‘You can’t get the buy-in’: Marketers confess their biggest content challenges

Senior management buy-in

“If you don’t have a CMO who is willing to invest some of the media budget in the content and understand it has different metrics than a banner ad, then your life is hell. It makes your job 10,000 times harder. And let’s face it: You can’t get the buy-in. You won’t ever get it. Go work somewhere else. If your CMO is someone who is not a marketer at heart, they never are going to take $10 million out of digital and put it to social. You’re always gonna hit a wall.”

Who should own content?

“I personally think content marketing is a marketing function because it’s about perception of a brand by a consumer. But internally, there’s always  a fight where either it is disorganized or everyone is doing it differently, or nobody is owning it. Or worse, there are three teams, all creating content that competes with each other.”

Resources

“Internally, budget is always a struggle. When you come up with a campaign, it’s always about who is paying to make it successful, and it’s always is a battle between marketing and e-commerce. It sort of evolved, and we realized it. And we’re always fighting to get budget for digital. Digital is the first thing that gets cut. And internally, an e-commerce team wants everything to be direct response and they don’t focus on brand affinity. For us, we want to focus on brand affinity.”

Organizational silos

“There is so much internal competition. Everyone wants to own content. But maybe the group who is owning it doesn’t understand content. Anyway, it’s not like the customer understands or knows the difference between content produced by marketing, or PR, or public affairs. It’s not cohesive.”

Instagram stories — why?

“I can’t believe we have another channel for an identical product. This just makes everything more difficult.”