As a content marketer, building strong relationships within your organization is key to success. It is simply a must.
To be very clear: If you're sitting in your corner just pumping out content either from your own brain or a quick Google search, you're doing it wrong.
Finding the right people to work with inside your organization not only enhances results but also brings that real, deep expertise into your content. It can help you differentiate from that ocean of beige content online today.
Added to that, collaborating with other teams in the company can help bring you closer to your audience. Better understanding your prospect and customer will only ever be good for your content.
In this article, we'll discuss six internal teams that content marketers should work with every day and explore the value each team brings to the table for a content marketer.
Watch or listen to this full episode of the Content Marketing Commute podcast, or scroll on down for a summary of key points.
1. Events
a. What does the events team do in a B2B company?
The events team is responsible for planning and executing various events, such as webinars, trade shows, and conferences. Their goal is to create engaging experiences for customers and prospects, generating sales opportunities and delighting current customers.
b. Why the content team should work with events
An event in itself is content, so collaborating with the events team is crucial. Events attract audiences based on their content. Sorry to say, but people don't usually come to your events just because your company or product is super cool - they come along because the topic interests them and they feel they could learn something from it.
Going further, aligning event schedules with content planning can be a real game changer. Imagine your company is like a storyteller - but one with a few different brains that don't always speak to each other! Making sure all these stories line up is more challenging than you might think. If you're saying one thing at events and something totally different in your blogs, you're audience is likely to start getting confused about what your company is really all about.
Imagine your a tech company and you've got this big conference coming up about the future of cloud security. Now, before the event, you're dropping blog posts and social content about security challenges, success stories, and more.
If done right, by the time your event hits, everyone's on the same page. Attendees feel like they're part of this big, connected journey, and even those who missed it can catch up with your blog content.
Once the event is over, repurposing the session scripts or chopping up the recordings into bite-sized videos for social means you'll have content to drip feed your audience for months!
In the B2B world, trust and relationships are everything. Having a story that flows through events and content makes you stand out. It's not just about one cool event or a catchy piece of content – it's about creating a story that sticks with your audience and gets them on the journey towards a sales conversation.
So, aligning your event plans with your content strategy isn't just a fancy move; it's a smart way to make your B2B story stronger and unforgettable.
c. Ideas of ways to work with this team
Coordinate content themes with upcoming events, ensuring a seamless narrative. Also, research and get across the agendas of external events in your space to gain insights into trending topics and adapt content strategies accordingly. The big trade shows in your space become big because they know what the audience wants to learn about. Piggy-back on all that research the event organisers have done to create content on similar topics, with your company's unique pointy of view throughout.
2. Marketing Operations
a. What does the Marketing Operations team do in a B2B company?
Marketing operations involves overseeing a range of processes crucial for the success of the marketing team. This includes project management, strategic planning, and benchmarking to ensure efficient workflows. Additionally, marketing ops plays a pivotal role in gathering intelligence, analyzing campaign performance, and managing data to enhance overall marketing effectiveness. In B2B companies they can often have a big focus on CRM, marketing automation, and email marketing, working to optimize the entire marketing funnel.
b. Why the content team should work with this team
Working hand-in-hand with marketing operations is a game-changer for content marketers, especially considering that one of their primary objectives is to drive leads and revenue for the business. Content is the fuel that propels potential customers through the marketing funnel, making the collaboration with marketing ops indispensable. Content marketers should view marketing operations as go-to partners, leveraging their insights and learnings to help improve funnel performance in an iterative way over time.
By closely collaborating with the marketing ops team, content marketers can gain access to a wealth of insights to reverse engineer back into their content.
One of the key areas where this collaboration shines is in the top and middle of the funnel. Since content is a driving force in converting 'leads' through these stages, testing different formats and delivery methods becomes a collaborative playground for content marketers and marketing operations. By experimenting with various content types and delivery strategies, they can work together to refine the approach, ensuring that the content resonates effectively with the audience and improves the conversion rate through different stages of the funnel.
This collaboration has to go beyond a one-time or one-campaign thing. It's an ongoing, iterative process where content marketers lean on marketing operations for continuous feedback and data-driven insights. This partnership not only aligns content with the funnel stages but should also see both teams work together to enhance conversion rates, ultimately driving the business towards its revenue goals.
c. Ideas of ways to work with this team
Regularly communicate with the marketing operations team to understand funnel metrics. Adjust content strategies based on performance data to enhance overall marketing efficiency.
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