CS Forum 2016: Content people and marketing people. It's complicated.
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How do ‘pure marketers’ think about content, and how do ‘pure content people’ think about marketing? The content strategists at CS Forum 2016 (Melbourne) heard about the prejudices, the sad truths, and the misunderstandings that can cause conflict. And they heard it from someone that’s been on both sides of the fence.
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CS Forum 2016: Content people and marketing people. It's complicated.
- 1. MAX JOHNS, CS FORUM 2016. AWESOME. SIMPLIFIED.NET.NZ@MxDEJ
- 2. CONTENT PEOPLE AND MARKETING PEOPLE. IT’S COMPLICATED.
- 3. WHY?
- 4. HI, I’M MAX JOHNS. You may know me from such Twitter handles as @aucklandCS and @MxDEJ
- 5. HI, I’M MAX JOHNS. You may know me from such Twitter handles as @aucklandCS and @MxDEJ
- 8. WE FOCUS ON THE ________’S NEEDS. user customer
- 9. REPETITION IS ________. a waste reinforcement
- 10. IT’S BEST TO TREAT SITE ANALYTICS AS ________. a rough guide actual truth
- 11. GOOD WEBSITES TAKE VISITORS THROUGH A ________. user journey sales funnel
- 13. “We’re the last line of defence against crap going up online.” CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 14. “I’m responsible for all of the content on the website.” CONTENT PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 15. “We’re rewriting content for a new site. Once that’s done, I don’t know who’ll look after it. Apparently I’m the only one who cries about these things.” CONTENT PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 16. “We overthink things, and over-polish things without asking what the return is on that effort.” CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 17. “We’d like people not to hate us.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 18. “We have a much greater understanding of how people perceive us and interact with stuff.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 19. “I’m here to shift perception.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 20. “We understand how to talk about things in a way that is relevant.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 21. “We have successfully positioned things as desirable products.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES
- 23. “They have no clue.” CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE
- 24. “They hate being corrected. Oh yes, they do.” CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE
- 25. “It’s tricking. It’s a trickster’s trade, and that’s why marketing sucks.” CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE
- 26. “Marketing don’t write, can’t produce, don’t do imagery or HTML.” CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE
- 27. “Strengths!? Of marketing!?” WHAT ARE MARKETING’S STRENGTHS? CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE
- 28. *Laughter* WHAT ARE MARKETING’S STRENGTHS? CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE
- 29. “Strength in numbers? I honestly don’t know.” WHAT ARE MARKETING’S STRENGTHS? CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE
- 30. “Marketing is great at getting funding for random ideas.” WHAT DOES MARKETING DO? CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE
- 31. WHAT’S MARKETING’S JOB? CONTENT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MARKETING PEOPLE *Fart noise*
- 32. “They’re not great at capturing imaginations.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CONTENT PEOPLE
- 33. “They have no words to explain what they do.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CONTENT PEOPLE
- 34. “Strengths? Grammar. But I think they just look for the squiggly green line and say ‘ah ha!’.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CONTENT PEOPLE
- 35. “They don’t want to engage. They just do their own thing.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CONTENT PEOPLE
- 39. “I don’t know.” WHO’S THE FIRST BOSS YOU HAVE IN COMMON? “The CEO.”
- 41. “We’re part of Digital.” COMMON STRUCTURES
- 42. “Digital is blurring the line between I.T. and Marketing.” COMMON STRUCTURES
- 43. “As Marketing, we’re our own thing. My boss reports to the CEO.” COMMON STRUCTURES
- 44. “We’re in with Comms.” COMMON STRUCTURES
- 45. “Marketing and Brand are our own group.” COMMON STRUCTURES
- 47. “I used to be in a Marketing team. It was weird, like I had half a real job.” AN UNCOMMON STRUCTURE
- 48. “We have good intentions. We want to work together.” HOW DO THE TWO TEAMS RELATE?
