Or, we've got the managing editors themselves. Now, these are people who can hold people to task. These are the people who manage the properties themselves, the online media product. These are usually people with journalism backgrounds who understand the project management, the workflow, and the capabilities that are needed to actually stand up a content marketing property. We have an amazing one in Michele Lin who is our VP of content, who manages all of the things related to our blog. 

It has her team really working to make sure that our content sings in managing all the different content contributors who actually contribute to our blog. Also, we have content producers-- the people who make it beautiful. Now in many cases, this might be an outsourced agency for you. It may be an in-house team. It may be some combination of the above. But a producer who can actually make and align things that are beautiful-- the white paper, the infographics, the video, the photography. Then we've got chief listening officers. We think this is an important piece of a content marketing team. 

And quite frankly, we're starting to see it more in media companies. Not only someone who can actually manage the social channels, but who can manage the strategy of the emerging social channels. In other words, what should we be doing on WhatsApp or what should we be doing on Snapchat or Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, and developing partnerships, strategies, and abilities for us to manage the social conversation in a way that helps direct content throughout the enterprise. I like to think of these folks as the air traffic controllers. 

They're not necessarily answering the question, but they're making sure that the conversation or the question gets directed to the right part of the organization. And then finally, and you'll see that we've disconnected this piece, actually, is the content creators themselves. Because these may be C level people, they may be managing people, they may be influencers, they may be freelancers, they may be journalists. These are the people that are creating the raw content that flows into our organization and actually helps us develop a core strategy for content production, helping us reduce the amount of content we're creating and reuse it, repackage it, re- synthesize it in a meaningful way. 

So where do we start with this? Find those pockets of excellence because those people will be your key people who can fill some of these roles. 

Somebody is doing this well in your company already. Maybe somebody is a great social person, maybe somebody is great with the email newsletter. Find these pockets of excellence and build upon them in your roles. And build one house, one street, one neighborhood at a time. Ultimately this group, this team, has a remit. And it's very focused. 

Content creation management-- creating the media properties, the thematically-aligned collection of assets that we want to create as a portfolio of what we're doing in content marketing.

The other is how we're going to create a function for content, a strategy for content. Put simply, it's not a campaign. It's a process that will ultimately build content products. That is what a content marketing strategy is-- a process that helps us build content-owned media products that drive multiple lines of value for the business. 

And once we've got that function defined, which we'll start to do today, is we're going to start doing things like writing the roles and responsibilities, making those roles and responsibilities real in the organization, formalize them. Writers that write will do so as part of their job. 

Content creators who create, editors who edit, developers who develop will do so as part of their job of creating these content and marketing-oriented products. It has to be a recognized strategy. It has to be a documented strategy. It has to be something that the business does as part of its operation. Figure out those official content responsibilities. 

Make a case for the liaison to the execution of whatever it's going to be. Make a governing body. Have your boss understand that what we're building here is a function, not just a project.

So let me give you a couple of examples of this. So we have many, many frameworks that we've seen in all of our histories at the Content Marketing Institute. And a few of them have weaknesses, strengths, and pros and cons. And so we'll go through a few of them here. 

So a center of excellence framework. When we look at this, it's a central area. So this is probably the least common these days, but maybe the most popular way of thinking about a content marketing group. Think of this as the content marketing department where there's going to be a fully realized function of content marketing in the business. So the strengths of this? 

You have a high degree of control. You've got people in there who focus on creating these content marketing properties, who focus on content marketing, who focus on aligning with the business. And it's very, very clear missions and very, very clear responsibilities. Now the weaknesses here are we've got to make sure that this doesn't yet become another silo, that it's not disconnected from the other marketing functions. 

And quite frankly, this becomes very hard to scale. We can't really scale it without actually building more teams, more processes, et cetera. But it can be very, very effective if you're looking to centralize the function of content marketing in an enterprise.

Or, another one is what we call the rebel framework. The rebel framework is how many organizations start with content marketing because each line of business or each function-- PR brand, demand, generation, et cetera-- basically launches their own content marketing initiative and works in their own line of business, in their own silo, to create content marketing strategies. This in many ways can be the best way to start because in many businesses it's the only way to start. 

If we're trying to get a committee together, if we try to get all these people together, it's just not going to work. So what happens is when we start processing this and creating a function over this, it becomes loosely siloed and connected groups that are working together on best practices. So the strengths of this start are it can be entrepreneurial in nature. 

It can be focused on brand-oriented or product-oriented groups like a multi-brand, like a P&G or a Unilever, something like this. Quite frankly, it can be a very great way of operating because the audiences don't overlap that much. But the weaknesses are plentiful in this. 

