5 Steps to Getting Visibility Across Your Marketing Operation

* We are thrilled to share this guest post by Liz O’Neill at Kapost

Visibility is the difference between a mediocre marketing operation and successful one.

When you have visibility, you know what content is being published across your organization, who is responsible for it, where it’s being published and when. This clarity facilitates consistent, relevant, and targeted brand messaging that will engage leads, convert prospects and drive business.

Without visibility you risk publishing duplicate and irrelevant content. utdated content with broken links fester on your website or blog. Workflows and approval processes are disorganized and ineffective. As a result, you alienate rather than serve your readers.

So how do you get visibility across all your marketing?

1. Conduct a Content Audit

Before you can fix a visibility problem, you need to know where you stand. Find out by conducting a content audit. A content audit is essentially an inventory that identifies every single content asset your organization has published, where that content lives, what themes and personas it addresses, and whether or not it’s still relevant. Once complete, your team can work on archiving outdated content, and identifying what content you need to develop more of.

2. Identify Actual Content Needs

One of the major benefits of a content audit is that it exposes the gaps are in your brand communication. All of the content you publish should be directly correlated to the larger strategic goals of your organization. Pose these types of questions to figure out what holes there are in your content library:

• Is there a persona whose needs and interests you’re ignoring?
• What business goals are we neglecting in our content?
• Is there a market or product line with deficient assets?

Once you identify gaps, you can build a plan for filling them.

3. Assign Roles and Responsibilities

Having visibility into the people and processes surrounding your content is just as — if not more — important that having visibility into the content itself.  Before you even begin developing your content, identify who is responsible for writing, designing, editing and approving it. Document this process and communicate it to your team so that everyone knows what their responsibilities and timelines.

4. Organize an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is essential for keeping your entire team on track. This calendar should be a holistic one, incorporating your content campaigns across your organization. And all team members should have access to it. Too often, marketers try to operate with multiple editorial calendars. As a result, content launches are disorganized and conflicting.

5. Analyze and Share Performance

If you don’t understand how your content performed, you will struggle to be successful with it. Have a system for tracking the traffic, leads, shares, and new business your content drove. Ideally, your tracking system provides data not only on the final results like lead count and new business won, but also the consumption patterns and behavior of your prospects — from interest to purchase.

Enterprise businesses who don’t have visibility into their content aren’t just missing a big opportunity to win new business, they’re playing with fire and hurting their brand. Want more tips on getting visibility across enterprise organizations? We’re teaming up with Motorola Solutions and  ANNUITAS for a webinar, “How to Distribute Content on a Global Scale.” Register here.

Author: Guest post by Liz O’Neil @LizKONeill is Content Marketing Manager for Kapost.