- 49. “There’s massive tension. We just avoid them now.” HOW DO THE TWO TEAMS RELATE?
- 50. “They don’t want to engage. They just do their own thing.” MARKETING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CONTENT PEOPLE
- 51. “Marketing aren’t our customer anymore. We used to deliver things for them, but now we have our own Digital agenda and just tell them.” HOW DO THE TWO TEAMS RELATE?
- 52. “Increase our net promoter score...But that’s not a stream of work. We still do what we normally do, but, umm…” WHAT ARE YOU INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 53. WHAT ARE YOU INCENTIVISED TO DO? “Deliver results by deadlines and build strategic relationships to get things done.”
- 54. “Just churn out pages. It’s quite demoralising.” WHAT ARE YOU INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 55. “…Improve SEO, help UX decision-makers, increase visits to the site, uphold editorial standards...” WHAT ARE YOU INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 56. “Get my microsite generating revenue.” WHAT ARE YOU INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 57. “Improve customer survey results.” WHAT ARE YOU INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 58. “Increase the number of ‘call me back’ requests.” WHAT ARE YOU INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 59. “Sell shit.” WHAT ARE YOU INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 60. “I’m not 100% certain. Not make money, that’s for sure.” WHAT’S THE CONTENT TEAM INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 61. “Spend lots of money making crap ads to hopefully sell some shit?” WHAT’S THE MARKETING TEAM INCENTIVISED TO DO?
- 64. DO YOU HAVE ANY FORMAL GOALS, STRATEGIES, OR TACTICS SHARED BETWEEN THE CONTENT AND MARKETING TEAMS?
- 65. “NO!”[Yelled very loudly] DO YOU HAVE ANY FORMAL GOALS, STRATEGIES, OR TACTICS SHARED BETWEEN THE CONTENT AND MARKETING TEAMS?
- 66. “Ideally we’d decide off the back of a strategy, but there isn’t one because no-one knows what they’re doing.” HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHAT TO DO?
- 67. “We have a shared goal: customer acquisition. It’s a company-wide obsession.” HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHAT TO DO?
- 68. “There’s a clear line to the corporate strategy, and to the marketing team’s goals.” HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHAT TO DO?
- 69. “We have good intentions. We want to work together.” HOW DO THE TWO TEAMS RELATE?
- 70. CONTENT STRATEGY
- 71. “I mean, I get it, but…” HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHAT TO DO?
- 75. CONTENT PEOPLE AND MARKETING PEOPLE.
- 76. CONTENT PEOPLE AND MARKETING PEOPLE. IT’S COMPLICATED.
Editor's Notes
- Why address this relationship in particular? The skills on both sides are really important Unavoidable crossover: If you work in one, you need to know about the other This relationship is often very broken If you get it right, work is easier and more productive
- I’m a content guy. Have been for 10+ years. At the Auckland CS Meetup, after nearly 3 years, we have 750 people in our group. Seeing who’s coming into the content strategy world, we’re picking up all sorts. It’s really good! But hardly anyone from marketing
- I’m a Marketing guy. Qualified straight out of school, worked in research and creative roles – mainly in manufacturing, retail, and software. Interviewing for marketing grads in the last few years, not much has changed in their course content since the 1990s. Given what marketing people ought to thinking about, careerwise, this content-crossover stuff is important
- So in a way, I know it all, right? I can just pull this whole talk out of my own head. No. This comes from interviews and surveys on both sides. Mainly from New Zealand, Australia. Organisations: Corporate, public, big, small. I spoke with employees, not agencies
- There are three levels to look at: People, Structure, and Strategy People first. People are messy, wonderful things. “Marketing people” and “content people” are crude groups, but you know what I mean. Each group has a rough-but-shared set of defining traits: Skills Things they care about Things they don’t care about Assumptions (about everything, but especially about ourselves and about others) Terminology (which I think reveals those assumptions)
- So here’s a test, to see who you are! Pick an answer to fill the gap. Content people are influenced by the digital sphere – we’ll read Silicon Valley blogs, not the business pages. We think about Users. Marketing people want people to open their wallet and be customers. And they place customers above other users.