There's no leverage across these silos. There's no integration and no institutional learning here, no sharing. So each one fails or succeeds in its own silo. And the organization, the enterprise, doesn't benefit from the knowledge there. And so our favorite, the way that we'd love to see our organizations begin to develop, is what we call the integrated and/or hybrid network where content marketing as a process becomes an integrated function into the marketing strategy more broadly. 

And so where we're seeing that all sorts of integrations are happening, right. Lots of ears to the ground. We can take on a centralized process for some services, but leave the lines of businesses to create subject matter expertise or content for their particular line of business where necessary. Now the weaknesses here-- they're harder to build. 

There's a lot of politics here. Knowing where best practices end and begin, and knowing where content creators end and begin, and limiting the size so that it yet also doesn't become a centralized and/or become its own silo is really, really difficult here. 

Which one of these is right for you? That's for you to determine. But this is the key-- trying to figure out what we're building a business case here for is the function. Because these roles will turn into actual responsibilities. So when we see the responsibilities of content marketing really, really working, we see a few roles. One is the chief content officer. Now despite the title of this, this doesn't necessarily mean a VP or director or even a senior-level manager. 

And some of the companies we've seen, the chief content officer can be a manager who comes from publishing, maybe who comes with editing skills. But this is the person who can determine and synthesize all the sort of stories that are being mined out of the organization into something that is meaningful for the audience, into something. So they're usually a great project manager, usually a visionary, usually somebody who can manage all the different personalities and lead the strategy of content marketing more broadly.

What I want to talk about is the content marketing perspective. Because in many ways, one of the things that hold us back from creating a strategic function of content marketing-- not only just the collateral that we're creating to support direct marketing with a little less logo-- but quite frankly, 

we start with, what is it we are trying to say. And guess how much the customer values what we are trying to say? Not at all. 

They don't care what we have to say. They care what they care about. They care what values to them. And so if we can fundamentally shift the pattern of marketing, and content marketing specifically, to look at what valuable customer experience are we trying to create with our content and what value are we trying to deliver to the customer, and then figure out, working backward, if we're the ones that should be delivering that to them and how we might deliver it. We can always decide that we are not the right ones. That it doesn't match our brand alignment. 

That it doesn't match our product. That it doesn't match what we're trying to say to the world. But we can't start from, what are we trying to say to the world and figure out how to retrofit that into a message that customers will resonate with. That is a fundamental change in the way that we create content and the way that we think about content. So I'm hoping you'll take that forward as we start to think about it. Because I know we feel the pressure. Just like Steve felt the pressure. 

Just like we all feel the pressure and the frustration of where it is we are with marketing and where we are with trying to deliver content. Content marketing can break that pattern, just even the beginning stages of it. We are not creating a content strategy for business. We are creating a business strategy for content. The subtle difference there is very important.

We are creating a media platform. We are creating a product, something that will provide multiple lines of value to the business. Some of them will be direct marketing, campaign-related value. Many of them, quite frankly, will be business values that supersede or transcend marketing. 

So where shall we begin? How should we even begin to start to think about this, this function, this strategic approach to content marketing? Well, as I like to say, one of the best places to start is our sales process and where does it hurt the most. Where does it hurt the most in our business right now? Or for this particular line of business or for this particular product or this brand that we're trying to create? What is it that actually hurts the most? 

One of the favorite things I like to do is I'll draw the funnel-- the idealized funnel, that is-- with awareness and consideration and customer, and then upsell, cross-sell, loyalty, and advocate at the bottom. It's like, where does it hurt the most right now? Are we really trying to get the awareness of this new business or this new product? 

Are we really needing to arm our sales guys with better leads and better content so that they can actually nurture those leads because many of them are falling out? Are we actually trying to develop more loyalty or cross seller or upsell? 

Or are we trying to get people to advocate on behalf of our brand? Where does it hurt the most? And then ask ourselves, and take an honest assessment, our we actually starting from scratch, or are we actually trying to improve something that's already working? In many cases, we are already doing something. We have an email newsletter. We have a social program. 

We have a thought leadership thing. We're trying to develop better collateral for direct marketing. But quite frankly, it's kind of content in marketing, not really content marketing. It prints out on white paper when we print out that white paper, but it's not really very thought- leader if we were completely honest. It has a little less logo, but it's not really developing that emotional story. So is it content in marketing? Or is it actually good, because we may be producing some wonderful stuff? 

