Note: This post was written by Rochi Zalani, staff writer at Elite Content Marketer.
A content marketing strategy is crucial. But it gets tricky when you expand from a local to a global audience. On one hand, you want your brand messaging to be unified so that your brand is easily recognizable. On the other hand, tight consistency may not take into account cultural nuances.
Andi Robinson (photo via Twitter)
Andi Robinson gets it: She is the global digital content and brand leader at Corteva Agriscience with 17 years of experience in marketing across various industries.
At the Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup, Andi talked about how she runs a successful global marketing campaign.
Andi’s mind map will be our guidepost on navigating these wide waters:
1) Get leadership buy-in
Not all leaders understand what content marketing is, why it’s important, and why the company should make an investment in it.
It’s your job to address these apprehensions. Establish the importance of content marketing before making your case. After this, let the leaders know what exactly you are doing. Create monthly, quarterly, and yearly plans for your content marketing efforts.
Leaders should walk the walk because that’s who your employees emulate. To ensure this happens, make the ask as clear as possible. Define what you expect your leaders to do and make it easy for them to begin taking action right away.
Let this be your #1 ask: Ask leaders to join a content council or nominate someone from their department who would be a good fit.
2) Create a content council
A content council is a group of people who are your advocates for content implementation in the organization. Ideally, individuals would be appointed from each department to participate to keep the entire company in sync.
You can ask your leaders to nominate someone who is:
- Passionate about content
- Has influence among their peers
- Is familiar with their market and local processes
After you’ve gathered the council members, create a charter of why and how this council exists. Answer questions like:
- What will the council members do (and not do)?
- What are the responsibilities of different council members?
- Is the council permanent or for a specific period of time?
- How frequently will the members meet?
At Corteva, the council works on two tracks: content and content marketing.
“Content” defines what different kinds of content the organization will create (e.g., videos, infographics, etc.) and “content marketing” defines which distribution channels, what metrics will be tracked, workshops for new hires, etc.
It is also the job of the content council to collectively build a content philosophy.
3) Build a content philosophy
A content philosophy guides each piece of content you create. Building it becomes especially important for a global company because it helps keep your brand messaging consistent across continents.
But how do you go about creating it?
There are a lot of factors to consider, but broadly, you should be able to answer: What do you want your content marketing efforts to do for you?
For instance, do you want to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry? Do you want to build brand awareness and credibility through content? All of these are part of your content philosophy.
This is how Corteva does it:
For Andi, each piece of content should align with at least two items on this list. You can create a similar benchmark for your company. After having all this in place, it is essential that you create a system that keeps working smoothly without intervention.
4) Create training programs
Content marketing toolkits ensure that your content marketing efforts keep running like a well-oiled machine. Toolkits can help someone in the council find answers to FAQs, aid in onboarding new hires and allow local teams to run successful content marketing campaigns.
At Corteva, employees can find all workshop materials in one place:
You can also include other things like your style guide, SEO checklist and press documentation in this toolkit.
Next, take automation further using the right tools.
5) Find and integrate the right tools
You will need different tools for each area of content marketing: social media scheduler, CRM, CMS, etc. All of these tools should be inter-connected when you run a global campaign.
Break down silos to share content globally, even if your campaigns aren’t identical across countries. While there are many tools in the market, you don’t always need all of them. Make the best of whatever tools you can get and remember that communication is key.
Best practices that can make a difference
These two best practices can help you elevate your content marketing efforts even further.
1) Have proper measurement protocols
Data helps content marketers understand what truly matters, especially if it’s their first time running a campaign. It can also help keep them motivated when their efforts show results leading further into them asking the right questions when something does or doesn’t work.
This is how Corteva decides which numbers matter:
Analyze your campaign metrics before, during, and after your campaign. You can keep some metrics standardized, but remember to tweak your measurements based on each region.
2) Make a plan, but be flexible
The biggest challenge about running a global content marketing strategy is keeping the overarching brand goal consistent with different local audiences. It is important to recognize that each content marketing journey across countries and states can be different. Keep different local KPIs and common global KPIs.
Take digital maturity, market penetration, and other factors into account and make local, rather than global decisions.
On-demand recording
Watch the on-demand recording of Andi’s talk at the Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup: