Content marketing doesn’t have to just be a cost center—it can become an innovation engine for your business and even its own profit center. In this #ContentChat recap, I was joined by content marketing leader Carlos Abler to expand upon that perspective and talk about how to spark a content revolution in your organization. We discussed a wide range of high-value content programs that drove meaningful business results and social impact and how to break down organizational silos and educate specialists to unlock the full power of content marketing.
For some people, content marketing is just a job. But for Carlos and I, content creation is a core part of who we each are. And that comes across in our approach to content marketing, and this conversation.
Watch our entire video podcast episode on YouTube or read a few of my favorite highlights below.
The Convergence of Content Marketing, Innovation, and Social Impact
How do we consistently create content that delivers value and not just promises it? Carlos explains the mind shift that’s necessary.
“I’m a juror and mentor and national expert for an organization called the World Summit on the Information Society. And we award and support people who are using content on the internet in ways that help deliver social impact, such as reducing infant and maternal mortality at scale or increasing democratic participation in various countries.”—Carlos Abler
“I judge about somewhere between 40 to 80 projects a year for the World Summit Awards. I estimated I analyzed over 2000 decks in my almost decade at 3M as leader of content marketing strategy. And in that entire time, I’ve been accumulating this value driver framework from all of these models, and I see that there’s a lot of overlap here… omnichannel content marketing and sustainability inevitably converge via the content value design practices that make content helpful and subscribable, and this becomes a success factor for the effectiveness of programs. ”—Carlos Abler
Start Treating Content as Sustainable, Value-Added Deliverables, Not Just Campaigns
The key to content as an innovation driver is viewing it as a strategic investment and a business asset—not a marketing campaign that’s turned on or off.
“And to a degree, because of everything I’ve been saying, businesses may have already been doing some of this [incorporating sustainability in their content marketing strategy], but rarely consciously. Because there are conscious ways to go about social impact, innovation, and other types, but also sustainably. Very often, what happens is we set up these things that should be treated like revenue generating products and services that are a part of the business function, but they still get treated like campaigns and communications initiatives, so they’re not dealt with sustainably.”—Carlos Abler
“With Johnson and Johnson, where I worked on a diabetes, lifestyle, wellness management platform that eventually devolved into a blog because it was operationalized—as these things often are—inconsistently, like content assets and so on, are on more of a campaign basis, rather than seeing them as a continuous product for value-added delivery.”—Carlos Abler
“The people who drive this stuff need to be a certain type of person and have certain kinds of backgrounds and teams need to operate in certain kinds of ways… in order to integrate across barriers that are almost designed to repel integration. So it’s a big challenge, but also a really big opportunity. “—Carlos Abler
It’s important to take a pause here, which I did during the livestream, to let this sink in. Here’s how I summed up:
“This, to me, is also the difference between actual content marketing and content strategy. It’s the difference between having those approaches and just creating content that may as well be a brochure or a sales sheet, because too many people think that they’re doing content marketing, when in fact, they’re just creating random pieces of content. They’re not actually doing content marketing.”—Erika Heald
Cross-Functional Collaboration, Accountability, and Integrated Content Strategies
“Value delivery is often where people struggle and where the opportunity lies, and it also grounds content practice and objective content value design criteria. Because if you’re going to stand something up and go up in front of a bunch of investors and say, hey, I want 10s of millions of dollars to launch this thing or to sustain this thing, you know, that thing’s got to deliver.”—Carlos Abler
“Sometimes we can set up a corporate publication or something that has basically zero audience. In other words, it’s almost done like a hobby with no accountability on the one hand. Or we end up with a lot of unrealistic expectations for what it can deliver. A lot of times, not because they couldn’t have been delivered, but because that more comprehensive view wasn’t taken on how to ensure that they can deliver value cross-functionally, increase relevance and impact, and decrease non-tent, and as you just said, random acts of content and the arbitrary in general, increase true purpose and decrease optics-only purpose and crimes against authenticity.”—Carlos Abler
Key Issues That Keep Content from Living Up to Its Innovation Potential