And we just need to figure out how to thematically align it so that it starts building toward a subscribed audience. Are we starting from scratch? Or are we actually doing something and look for that weakest point as an area of priority that we're trying to look at. That's the place to start. And then from there, establish a vision, not an entry campaign. 

We're not talking about marketing campaigns, anymore. We're establishing an entry vision for the thing that we want to build that will solve that part of the customer's journey, add value to their lives, and add value to the business. And the key thing to remember here is facts don't change beliefs. You can go to Content Marketing World. You can attend one of our masterclasses. 

You can view all of the classes in this particular online university. And you'll come away with the same thing. All these facts, if you put them into a PowerPoint presentation, are not going to change the beliefs of your boss. They're not going to change the beliefs. You have to go appeal to their emotions. You are going to have to appeal to their beliefs that this is going to actually work. How do we do that? 

Maybe it's a pilot program. Maybe you beg forgiveness rather than permission. There are multiple ways to get there, but you're building a vision for the future, not an entry campaign, not a marketing campaign. And the business case is really only one of two questions we're going to have to answer here.

Our challenge, then, becomes how do we break the pattern. How do we write the change? In the introduction to this class, I asked you to write something on a Post-it note that says what is the one change you must make. I'm sure it's one of the many patterns that must change. But that might be our most important one. That is how we can create the content-- how can we change first and break the patterns of marketing and creating content. That is the function.

So I'm going to play the video here in a minute. And this video is Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs was a really interesting guy and, of course, a visionary in Apple. And this is a really interesting video because it takes place in 1997. And I think it's just a perfect metaphor for where we are in marketing today. Because in 1997, as many you know, many of you who saw the movie, and certainly many of you who have seen the documentaries and all the things about Steve Jobs, Steve was in a world of hurt. He had just come back from his sort of exile for seven years at Apple. 

And he's now been coming back as the consultant and ultimately would be the new CEO of the company, again. Now, in this video that I'm going to play for you, he's not even CEO yet. 

He's still a consultant with the company. But he's decided that he wants to come to the Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997 and basically do a Reddit-style ask me anything. And so all of these developers spend the next 45 minutes peppering him with questions about his future vision for Apple. He's just about to get a question here that I think is the perfect metaphor for marketing. 

We're going to play the video now. Here it comes. It's sad and clear that on several accounts you've discussed, you don't know what you're talking about. I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say, Java, in any of its incarnations, addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc. And when you're finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years? You know. You can please some of the people some of the time. 

But one of the hardest things, when you're trying to affect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas. I'm sure that there are some things OpenDoc does-- probably even more than I'm not familiar with-- that nothing else out there does. And I'm sure that you can make some demos, maybe a small commercial app that demonstrates those things. 

The hardest thing is how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that's going to allow you to sell $8 billion, $10 billion of product a year. And one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. 

You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I've got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it's the case. And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer, where can we take the customer. 

Not starting with, let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that. And I think that's the right path to take. I remember with the LaserWriter. We built the worlds first small-- Isn't that a great video? 

I mean, here's why I like that video so much and what Steve said there. There's a couple of things at play. The first is, how we actually even look at marketing more broadly, where we tend to look at things like, here's the product we want to sell into the marketplace. And how are we going to explain it in ever clever ways to convince people that it's the right product, without even discovering whether or not something that they need or not. That's a different story and for a different class.

Eduardo Conrado, who was kind enough and is the chief innovation officer at Motorola Solutions and wrote the book-- to Carla and my book, Experiences-- the Seventh Era of Marketing, said this really well. He did a really interesting thing. He said, if you're able to invest in systems of engagement, IT technology then becomes a differentiation in the marketplace. It's a really interesting point, right.

And what he did was he combined those two things. He said, sales, marketing, IT, you're actually all in the business of doing one thing-- creating a better customer experience. So guess what, you're all one department now. You're in the customer experience department. 

And as the chief innovation officer, he runs all of that. And so it unifies those groups together into a function that focuses on creating better customer experiences. Or how about Stephen Quinn, who is now the former CMO of Walmart who had created, as he said, our customers need innovation. And they need a customer focus. And so we have to focus on that. 

As he says his job is to protect the next from the now. And what he meant by that was he said he had the 70/20/10 split of investment of time, where he said 70% of the stuff we do is focused on today. 20% of the stuff we do is focused on tomorrow. And 10% of the stuff we do, the bandwidth, the hours that we spend, is focused on the future. And that's a really important thing as we start to think about how are we spending our time. 

