Here are the five levers B2B fintech CMOs can pull when they are serious about content for brand, demand, and reputational reasons.
1. Team Structure
Be intentional about team structure. Leave this to chance, and you risk content becoming a silo. Or developing cross-functionally (good) without impetus or leadership (bad).
Ok. What could team structure look like? Your content team — or a marcomms department weighted towards creative content — could mirror an in-house agency. For example, you could have a content director with reports for content creation, distribution, performance analysis, and content design. (If you can go all in, consider product management and UX design too — or at least standing up frequent collaboration).
2. Editorial Processes
Your people need frameworks and processes for deciding content marketing strategies, populating editorial calendars, delegating repurposing and distribution, and overseeing all designing and writing. While letting smart folk work this out and ‘get on with it’ may sound OK, it’s a common trap. Document the processes so staff departures don’t devolve content into a less mature state.
3. Brand Guardianship
Be watchful and realistic about how content can be used (and misused) for political purposes that are either irrelevant or downright harmful to your agreed marketing strategy. Saying no is easier with standardized processes for
- Briefing content needs around product development
- Making design and copy decisions ahead of time
- Limiting approval, legal, and regulatory bottlenecks
- Triaging stakeholder demands with insight and data.
Instead of ‘do more with less’, consider how you can do less .. while squeezing more from it (e.g., tighter channel focus, manageable cadence, careful redistribution). Build for proactivity rather than reactivity.
4. Content Governance
It matters who ‘owns’ this. As CMO, you can be transformative. You can be the enterprise content champion. Or next best, sponsor a director with sufficient influence to do so. Broker peace and contain turf wars before they start. Build consensus around who runs what and why:
- Document your internal clients and stakeholders
- Analyze who affects content decision-making
- Assess which in-house experts are ‘enablers’
- Set fair boundaries (e.g. no more ‘random acts of content’).
5. Total Content Experience
But it’s not set and forget. Educate fellow execs to understand the content lifecycle is eternal. The work is never done (sorry). Each new ‘piece’ you publish creates future work demands … think of internal linking, optimization, and so on. Particularly overlooked areas include sunsetting underperforming and irrelevant content, wholesale deletion, re-categorization, and in-site search experience.
