The B2B marketing department has long consisted of four key disciplines: brand, content, demand generation, and product. These are crucial facets of marketing that few would dispute. But there’s a fifth discipline that’s only now rising to the ranks of importance. You guessed it—content experience.
While today’s marketing department may not be ready to fully commit to this emerging category by hiring someone to lead the charge, fearless CMOs of the future will see the content experience as akin to the customer experience, and resource up. Here are three reasons why the marketing department of the future will include a Content Experience Manager:
1. The Past Predicts the Future
History tends to repeat itself, and we’ve seen this before. A decade ago, when marketing automation was an emerging category, few people had roles dedicated to managing this software. Yet today you’d be hard-pressed to find a marketing team of a certain size without a marketing automation platform owned and managed by a Marketing Operations Manager. As new and disruptive technologies enter the scene, roles are created to manage both the technology and the process.
But technology isn’t always the impetus. Think about UX designers. There was no technology that created space for them on the marketing team. Instead, a recognized need supported by research on how people buy opened up a spot for UX designers on the marketing team of today. There’s no doubt that as content experience earns its place through technology and research to support its importance, you’ll begin to see openings for Content Experience Managers across job boards and LinkedIn.
2. Content is Already the Center of the Marketing Universe
Content marketing quickly moved from a tactic used by marketing to generate page views to fueling the sales and marketing engine. As content extends to all corners of the marketing department and is leveraged across the buyer journey and the organization (from sales and marketing to customer success) how that content is experienced will come under the microscope.
Today’s content experience reaches across the customer journey as content is used at many key customer touch points. If we care about the end-to-end customer experience (as we should!) then content experience continues to inch its way closer to that critical tipping point, when it’s no longer an emerging category and instead, firmly entrenched as a facet of marketing in its own right.
3. End-to-End Content Experience Management Requires a Bird’s Eye View
Because content experience is expansive and extends across the entire marketing department (and beyond!), its management is best served by someone with an overarching view and a clear picture of all facets of the department.
Who has this view? The CMO and / or the VP of Marketing. The problem is that these roles, while well positioned to see the entire experience, are not well positioned to proactively manage or iterate on the experience. So the result is largely reactive. When there’s a break, or a nonsensical or poor experience (think a broken email link or irrelevant content recommendations), leadership takes note and sends out an urgent request for a fix. But to whom do they send it to? Whose responsibility is the content experience?
Or what if no one notices that breakdown in the experience. It persists for days, weeks, and months, and your prospects look elsewhere. That opportunity is lost. And who among us can afford a lost lead, a missed MQL, or a squandered sale.
As focus shifts toward the importance of content experience, the need for another person with a full view of the entire experience—who can constantly review, update, and iterate on the experience to optimize for both the buyer and the company—becomes less of a pipedream and more of a recognized need.
Introducing the Content Experience Manager
What exactly would the Content Experience Manager be responsible for? And what type of marketer is best suited for this role? For early adopters (or curious minds), we’ve thought through what a Content Experience Manager job description might look like.
While today’s marketing department may not be ready for a Content Experience Manager quite yet, it’s also not far off. As a content experience company, we’ve taken the first step by hiring for just such a position. And we firmly believe that as marketers turn their focus to the experience, the marketing department of the future is destined to include a Content Experience Manager.
So what do we do in the meantime? Find out who owns the content experience in your organization and how other companies are doing it by downloading the Who Owns the Content Experience? ebook.
