Publish or Perish: A Blueprint for Fueling Modern Marketing Programs with Content

Written December 15th, 2016

Brand publishing — which we define as the production, management, distribution, and optimization of marketing and sales content at scale — has become essential to the future growth of every business and critical to the success of the marketing organization. According to Mike Marcellin, the CMO of Juniper Networks, “the quality and organization of our marketing content has a huge impact on what we do as marketers, and ultimately our contribution to business, and our interactions with customers.”

High quality, relevant, and targeted marketing content has become so essential to the executive growth agenda that 93% of CMOs view themselves as publishers, according to the Brand Publishing Institute. 70% of marketing executives believe the effectiveness of their marketing content gates their ability to drive top line growth with digital, social, and mobile technologies and supports core branding, demand generation, and value selling programs. And almost half of all Digital Transformation budgets include content — whether it’s 360-degree videos of resort properties, store layouts for product locator apps, or product training delivered at the point of sale.

So “Publish or Perish” is fast becoming the bottom line for marketers. According to Carlos Abler, Leader of Content Marketing Strategy at 3M, ”In order to move the needle in terms of creating effective content at scale, we need to adopt publishing practices, processes, skills in our strategic planning, operational planning and have these practices drive platform requirements and adoption approaches. Furthermore, we need to embed Brand Publishing competencies into standard marketing and relationship practices at the tactical go-to-market level.” Marketers who do not optimize their publishing process are putting their growth plans — and careers — at risk.

Many of our clients feel the same way as they struggle to create content to support their owned media, social media, and digital marketing efforts. To help them, I recently recorded a 45-minute webinar that explains how the best marketers are making the transition from marketer to publisher by establishing internal systems and processes to plan, create, manage, distribute and optimize content operations at scale in a large and complex company. In it, I share original best practices research and practical examples drawn from interviews we conducted with hundreds of leading marketers across the globe.

If you invest the time to listen, you will learn some useful things:

• The 10 key points of control, leverage, and scale in the publishing process that can reduce the cost and complexity of content operations;
• How to identify where technology can create leverage and control in the Brand Publishing process;
• Twelve levers enterprise marketers are using to govern the quality, consistency, and compliance across a large and complex organization;
• The keys to building a Brand Publishing Center of Excellence within your organization;
• Examples of how leading brands are establishing cross-functional teams, processes, and systems that span marketing, sales, product, communications, IT and agency stakeholders.

If you would like to learn more about how your organization can reduce the cost and complexity of creating marketing content that drives growth, let’s talk more. We can share our research on how you can save money and improve your marketing performance by thinking more like a publisher, and less like an advertiser.

Originally published at www.digitalsurgeons.com.