- When you’re writing something, are you thinking more about getting a new piece of information across succinctly, or about building on an impression that someone already has? Content people think more about the information they’re conveying. Marketing people think more about the impression.
- How do you treat site analytics? Content people worry about boiling interactions down to numbers, while Marketers are trained to.
- What are websites even for? It’s easier to tell if a funnel is a success than a journey (there go those numbers again).
- I’m treating greys as black and white, but you get the picture. Anyway, when you talk to people they kind of define themselves. Starting with content people…
- - There’s a touch of perfectionism to your average content person - There’s often a small number of people looking after a LOT of content.
- Content roles are **still** channel-based roles. The idea of “channel” is getting weirder, and it has to go away. Today, the website isn’t a compartment where a defined set of content lives by itself. - Digital content is leaking out into microsites, social media, apps, online products, online ads, eDMs… - Non-digital content is appearing online, like blogs replacing old school media releases - Websites are transactional now, more like software interfaces - Staff use the web as they serve customers in other channels Digital is eating the world, BUT content ppl still talk about channels. We need to kick harder against this
- Content people have a long-term view. We know that websites can’t live in phases. Refresh projects aren’t the way to operate. Sometimes words look disposable, or messages seem eternal, but they never are.
- Talking business with a content person is not natural. You hear the word QUALITY a lot. Content people know QUALITY when they see it. They strive for it. They just can’t define it in business terms.
- Marketing people talk about themselves: You hear from your customers a lot more these days than you used to. It’s scary. Some people feel backed into a corner. Two massive themes in the Marketing world right now are that image matters more than ever, and traditional marketing is dying. So how do you project that image, when once-trustworthy methods are losing effectiveness, or even backfiring? The goals of marketing matter, greatly, and always will. And many of the skills are still as valuable as ever.
- Skills like this one. Marketers understand behaviour. Not just interaction via a screen, but behaviour like: Thought processes that go into short-listing companies that you’ll even consider How consideration then works When organisations should be more passive, and when to be more active
- Understanding behaviour includes an understanding of perception. This is the step BEYOND helping someone learn something or complete a task. It’s the end MENTAL STATE. Marketers aren’t shy about this – they want to make a good impression. Impressions and perceptions aren’t just ethereal things.
- Understanding behaviour and perception brings the ability to be relevant to people, in a ‘mindset’ way.
- Marketers know that desire can be created, which looks like a dark art to Content people. Positioning something well makes it desirable only by altering what’s around it. It’s incredibly powerful stuff. It turns into proud boasts, and into profit. So that’s people talking about themselves. It’s a bit like an echo chamber.
- This picture isn’t an echo chamber. It’s the opposite. This is an anechoic chamber. This room in Minnesota is the quietest place on earth. It returns negative background noise readings. The walls suck energy out of the room. If you go in there, your ears and brain stop trusting themselves. You lose balance and orientation. Longest anyone’s stayed in there: 45 minutes. I’m showing you this because I’m about to go through things that content people and marketing people say about each other. If we were in an echo chamber before, we’re now about to head into *here*. The energy’s about to be sucked away.
- Direct quote
- Imagine having corrected people enough to know this, but still doing it anyway. What does that say about the relationship? About you?
- Marketing, perceived as a dark art.
- Delivery isn’t a strong point, possibly due to broken relationships with “channel” functions.
- What if I’m more positive, and ask specifically about strengths?
- Asking about what they do isn’t much better. But, on why Marketing ideas can seem random to a content person: Marketing people sometimes think about an audience that'll give them 2 or 3 seconds at best. Not today, not for this interaction, but 2 or 3 seconds ever. They're thinking 'first impressions'. Anything that uses up any of that time and doesn't boost the exact right message is not just a distraction, but a cost. And Content people are worried about governance issues that won’t matter for months.
