Breaking Free of Content Marketing Admin

Marketing as a discipline is hard to define. This is one reason given for the seemingly endless chopping and changing of job titles at senior level. Some companies prefer to replace the “CMO” with a “Chief Customer Officer”, with others adding the word ‘experience’ in there. On occasion, the marketing element has been erased altogether, with organizations instead favoring the more analytical approach of the "Chief Data Officer".

However, surveys that examine why marketers get into the profession in the first place deliver intriguing insights. After interviewing 10 marketers a few years ago, one report found that the themes of storytelling, inspiring memorable businesses, and the opportunity to be more creative were among the main reasons why marketers chose to be marketers in the first place. While one respondent noted the satisfaction of an analytical approach, not one of them highlighted spending the majority of their time locating, tagging, managing, and approving a sea of marketing content and collateral as their dream career. We recently conducted our own research on the same topic, and unfortunately, it looks like many marketers are still finding themselves in a similar situation.

Admin Is Vital…But Suffocating For Creativity

It’s a fact of life that we can’t spend all day, every day on the exciting, paradigm busting campaigns that win awards, capture the public’s affection, and catapult our brand into the stratosphere. But accurate catalogues, up-to-date pricing, and marketing materials that strike the right note at the right time are also hugely valuable to any marketing operation.

The problem comes when the management of such bread and butter elements of marketing starts to dominate the day-to-day for the wrong people. When the organization has employed talented marketers with vision and the ability to find new opportunities, it is a monumental waste of resources to tie them up hunting down the most recent rights agreement for a single image.

Nor is it an adequate argument to say that the more mundane tasks should be the purview of more junior members of staff. In the first instance, content management is a business critical and senior level responsibility. Misplaced or inaccurate content can have costly ramifications. Secondly, junior marketers are hired as much for their vision and potential as their senior counterparts. The company’s efforts are much better spent mentoring and developing their nascent marketers, instead of leaving them parked at a screen, looking through several different systems and emailing various departments on the hunt for the assets belonging to a single pair of trousers.

Centralize The Way To Creativity

And yet, these tasks need to be done. The production of marketing content both on and offline is a constant and demanding process. For many organizations, this currently resides across multiple departments, in a variety of systems with hit-and-miss processes in place to manage them. But there is another way – one that releases the marketer from time and soul consuming tasks, in order to allow them the freedom needed to create those great campaigns which boost their brand's reputation.

In an exclusive survey conducted for censhare by London Research, The State of Universal Content Management 2020 found that market leaders, those utilizing an integrated and centralized content management hub, were 3.5 times more likely than mainstream companies to strongly agree that they were “consistently meeting or exceeding their communication goals” (28% vs 8%). They were also 2.5 times more likely to integrate workflows “for the best possible customer experience” (32% vs 13%).

Critically, across the board, 74% of those surveyed said they could add “significantly more value” to the business if the amount of content related admin work they carried out regularly, was reduced. With half their time spent on tasks that could be automated, many respondents (59%) agreed that they were wasting their time and money on such content related tasks.

You can download your copy of this exclusive research here, and learn more about the actions leading organizations are taking to reduce the burden on their marketing teams and driving more effective content operations, as well as reading the report authors’ recommendations.