Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
How many media properties does your company have?
Yes, I ask you to count the newsletters, websites, campaign microsites, blogs, communities and resource centers that your company actively maintains.
Many of you probably have this number handy right away. For others it may take a moment. You might ask, “Well, our blog is integrated into our website. Does that count as one or two?” If it’s an integrated core area of your website, count it as one. Eventually a group of you will just smile and say, “I have no idea.” Ten? Twenty?”
If it makes you feel any better, we just worked with a large B2B tech company with over 150 web products. Taking newsletters into account, the total number of owned media properties rose to 176.
And yes, they had an Excel spreadsheet listing them all.
Let the happy garden fill with weeds
For a few years (around 2016 to 2018), companies made a concerted effort to optimize their web properties. Marketers often embellish this with labels like “2020 Initiatives” or “The 2020 Project.” They were trying to weed out the “weeds” of their web properties – product or campaign microsites that were outdated or just an eyesore.
Spoiler alert: it didn't go well. Many marketing teams have been unable to convince cross-functional colleagues that their pet projects are considered weeds. Others feared that the technology they used to create the platform would be limited if not enough sites used it. Others simply never had the time, budget, or resources to exit the platform gracefully. Therefore, the circumcision projects ended up at the bottom of the priority list.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, most companies have not renewed their efforts to clean up their content garden. With little new web content introduced in recent years, the focus is on improving the most important media content – the website.
However, we see real change emerging as we enter 2024. Marketers are shifting their focus to owned media to get better first-party data and increasing their efforts to launch new platforms.
New initiatives we are considering include:
- Content Hubs were introduced to escape the limitations of PDF and other more document-oriented content containers.
- Email newsletters are segmented for subscribers based on the customer journey.
- Resource centers and blogs provide centralized access to thought leadership programs, influencer programs, podcast episodes, and webinar series.
- Communities are emerging as marketers increase their focus on customer support, training, and ongoing education.
But companies have not learned the lessons of previous cleanup attempts. They view these platforms from the perspective of “projects” or “campaigns” – short-term or one-off initiatives – rather than an ongoing content product. However, calling a content product a temporary platform, product launch page, or campaign hub makes it less effective because it is not a strategic business proposition.
I often ask company executives, “How important is (the media property being discussed)?” This could be the company blog, the resource center, the Friday newsletter, or even the company website.
If the executive doesn't say that the content vehicle is as important as the company's products, I ask, “Why is it there?”
If the executive agrees that the content platform is as important as the products, I ask, “Why not add a product manager or team?”
Owned media are also working media
I recently argued with the CMO of a large company. He didn't want to invest in the company's web properties or video platform because they weren't “work media.”
Working media refers to the part of the advertising budget that reaches the target group – i.e. what appears on the screen or in printed form. The non-work media component includes agency fees, market research, tools, etc. In general, at least 85% of the advertising budget should go to work media.
While not exactly equal, the CMO viewed the owned media effort as dysfunctional media – and not worth spending so much money on.
I didn't suggest that they spend the millions they spend on television advertising and other media placements on a blog, resource center, or community. I pointed out that spending less than 1% of TV's budget on owned media properties suggests that they don't care whether these content products exist.
Those responsible for this new strategy
As proprietary digital media platforms become an incredibly important part of marketing efforts, the demand for editorial product managers in marketing is likely to increase.
A traditional media company's products are easy to identify – the books, newspapers, magazines, television shows, radio shows, films, etc. on the market.
With modern digital marketing, product and service-oriented companies can also have such digital media products. In the early days of the Internet, companies realized that an always-on media property such as a website, email newsletter, or blog could circumvent their need to constantly advertise on other media properties. Then, as noted, the 2010s continued with these same companies competing for attention by entertaining, educating, inspiring, and otherwise attracting these audiences. Companies realized they could become media.
However, many companies have also failed to establish responsible teams and charters to manage these owned media as products. They treated them as projects, digital billboards, time-limited access to information, or temporary campaigns to achieve short-term results and be replaced.
They fill their weedy gardens with campaigns that have no defined purpose or objective. People fight to keep them alive and people fight to let them die. Both are probably right. The garden doesn't hurt anything, but it doesn't help either.
However, some companies create flowering gardens without weeds. These companies codify a skill set where every published media property has an editorial product manager – a person or team with “content gardening” skills.
Editorial Product Manager Skills
We find that a successful editorial product manager has these skills:
1. Editorial/content/journalism
These skills don't necessarily relate to writing or content creation, although these people can probably do that. It refers to managing the quality of the platform from the customer (or audience) perspective. These skills allow a team or individual to act as an “arbiter of good” – recognizing, acknowledging, and having the power to approve what looks good.
2. Product management and design thinking
With these core competencies, the individual or team can build, manage and change the media product by prioritizing the needs of the audience over the internal pressures coming from functions across the organization.
This person or team must have aligned business goals and the ability to manage that alignment. Assume the business goal of a thought leadership blog as a media product is to generate leads. In this case, the editorial product manager shouldn't measure it against a brand awareness goal or capitulate to the request to inject content that doesn't directly support lead generation goals because “it's the only blog we have.”
3. Technology and data skills
Every successful media product is not measured by vanity metrics like overall performance or views. It is measured by the impact on the target group. These metrics can be positive comments, replies, views, or other qualitative metrics. However, it is more likely that the metrics are numbers, such as: E.g., first-party data collection, audience acquisition, marketing journey conversions, etc. An editorial product manager must be able to access this data and assemble the technological capabilities to capture and utilize the right data at the right time.
4. Business and marketing acumen
If you treat your own media platforms as strategically as you treat products and services, you should create, manage and measure them as such. They also deserve to be supported and developed further. Therefore, the editorial product manager must be able to market their own media platform, build on its success, communicate this success internally and externally and operate the platform similar to a profit and loss statement.
ServiceNow does this amazingly well with its own media properties workflow. The digital magazine is not a digital campaign or a temporary content hub. It is a company product. The platform includes all types of content – trending articles, a quarterly magazine, guides and even editorial courses. It is a media product with multiple ways for customers to engage with it.
Richard Murphy and Sheila Dowd operate like a media company and lead Workflow as editors and publishers. Richard focuses on content (see skills one and three), and Sheila handles audience development and paid and organic search (see skills two and four).
Use your strategic content products
When counting your company's media experiences, look at them through the lens of a product portfolio. What should you keep? What should you quit? What balances business goals and a purpose you recognize? Which ones make economic sense to keep as media products and which ones are best eliminated as simple campaign initiatives?
If any of these questions do not provide a clear answer, remove them from the Content Garden. You get a garden full of media products that can be grown with the appropriate people, processes and technologies.
Marketing thought leader Seth Godin says, “Don’t find customers for your products; Find products for your customers.” In the world of marketing in 2024, I would tweak that a bit: “Don’t find an audience for your content; Find the right content for your audience.”
Your own media assets are the most powerful factor in attracting, growing and retaining your audience. Treat her like that.
It's your story. Say it well.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
