Marketing today is more complicated than it’s ever been. Most CMOs would agree: 97 percent believe that marketing must do something it’s never done before and two-thirds it’s getting more difficult to keep up with the changes.
This enormous shift in the way we market is evident in just about any of the research you’ll encounter. Marketers are being forced to expand their skillsets, dream up new, interesting projects, and keep up with the changing technologies around them—all while completing and measuring impactful campaigns. It’s no longer enough to be competent in one skill: Today’s marketer needs digital marketing skills, they need to be able to learn MarTech platforms, they need to be able to write on-brand and often witty tweets, and they need to be able to develop reports fit for the C-suite.
But that’s not all.
Increasingly, marketing teams also needs to generate interesting content ideas focused on their prospects, and these ideas need to develop into well-written content pieces. These teams need to successfully navigate the three C’s – Content, Complexity and Compliance. But nearly three-quarters of these marketers are tied up working on more than four projects at once.
Something has to give.
Content, complexity and compliance may be achievable, but individually, an in-house team is going to have a difficult time making it happen. What they should be developing is a high volume of audience-focused content that will get approved quickly and meet tone and brand voice requirements, at the minimum (and much more if you’re working in a regulated industry).
The idea of “content shock” isn’t a myth. Your potential customers are indeed struggling to wade through a sea of average content to find the information that’s actually going to help them solve a problem. Your team needs to be doing what probably seems impossible to them—churning out high-quality content that will serve your brand or business and meet the three C’s.
To develop high-quality content and balance other marketing priorities, you need a dedicated team who understands the industry and how your brand fits in, can recite your brand standards by heart and who understands how to develop quality content quickly and move it through the approval process.
At Scribewise, we advocate the adoption of a “newsroom mentality.” Newsrooms excel at turning ideas into action by triaging what’s important—it’s a daily exercise of strategy in fast forward. Whether you build an internal newsroom like Marriott and other well-funded brands have done, retain an outsourced newsroom like Scribewise, or create some sort of hybrid, you need to be both decisive and efficient. Your team has to have the ability to zoom in on the details, but also to zoom out to keep the big picture in mind. This is what the best newsrooms do. It’s how they uncover and tell compelling stories that reach the audience in the moment.
It isn’t easy. It requires an advanced metabolism, an ability to bring hair trigger reflexes to advanced storytelling skills.
Daunting? Yes. But without this, you’re likely wasting time and money, and doing a disservice your brand.
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