Marketing’s blind spot: The overlooked dimension of content operations

It’s astonishing to acknowledge that content marketing, a discipline with roots dating back to the late 19th century, still struggles to find its footing in many organizations.

The pioneering efforts of John Deere and Michelin tire company, who leveraged content to educate and engage their target audiences, laid the groundwork for the content marketing strategies we know today. Despite its rich history, content marketing remains an underdeveloped function in many organizations, with content operations, a critical dimension of this discipline, often overlooked or misunderstood. To understand content operations, it’s important we level-set on the journey that we, as marketers have been on over the last 20 years.

The MarTech tipping point

The rise and demands of social media and the subsequent explosion of customer touchpoints created a perfect storm of complexity, making it increasingly challenging for marketers to keep up. The proliferation of technology platforms, designed to automate, harness, and streamline data, has led to a proliferation of point solutions, further exacerbating the issue.

Moreover, the same advertisers, who were pioneers in digital marketing – leveraging technology to personalize and hypertarget customers – struggled to understand that these platforms also required content; not just ads: a tension that only marketers who think like content marketers can truly understand.

Amidst this struggle, marketing operations emerged as a sub-function in the mid-2000s, aimed to bridge the gap between IT, operations, and marketing. Today, 70% of organizations have a marketing operations function.

With the introduction of GenAI and the effects of post-COVID economic slowdown, the pressure on marketers to do more with less has intensified. And while a marketing operations function can help organizations focus on infrastructure and measurement, that doesn’t necessarily translate to an efficient content marketing function. It’s content operations that can truly ensure that content can deliver results in any environment.

As seasoned marketers, we know that at the heart of marketing operations lies performance. The need to ensure organizations have the right infrastructure in place to accurately measure and convey performance remains crucial. However, if you have any form of content emerging from your organization as an output, are you considering content operations?  Are you shifting your mindset away from trafficking ads and more towards behaving like a publisher or a broadcaster?

The unifying power of content

Today, only ~10% of marketing budgets are devoted to content, and there’s little to no data indicating what portion of that 10% is dedicated to content operations.

But content is leveraged across all aspects of a customer lifecycle, it touches every facet of a business, and so too should content operations. By focusing on content operations, organizations can objectively examine the effectiveness of content for cross-functional teams and objectives, inspiring greater unity and driving longer-term success.

Ads age quickly. Meanwhile, because of its lasting power, content can be broken down into modular components, teams can repurpose and reuse content across various channels and campaigns, it can be measured and optimized to meet a variety of KPIs. Dialing your content operations helps reduce a duplication of effort and ultimately increases ROI. Now, ensuring you have clear processes, workflows and governance models is the key to this seamless collaboration and communication–it allows content to effectively support and ultimately unify the needs of every team within your organization.

How many times have you heard about a piece of content from within your organization after it’s launched? Or heard about a report that the Sales Enablement team is working on that sounds remarkably familiar to a Product team request you just reviewed? By implementing a hub and spoke model, organizations can avoid content being created in departmental vacuums. The hub serves as a centralized platform, providing a single source of truth and visibility into content initiatives across departments. Meanwhile, the spokes represent the various teams and stakeholders that contribute to and benefit from the content. If content operations weren’t so elusive a function, frictions and inefficiencies will start to lessen to make way for truly integrated teams, and this integrated approach would allow organizations to maximize the value of their content, creating a multiplier effect where 1+1=4, not just 2.

By acknowledging the significance of content operations and investing in its development, organizations can unlock the full potential of their content marketing efforts, driving efficiency, integration, and ultimately, business growth. In fact, focusing on content operations – or operationalizing strategy, instead of just developing a strategy – is accretive to the top and bottom line, so it’s time to bring content operations out of the shadows and into the spotlight, where it rightfully belongs.