From the way I see most marketing departments these days, 100% of our time is spent on yesterday. It's already late by the time it fits onto our desk-- that blog post, that white paper. We're already late with the social media thing. We have to get it out. We can't focus on tomorrow. We can't focus on the future. We can't event focus on making it great because it's already late. 

And that's what needs to change in the process. As Beth Comstock, who is now the vice-chairman of GE-- the vice-chair of GE-- as she said, which is so important, innovation is often deprecated at the expense of what is predictable. And we don't have to. 

Creativity doesn't have to be something that we put down. It is something we don't have to pit against the strategy of the business. And that's an important thing when we start thinking about this new thing called content marketing and how we make it an effective function in the business. 

We have to require the mental and physical space to be able to shape and smash these things to smithereens so that we can create new things. But here's the thing. 

We are still stuck in these old patterns. We still focus on reach and frequency as sort of the main drivers of content and how we use marketing strategies. We still think if a customer touches something three or four or five or six or 10 times, it's better. We do lead scoring by saying, how many times they touch a piece of content. If it's more than three, now they get a call from a salesperson. 

This is proving to be inefficient because what it's encouraging us to do is produce more content in the hope that people will touch it more, not that it means anything to their lives. The CEB actually found this out where they said it is a myth that the more that people touch your content, the more sticky or the more loyal that they become. 

And in fact, it works quite the opposite. As we create more content and then bombard our customers with more content, it adds the reason for them to become less sticky, less loyal. Without realizing it, we're adding to this information bombardment that we're putting onto our customers and suffering as a consequence. 

Hi. Welcome to Module 2 of the Content Marketing Institute's University Master Class. Module 2 here is getting to a strategic function. How do we actually start to think about a function of content marketing before we think about its form? And what I want to do there is I want to start by thinking, what holds us back. What is it that actually holds us back from using content more effectively in the business and especially for marketing purposes? And so, let's think about that for a second. 

We know that marketing is not getting any easier. So studies have recently shown that half of us, or half of the consumers, really switched services because of some poor customer experience. And I don't mean poor customer service. I mean a poor customer experience.

As I like to say, customer service is what happens when the customer experience breaks down. Half of the individuals-- consumers-- switched services. Think about how quickly now you change out your cellphone company or change out a service because you had a bad experience on their website, or you had a bad experience in their physical experience. 

We have a mandate now to create powerful customer experiences that add value to the products and services we offer. 23% of us-- only 23% of us-- feel like we have any relationship with any brand at all. Think about that for a second. Think about when you open up your refrigerator, right. You open up your refrigerator, and you look at all the different brands that are in your refrigerator. 

Or you open up the Start menu on your computer and you look at all the brands that are represented there. Think about when was the last time you went to any one of their Facebook pages and just wrote, you know what guys, I think you're doing a terrific job. You don't do that.

You might engage with their content, though. And quite frankly, interestingly, 75&% of studies have shown of adults would prefer that, quite frankly, their data isn't used at all. 

So using data and extracting data from customers is only going to become more complex, not less so. Marketing is going to get more complicated, more complex. And share of experience is the new goal. There's a wonderful study being done by the Association of National Advertisers, the ANA, called Marketing 2020, where they're going across the globe, in looking at all the different ways that marketing organizations are changing, from a functional standpoint, from the way that people organize marketing, from people, process, teams, all those kinds of things. 

One of the things that they found in studying brands that actually are forward-leaning and that really get it versus those brands that are lagging, are those that really get it are helping enhance their customer experiences by delivering content-driven customer experiences. And the ones that are really forward-leaning are personalizing those experiences. 

As they say, the most important marketing metric will soon shift from a share of wallet to share the experience. This is something that we're seeing in just all kinds of ways at the Content Marketing Institute and what we see with brands. This share of experience, the share of attention that we're getting from consumers, is really much more important than trying to grab their attention and persuade them to do something in time. And we marketers, quite frankly, we're making it up as we go. 

It's really true. 94% of us feel like optimizing the digital content experiences that we have would be a great thing. It would provide higher engagement, more conversions, better leads. But only 3% of us say that we have really the existing technology, processes, and teams to be able to do that.

97%-- almost all of us-- would see a dramatic increase in the breadth of skills needed. We're all doing things that we never did before. We're all signing up for Snapchat. 

We're all signing up for Meerkat and Periscope and all these things, trying to understand these new platforms and how our consumers will behave with them, and trying to figure out all these things that we've never had to do before. 97% of us are doing things that we've never done before and seen the increase in the breadth that we need to deliver those things. 

So marketing is getting more complicated. The patterns of marketing are changing. The question is, can we change the patterns. Can we actually change ourselves, not just the technologies that support it? So it's starting to happen, right. 

