Nothing good ever came easy. Well, maybe sometimes, but as a general rule, we have to work hard for the results we want to see. In terms of content marketing, this is particularly true. The process of consistently publishing knock-out content that hits all your defined KPIs and brings in real results for your organization is a challenging one. Coordinating these efforts across multiple departments and brands presents perhaps the biggest challenge of all.
New research released by the Content Marketing Institute in February 2019 confirms this. Their Enterprise Content Marketing Report tells us that 74% of enterprise marketers find it a struggle to effectively coordinate content management and marketing efforts across multiple departments and brands. This results in a disjointed content marketing program, one that is reactive and incoherent rather than harmonious and effective.
So, how do you avoid this pitfall and why exactly does it matter anyway? Why is it so important that you coordinate your efforts across your different departments and brands? Let’s start by digging into 4 reasons why coordination is so important.
Why Coordination is Key to Enterprise Content Marketing Success
1. Coordination Builds Association Through a Consistent Voice
Your audience needs to know who you are, what you offer, and how your products and services will benefit them. This can get confusing real quick when your audience is getting hit with content in multiple channels with disparate messaging. Instead, you need to be consistent in your messaging, building up a solid brand association across your entire organization.
Crafting this kind of unity and harmonizing your content and editorial calendar pays dividends in the long run as customers and prospects recognize exactly where your products and services fit into their lives and understand the different problems that can be overcome by using your offerings. This must stem from your content, one of the key points of communication between your brand and its audience.
2. Coordination Maximizes Content Efficiency
Efficiency is a critical concern in every aspect of your business. If siloed teams are working independently towards a common goal, there’s a good chance that efforts are being duplicated and wheels are being reinvented regularly. The larger the company, the more waste there tends to be.
Though many enterprise-level businesses may have the resources required to run numerous content programs across different departments and brands, this does not mean that they should.
By harmonizing your content calendar and your content planning process, enterprise businesses can recognize opportunities for sharing assets, or repurposing assets that other teams have created in the past.
Content automation can also help to ensure that integrated campaigns are properly coordinated across different departments. You can’t afford to expend resources twice over, so make sure that all departments understand what they need to be doing and when they need to do it.
3. Coordination Optimizes the Customer Journey
Most enterprise content marketing initiatives are designed to encourage prospects to move through the sales funnel, with the end goal of securing a purchase. If your content is consistent across your whole organization, the customer’s journey should be a smooth experience.
For example, if a prospect has connected with one department in search of a particular service, they may be interested in other auxiliary services provided by other departments. The content they consume may lead to that initial purchase, but a lack of coordination between departments can quickly divert that customer to a dead end, and a missed opportunity for you.
By unifying your efforts via a coordinated strategy and content automation technology, you can direct your customer through to other pieces of content and to other products and services. The result is a hot lead landing in your other departments or on your other brand pages, an SEO boost thanks to the internal clickthroughs, and an optimized transaction value from this particular customer.
4. Coordination Presents Opportunities
We all know that the whole point of marketing is to get your message in front of the right audience, in the right channel, at the right time. Coordination between teams increases those odds by uncovering opportunities for integrated campaigns.
Let’s say you’re getting ready to launch a new product or service. Through coordination with your events team, you learn that there’s a conference coming up that would be perfect for promoting the launch. You should now probably get your PR, Email Marketing and Social teams involved to get the media kit together, and all the content assets assembled to drive buzz during the event.
The same applies if there is a sudden development in your industry and you need to quickly and efficiently provide your audience with the details. When you have coordinated your efforts, you can comprehensively cover this development with minimum hassle.
Giving your audience exactly what they want, when they want it, should be your priority at every turn.
How Do You Create a Coordinated Environment?
Communicate Effectively Through Regular Meetings with Clear Outcomes
No coordination effort ever succeeded without the proper communication beforehand and throughout. This is especially true when we consider enterprise level businesses, many of which will have numerous departments and maybe even numerous brands working together within the same structure.
With this in mind, step one is to communicate the benefits of improving coordination (HINT: forward this post to everyone) so all departments understand the importance and potential.
Then there may be some required shift to ongoing meeting schedules to make sure stakeholders from different departments are forced to talk on a regular basis. During meetings, gather feedback on recent successes and plan the next steps of coordination and content production. Of course, make sure the outcomes and aims are clearly communicated so everyone knows exactly what is going on at all times.
Deploy Cross-department Communication Structures
Support this culture of communication with the necessary hardware and software. This means providing video conferencing solutions for communication between departments, as well as instant messaging, shared idea repositories, shared content planning tools, cloud document sharing, and collaborative editing tools to foster efficient production and content workflows.
Eliminate Siloing
Data siloing is the bane of any unified content strategy. Aim to share all relevant data between departments at all times, working to eliminate siloing and ensuring full transparency across the organization. The result is an environment that is far more conducive to creating consistent and unified content.
This is not a challenge that is easily overcome. Instead, you need to make sure that all departments are working on this on an ongoing basis, remaining vigilant of siloing and data bottlenecks at every turn.
Unify Analytics and Consider the Customer Journey
All of the above must be supported by the right content analytics strategies. In order to properly unify your enterprise content marketing endeavors, you need to make sure your analytic approaches are unified too. This means providing consistent access to analytics dashboards or platforms across the whole organization.
Don’t forget to apply this to the customer journey. Analytics provides cold data. It is up to you to make sure that this data is applied in a way that actively benefits the user of the content.
To learn more about coordinating content marketing across your whole enterprise, get in touch with the DivvyHQ team today.