- Perhaps the question is ‘What’s marketing’s job?’
- Now watch the energy drain away as marketers describe content people… Think of the 2-3 second impression from before, and what an imagination has to do in that time.
- Content people don’t appreciate which bits of their work bring the most value. They can’t sum themselves up in business-sensible terms. The team that works with words can’t find the words to justify themselves.
- Just as in the other direction, people undervalue each other, and the jobs we do.
- Teams who should be complimentary are just disappearing on each other.
- The people involved in content and in marketing don’t trust each other. The cynicism is mutual. They don’t appreciate each other’s skills despite the fact that combining those skills ought to enhance things for everyone. The two default states are: Deal with each other unhappily Avoid
- Let’s see how those two approaches play out in the context of organisational structure.
- I asked about the structure in different companies, starting with the first manager that sits directly above both Marketing and Content.
- Two most popular answers: I don’t know, and The CEO. Content tends to be lumped into a channel, in one corner of the org chart Marketing is a broader umbrella (often in ‘corporate’), in another, higher corner. When you have a disagreement, org charts suggest that you can look back up to someone who cares about you both equally, but escalation only works if that boss is realistically available. Otherwise conflict has nowhere to go.
- Common set-ups include distributed publishing: content people isolated from each other content work being done by people who aren’t a natural fit to the work.
- Content people as part of “digital” – that blurry and constantly less definable “channel” In this set-up and in distributed publishing, content people are managed by non-content people.
- On “Digital” teams, here’s something I heard said recently by a Digital Team Manager – quite a senior person – about how her peers and bosses see her part of the world. I.T. and Marketing are both traditional, non-channel business functions. Here, digital work is moving into their turf and eating into their budgets. You can tell that channel-based thinking is falling out of date when ‘Digital’ is stepping on non-channel toes and getting paid to do so.
- Lots of the time, Marketing has its own seat at the top table. The Marketing team is big, and high up the tree. It’s relatively homogenous in terms of people’s skills, the things they care about, and the assumptions they make. This makes it close-knit, but also quite closed, which makes change hard.
- “Comms” teams are often opaque: no particular channel, no strict boundaries separating ‘comms’ from other content Marketers who sit in comms teams struggle to articulate the boundaries of “comms” (e.g. where digital comms fit) Broad enough for Marketing to fit in.
- Marketing and Brand seem to always go together. Having Brand separate from Content – is that sustainable? Even when Marketing isn’t its own thing and is combined with another function, the most senior Marketing person typically out-ranks the most senior Content person.
- What DON’T we see in org charts? What’s uncommon? - Why no distributed marketing? As a consolidated specialty, they have to reach across to others in order to have influence. - Why no senior, standalone content (unless it’s the product, eg. media)? Content is King! A mid-ranking, compromised King. Things like this stem from how each function is seen by senior leaders: - Marketing: Business speciality; Form of management; Source of competitive difference - Content: Set of skills (non-business, manufacturing); Deliverable; Not a source of competitive difference
- If the relationship is so important, why not subordinate one to the other? This sounds simple but this ignores differences in skills, and in the things that each side can (and should) get done. *Marketing content* is a subset of *content*. *Content work* is a subset of *Marketing work*. There’s crossover between Marketing and Content, but there’s no containment. While I’m at it, *Content marketing* is a subset of both Marketing and Content.
- This marketing team sits so far from content creation that collaboration is a struggle, even though they want to! There are no incentives to do things that benefit both teams, or to make plans that connect together.
- When teams aren’t incentivised to work together, sometimes they don’t. The skills that each side bring get lost to each other.
- We saw that happening before.
- Internal digital teams used to have an ‘agency’ mindset, in which one external group sets all your work. You’re incentivised to fill requests, not to decide what work gets done. As Digital eats the world, Digital teams increasingly set their own direction and leave Marketing out in the cold. But when one team (no matter which) sets every project, work is skewed.