And also data append. They can actually look at the content of that you've consumed through that Academy and University, and use it to optimize their website to give you the better sales opportunities, and the more relevant products that you're interested in based on your content consumption. Customers ROI. They've created increased loyalty. They understand that people who go through the Academy will stay five times as long to their subscribed technology services. 

As well as increased lifetime value. They've seen a 10% increase in the average sales price and loyalty of a customer who goes to the Academy. Why? They're educated. They know what the product offers, they know what this company offers in its full regalia. And also business ROI. 

They've actually started to think about customer events in a regional, and they can actually look at all of those regions and say, you know what? If you target Atlanta you'll get this many because-- of if you target Seattle you get this many, and optimize their location for regional events by looking at their subscriber database.

All of these create value. Look at it another way. This is a conversation I'll often have with a CMO or CEO, and I'll say if you can create an audience, 

and if you create an audience in your database, what does your database consist of now? Probably, if you're like most organizations, it's a list of email addresses? Maybe we have 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 email addresses. But what if, instead, we had not only just a list of email addresses, but we had first name, last name, address, phone number because they wanted to give it to us because the content was so valuable. 

And I asked somebody, I said, hey, Mr. CEO, can you actually envision yourself creating something so valuable that you'd get that? 

Yes, I can, he said. Great. That means, and let's assume that they don't convert any more regularly than another option or another opportunistic lead that you would get through other materials. In other words, 5% to 10% would be the conversion rate. Let's just assume that it's the same as your conversion rate. That doesn't mean that that other 90% isn't valuable. 

You can get valuable customer research from them, you can test messages, you can do all kinds of things to generate other kinds of value, other than the lead value that they may provide. I might argue that they'd be a better leader, that they might be a more loyal lead, but let's assume that they're not even that. The value we can derive from the other 90% who never convert is huge for our business.

Think of it this way. Johnson and Johnson own BabyCenter.com. They know with the 4 million subscribers they have to BabyCenter, that moms planned the first birthday for their kid when their kid turns seven months old. That is so valuable for their brand managers who are trying to sell things like Tylenol and other kinds of things that they might want to sell. 

They know, by looking at their consumer data, because they've tested it, which message, sleep through the night, sleep tonight, sleep overnight, is actually going to resonate more. They're making better effectiveness on their ad creative by looking at the content consumption that's happening to their content property. And by the way, it's a separate division. As you can see on the screen, they're selling advertising. They don't sell it to competitors, but they're selling advertising to monetize and actually create value, business value for this property while it adds other lines of value to their marketing. This is the power of a content marketing approach, building it a thematic collection of assets.

A software company built an audience. And they, like many of us, we're just doing stuff. They're creating content here. Through the first and second quarters, they created all this content. And then they said, you know what, let's pivot just a little bit. We're going to pivot and create content that thematically aligns to what? 

For them, it was a physical event. And this physical event was going to be something where they could invite people to, so they basically focused all their content to building this event. Then that gave them a couple of lines of data. Really not a lot of campaign value, because it didn't provide that many more leads, but it built all kinds of insight into what kind of event, 

which thought leaders were going to be really resonant, which kinds of sponsors they might want to attract one day, what kinds of attendees would come to this event. So then they had the event, and it was a small little customer event that they had with some thought leaders, and some speakers, and a PowerPoint and all that kind of stuff. And of course, out of that came all kinds of content. Interviews with the thought leaders, interviews with the attendees, case studies, all kinds of content coming out of that event to build toward what? 

The 24/7, 365 days a year resource that is the embodiment of that event. What did that provide? All kinds of campaign value. You missed the event? Well, you might want to sign up for this webinar. You missed the event? Maybe you should get this presentation from this wonderful thought leader. Now are providing wonderful campaigns, also getting additional insight, etc, 

and as we build the content and we start building an editorial plan toward our second year of that event, well guess what? Now we're building business value because this company started to understand that the event was going to be twice as big in the second year. Now they can start to bring in some sponsors to help them offset some of those costs of putting on the event.

So a wonderful, multiple approaches to developing value using a content marketing platform to do so. What if we began with the end in mind? 

We begin with the end in mind. The most amazing resource center, the most emotional story, the most useful tool, a platform with the goal of building or retaining an audience. That is the business case for content marketing. 

That is your powerful means of reasoning for developing something that's going to add value to your business. So next up, in our next module, is going to be creating the strategic function. Once we've created a business case, now let's make sure that we're making a business case for the function, not just the form. And that will be coming up next.