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Originally Posted On: It’s Time to Make the Move to a Modern Stack Marketing Website (truudigital.com)

 

If your company is experiencing high-growth and an expanding product portfolio, you need to go to market fast. Larger portfolios also mean larger buying committees and new stakeholders.

To engage these new customers, your marketing team needs to respond quickly with campaigns, collateral, and landing pages.

To quickly market new products while remaining true to your brand, your company must have a fast, flexible content marketing system in place. But what does that mean exactly? And how can you get there? With a modern, full-stack marketing website, that’s how.

What’s Full-Stack Marketing?

The term full-stack originated in the development world. It was first used to describe software developers who could perform duties in any area of technology whether backend, integrations, user experience (UX) or coding. A full-stack developer usually isn’t an expert in any specific engineering area, but they usually possess enough knowledge that they’re able to execute anything from development to architecture.

Full-stack marketing borrows from this concept to define marketers that can perform duties in any area of the marketing stack.

For your company to hit next-level status, you need to create a website that integrates the modern stack. But this poses many challenges, which we’ll go into greater detail about later in this post, such as:

• Maintaining content
• Keeping content organized
• Measuring content engagement and conversion

So, what does a modern stack marketing website build entail?

The Most Common Challenges of Implementing a Content Management System (CMS)

Content management systems often fall short of your expectations but this is mostly because of poor management. The CMS is usually operated by your marketing department which poses three unique, interlinked challenges:

1. Marketing must manage all content,
2. So, the department organizes the content in the most meaningful way for marketing managers.
3. But, the CMS can’t accurately measure how prospects are engaging with the content.

What this means is that—for this to work—you must come up with a plan that eases these challenges, and it’s much more than just automation.

7 Best Practices for Speeding Up Cross-Functional Content Operations

Marketers are very well-intentioned. But even the best of intentions can equate to herding cats when what’s needed is a better way to get the workflows streamlined. In other words, cross-functional content creation should be simplified while also attending to customer challenges and desires from every possible angle.

Ensure your marketing team and all involved departments understand their purpose and incentivize working together. Their collective creation and knowledge-sharing will benefit the company as a whole. The following are some of the best practices for speeding up the process of your content marketing system.

1. Review current content, how it’s consumed, and what’s lacking

Creating cross-functional content begins with creating useful content. Design a system that reviews all marketing materials every quarter and pair it with a metrics system of specific criteria to measure content efficacy.

2. Create an editorial board to audit and identify resources for creating content pillars

What, if any, research is needed? Do you need subject matter experts? Of the content assets you currently have, how easy would it be to repurpose them into various additional assets, such as blog posts, emails, or videos?

3. Choose internal communication channels wisely

Have you ever had a deadline quickly approaching, looked into the shared documents, and found nothing but your initial input? Consider communication channels that offer appropriate notifications or choose someone knowledgeable to educate personnel about various options for content management and other tech tools. After a presentation, choose a company-wide communication channel.

4. Establish task ownership and a structure for cross-function approvals

After you have a single communication channel, it’s easier to keep track of cross-functional content creation. Having clear deadlines for tasks, content creation, and content approval keeps your deliverables moving through the pipeline.

5. Create a content calendar

Each team tasked with a deliverable in a specific area should have a point person that knows realistically how long it takes to complete a certain task. Each team should prepare a timeline that works backward from the pillar’s due date and provides trackable task deadlines.

6. Create templates for repeatable tasks and content type workflows

If you expect a certain task will be done more than three times, create a template to streamline it. Which tasks would benefit from this? Using a workflow template can save time and keep key data organized before it’s given to the next person for the next task.

7. Use an analytics software that tracks content production and identifies bottlenecks

Are there certain tasks in your workflows that create burdens on staff? Can you adjust a timeline in order to speed up a specific process? When your editorial board reviews delivery rates, comparing on-time to missed deadlines, you’ll gain insight into creating more accurate timelines for your future projects.

4 Tips to Empower Your Marketing Team to Make Changes Without Engineering Resources

To empower your employees and improve their everyday decision making and delegation of resources, these four items are essential:

1. A well-defined and understood strategy
2. Clearly defined roles and associated responsibilities
3. Upfront coaching and skill-building
4. A culture of empowerment

At the end of the day, it is about sales. Sales enablement solutions should be more than just a content storehouse. Of course, your teams will see the inevitable gains of having all approved content right at their fingertips, but they’ll gain greater value with a solution that transforms live engagements with customers.

Final Thoughts

Your sales team needs more than a content management system to help them design winning presentations. They need a tool that lets them quickly pivot a conversation with customers in real-time.

They need a tool that shows them how customers interact with the content they receive and analyzes what works and what doesn’t. The ultimate, robust, modern stack marketing website works to enhance the overall experience – for customers and your teams.

Interested in learning more? Take a look at what our past clients say.

Truu Digital creates value for businesses by helping create value for customers. Check out our sales enablement solutions or reach out to us today.