints such as budget, regulatory compliance, and internal policies.

Out of this process should come an editorial calendar of content projects. Some of these projects may be assigned to internal resources and others may be outsourced to design agencies. The plan should align with events in the business calendar (product launches, external events, etc.), and every project has a committed owner who has the time, resources and skills to complete it.

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Plan

New content initiatives, such as like a new blog or a Facebook page, should consider the viability of a long term commitment, how to measure the results of the initiative, the limit of effort you will put into promoting the initiative and how to adjust or wind it down if the base assumptions were flawed. For example, if you are creating a CEO blog, you might consider a contingency of turning posts into other types of assets if the blog doesn’t work out. It’s good to experiment, just have a plan to adapt experiments into programs that can be maintained or discretely eliminated.

Callout: Who is InvolvedYour planning process should include business owners who can represent strategic priorities and deadlines and leads for the create, publish and promote, and analyze phases described below.

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Create

Out of this process should come an editorial calendar of content projects. Some of these projects may be assigned to internal resources and others may be outsourced to design agencies. The plan should align with events in the business calendar (product launches, external events, etc.), and every project has a committed owner who has the time, resources and skills to complete it.

New content initiatives, such as like a new blog or a Facebook page, should consider the viability of a long term commitment, how to measure the results of the initiative, the limit of effort you will put into promoting the initiative and how to adjust or wind it down if the base assumptions were flawed. For example, if you are creating a CEO blog, you might consider a contingency of turning posts into other types of assets if the blog doesn’t work out. It’s good to experiment, just have a plan to adapt experiments into programs that can be maintained or discretely eliminated.

Callout: Who is Involved

Your planning process should include business owners who can represent strategic priorities and deadlines and leads for the create, publish and promote, and analyze phases described below.

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Publish and Promote

Up until publication, your brilliant content has the impact of a tree falling in an empty forest: It is silent. Effective publishing is more than making content available, it is getting the content in front of audiences where it can make a difference. We bundle publish and promote together because they happen concurrently and are so interrelated. Unlike the old days of broadcast publishing, content is now a medium of a bi-directional conversation. To keep the conversation going, you need to respond to your audience and encourage a healthy dialogue.

Publishing is more than data entry into social networks and content management, email and advertising systems (although that alone can be challenging). Effective publishing maximizes the reach of your content by improving search engine result placement and increasing the likelihood of sharing.

There are five areas to consider when you publish and promote your content:

Metadata and keyword optimization to ensure content is rich with terms a customer uses to search. If you are publishing in multiple markets, you need to optimize differently: thismeans localizing text and adjusting for the search engines most popular in that area. Personalization logic also relies on metadata. If you get your metadata right, your sophisticated publishing system will be able to achieve its desired effect of getting the right content to the right customers.

Adapting and testing on your target platforms (different browsers you support, mobile vs. tablet vs. full experience). You should have a list of platforms that you want to actively support. For each of these platforms, make sure that your content is compelling and useful and all of the interactive functionality is operational.

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On- and off-site promotion. This includes cross-linking and featuring content on landing pages. If your publishing platform supports it, promotion can involve configuring personalization or multivariate testing functionality. Gain the biggest impact from offsite promotion on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Storify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and any other sites that your audience segments use. Pay special attention to niche networks like forums dedicated to your industry.

Shareability. Make sure your content can be easily shared and looks good when people do so. This includes having content that is directly accessible through a URL and making it accessible to anonymous users (at least a teaser page if you want to collect leads). Also be aware that sharing sites like Facebook and Google+ can grab an image and description when people share a link. Program the link so the image and description that appear help improve click through rates.

Instrumentation. Tag your content and create links to track content consumption and behavior. For every piece of content, revisit the goals and what outcome you desire. Then apply the appropriate analytics codes and configure your analytics package to measure the results.

While these activities are not as glamorous as the creative process, they are arguably just as important. Your content could be brilliant and compelling but it will have no impact until it is in front of your target audiences.

After the content is live, the conversation starts. There is no “set it and forget it” when it comes to content. If you want your audience to engage with your content, you need to stay engaged as well. If you see audiences embracing your content, encourage them by recommending related content. If you see signs of rejection, you need to adjust. Look for signs that the content is driving desired behaviors like conversion to higher levels of engagement.

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Callout: Who is InvolvedTo execute the Publish and Promote phase, you need people who are power users on your publishing systems (your web content management system, your email management system, etc.). Most companies are woefully understaffed in this area. No matter how “user-friendly” these systems are, occasional users will not reliably do a thorough job with metadata entry and multiple platform testing. They will also not effectively use advanced features that your platforms support. Publishing often requires some graphics skills for post-production work like turning Photoshop mockups into search engine friendly HTML that fits in your CMS templates or scaling and cropping images.

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Analyze

Throughout the publish and promote phase, you should have been collecting data. You might have made some intermediate observations and reacted accordingly, but the analysis phase is when you really make sense of the data you collected. Most companies do not go beyond the superficial level of watching trend lines of page views and unique visitors. The companies who go deeper have a tremendous advantage of knowing what is working and why. Raw traffic doesn’t tell you much because there is a huge difference between converting a qualified customer and a general page impression generated by a curiosity visit.

Advanced features like traffic sources and entry pages will tell you how visitors found you. Configuring funnels and goals will tell you how effective individual pieces of content are. Armed with this information, you can learn what attributes make content assets compelling to your audience. These attributes could be anything from the topic of the content, to the wording, to the use of imagery and layout, to your channels. Most importantly, this information will help you increase the accuracy of your personas and help you refine your content marketing strategy.

Callout: Who is InvolvedYou don’t have to be a quantitative analyst to get more out of your analytics package, but it is worth your while to get training and read up on its advanced features. Consider bringing in an analytics expert that can help you set up your system and develop a program that you can follow.

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While having a good marketing strategy is important, you will not get the results you seek without strong execution. Having the right content will not achieve your overall business goals without publishing and promotion to put it in front of the right audience. Developing good content requires knowing the audience on individual (anecdotal) and quantitative (statistical) levels. Publishing and analysis is hard work requiring a committed team and effort.

Successful marketing organizations have operational capabilities that are strategy driven and well governed. They are realistic about constraints, know what programs are working and stick with them. They have an iterative publishing cycle that is tuned to continuous improvement. Through sustained effort, these high performing marketing teams have a clear understanding of how to engage their target audience.

Get in touchTo learn how Lionbridge can help optimize your content and marketing operations, visit us online at

www.globalmarketingops.com

or, contact us. C

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Seth Gottlieb has 15 years of experience using, implementing, and reviewing content technologies. As an integrator and consultant, he has helped businesses large and small improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their content management and publishing. As an industry analyst, Seth has earned a reputation for integrity, technical knowledge, and writing ability for his reports on content technologies.

Seth manages solutions for Global Marketing Operations at Lionbridge Technologies. Lionbridge supports customers at every stage of the Global Customer Lifecycle, helping them raise their online search profile, engage their global customers with locally-relevant content, and translate and test their products and applications.

Ahava R. Leibtag has more than 15 years of experience in writing, messaging and marketing. Her unique specialty is creating marketing campaigns designed to reach your end-user, no matter how intricate your subject matter.

Ahava is the Principal and owner of Aha Media Group, LLC, a full service Web consulting firm that has been in operation since October 2005. Clients include Johns Hopkins Medicine, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Washington Cancer Institute, Georgetown University Hospital, Franklin Square Hospital Center and Montgomery General Hospital.

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