- People do what they’re incentivised to do. But the funny thing is that incentives aren’t always clear. Sometimes bosses just pass on management-speak or intangible goals that don’t change what people do.
- This content person seemed to know what’s what, but what are the things they get done?
- Sometime incentives aren’t great, but managers get what they ask for. If you’re a boss, think about that.
- Here’s a very clear answer. But two of these four things – SEO and visitor numbers - are Marketing things. If you’re ranking well for the wrong search terms or searchers, or if you’re attracting the wrong visitors, you can hit these incentives without achieving much. Unless you know and track your target market – which is marketing stuff – these incentives can send you in the wrong direction. From the last four quotes you see that as the incentives put in front of content people get clearer, Marketing’s relevance becomes more obvious.
- On the marketing side, incentives are more often financial.
- They’re often more measurable.
- They’re often comparable over short terms.
- Sometime incentives aren’t great, but managers get what they ask for.
- I also asked people what they thought the other side was incentivised to do.
- When teams are separate, managing them to work together is difficult. When they’re incentivised to do very different things, there’s conflict. We issues can’t be escalated, conflict festers. When conflict festers, there’s a ‘winner takes all’ situation –Marketing is either the one and only customer, or they’re completely ignored. Structural misalignment, and managerial misalignment, are underpinned by issues with…
- …STRATEGY! Relying on escalation is limiting. You shouldn’t need a close, common boss, to keep groups on the same path. Strategy ought to be able to do the same job.
- The idealised vision of strategy trickling down the org chart doesn’t hold. If you go down far enough, things can dry up completely.
- If people aren’t making strategic choices, they’re making simplified choices. Here, the organisation-wide priority is acquisition - building the customer base. But there are so many ways to meet this objective, it doesn’t encourage everyone’s effort in the same direction. There are different potential customers, questions about product development - depending on the people working here, and the structure they’re in, different projects can suit the goal but conflict with each other.
- So strategy isn’t just a goal. It’s about the way you get there together. This answer from a marketing person has a clear line to what the corporation is all about, and team goals that sit under that. Sounds perfect. Except…
- …this is the same person. So the marketing team has taken the strategy, used it to plan out exactly what to do, but can’t work across teams. When you only look to your own team, strategic alignment goes missing.
- Strategy is hard. That’s why the word “strategy” is in content strategy. We don’t want to just do just whatever comes up. We don’t want to be manufacturers. We don’t want to slap businessy-sounding labels on the same old stuff. We want to understand entire business strategies and distil them into forms that work for our people and express them when we create stuff and see how a coherent, shared strategy fuels collaboration. We want to give content work real value to our audience, colleagues, business, and ourselves.
- Or, if we don’t want to do all that stuff, we have to stop calling ourselves content strategists.
- Strategic misalignment hurts, especially when you don’t have a strategic voice. Because content comes from collaboration, including with Marketing, solid strategy is crucial. To get better at this means getting better as “business” people. Not working off simplified instructions passed through too many hands, but actually understanding what your senior leaders want, and how they want you to go about it. It’s about knowing what other teams like Marketing want to achieve, why, and how they want to achieve it – understanding the alignment that can overcome…
- …structural problems. Work with your boss – who probably isn’t a content person – to get your incentives right (not just manufacturing targets). To improve the relationship between Marketing and Content teams, managers need to work together and align incentives. The structural imbalance between Digital and Marketing has a use-by date, because Digital is eating the world. If Content people can be business people, and have a better understanding with Marketing people, the change will be an improvement. It’s your job to deserve a spot higher up the tree.
- It’s your job to understand the types of people you work with. Their Skills Things they care about Things they don’t care about Assumptions (about everything, but especially about ourselves and about others) And know your own.
- This isn’t a quick list of ways to solve everything. But like I said at the start…
- It’s complicated.