“Content innovations must be managed as ongoing micro businesses, not as campaigns. I already spoke to that comprehensive integration across all customer-facing content initiatives, anchoring initiatives to audience development and journey management for individuals and accounts, which is, of course, very rare.”—Carlos Abler
“Very often, content programs are done in departmental silos with different reporting lines, goals and often, you know, I end up introducing people to each other within their own companies. When I consult, it happens on almost every gig. A lot of what I do is very horizontal integration—multi year road map strategy, things like that. So a lot of times, where the word omnichannel is flying around, whenever I get into those [projects], I always end up bringing people to the table… often the people who have hired us have never met.”—Carlos Abler
“[It’s important to have] content innovation integrated into routine business planning cycles and upstream and downstream processes. This is really key, because where do people collaborate?”—Carlos Abler
“A lot of times, the work they’re doing around ‘what should our content be?’ is very often happening downstream of key business planning cycles versus upstream of them. And that’s exactly the opposite way it should work.”—Carlos Abler
“At 3M I created a program which originally was called Content-2-Customer (C2R). But then my good friend, Ryan Satre, who was one of my partners in crime there, said that revenue was way more important. [Content-2-Revenue (C2R)] Because at the end of the day, no matter how much executives like to talk about Jeff Bezos’ empty customer chair next to them—no matter how customer-centric they like to talk, give lip service to— revenue is really what gets attention. So what we wanted to do was to make sure that the word revenue was welded to content, like welded to it and became like a noun. It’s like you, you have either done, you actually have your content to revenue plan within your marketing plan, or you don’t. It’s very binary.”
You’ll have to listen to the whole episode for more on his 3M program, which had 800 members on Yammer, and spawned its own multi-day internal content marketing event.
The big takeaway here, as I shared in the episode, is content is—and needs to be treated as—more than just a marketing program.
“Content is not just about content marketing, because. Content touches every part of your business and needs to involve people across the business because otherwise, you’re giving a really disjointed customer experience and internal employee experience that is absolutely not going to lead to innovation, and you’re not going to get the business results out of it.”—Erika Heald
Bust Out of the Organizational Silos to Drive Content Excellence
“What I’ve found is that there are three key horizontal forces in business that really are kind of the silo busters or the silo bridgers, and that’s content, data and customer experience, however you want to rephrase any of those things. Those three things are highly horizontal, and the geniuses out there that we need to really weave together and drive the future of business success in any of these things, and AI is just yet another spotlight. That’s why you know all this new stuff with AI, and it’s just coming back to the same old stuff. It’s the things we’ve been saying for 20 years or more around getting your content house in order. AI is just, it’s just turning up the heat on on the basics right in many, many ways.”—Carlos Abler
“Whether it’s the data people, the tech people, or the content people, very often they’re talking about being invited to the table too late on strategic initiatives. Well, in my view, or one way to frame this, to frame flipping that, is that the content and data people need to run the table much more. They need to be way more upstream involved, and they need to get very intimate with each other at a strategic level before expectations get set in the business as to what the hell they’re doing with their money period.”—Carlos Abler
“Anytime any of these trains get rolling where those core architectural strategic roles haven’t worked upstream to define what the opportunities are and how they’re going to integrate is going to create a multitude of failure factors in what they’re doing, and certainly, and most critically, miss all these huge value opportunities that they had, not only in what to do foundationally, but also to what accelerates their roadmap.”—Carlos Abler
Today is Your Opportunity to Revolutionize Content Marketing
In the rest of the episode, Carlos shares his personal origin story, and does a deep dive on a half dozen specific content programs that centered on social good and delivered real value to the people it served and the organizations who created the content. This stuff is all just too juicy and detailed for a recap to do it justice.
But I will leave you with this content manifesto slide from Carlos and a promise that we’re not finished on this topic. We will 100% be picking up where this episode left off to talk about how to operationalize your content operations to bring about your own content revolution.
And if the ideas we’ve discussed here inspire you to start on a content innovation journey of your own, get in touch—I’d love to help.
