iMPACT Has Created A Big Problem For Us. Is anyone else feeling the pain?
Leaders
Let me explain.
We started our relationship with Marcus over 3 1/2 years ago and have continued strengthening our content strategy with the rest of the iMPACT team the last few years. We have been so successful at what we've been taught. When I say successful, I mean we are seeing the results that all of you have been seeing if you've implemented what you've been taught. Yes, we have seen our traffic explode with our content ranking, more qualified leads coming in, building a better relationship with our sales team by developing content that they need, want and can use. That's all great.
The downside of all of this is that we have created a much bigger problem. When starting with a small team (content writer, videographer, HubSpot specialist/web designer), I never planned for what's happening now. Our organization is now starting to get it. We have every customer-facing department (sales, service, customer support, and finance), all requesting written or video content to solve a host of problems with a common goal of improving the overall customer experience.
Now some of you may say this is a great problem to have. Yes, I can see that, but as an executive, I see my team sinking into content "quicksand" where their content request lists are getting longer than what they can, organize, strategize, and produce. I need to do something about it or it's going to create a morale problem or I am going to burn them out. I can already see it's affecting my team's effectiveness, output, and work product.
Do you see it now? For me to solve this issue it's costs, resources, prioritization, and a management issue. One of the biggest challenges we all face with becoming a content-led organization, is managing the perception of our organization of what we've become and pony up the resources to continue this vision.
I have a number of ideas on how to solve this problem. Some of them include:
1) Start by doing a better job of measuring and communicating our ROI.
2) Providing content as a service to our thousands of customers. By taking a few of them on at a time, I can internally grow our content teams and grow this through sales and revenue.
3) Take a realistic approach to this and manage with what we have by lowering our and our customer's expectations (not a really good solution).
No matter what this is going to fuel some interesting discussions at the executive team level that we're becoming a media and content company and we are going to have to dedicate more resources and a budget, or not.
I am interested to hear what others think that have already gone through this and others that have not.
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Sona Nambiar
Hey,
Here are my initial thoughts, and I also have a question for you (in the video). I hope this is helpful for you, because this is a genuine challenge I have experienced many, many times throught my career as a content management professional.
First, this problem beats the alternative, right? But as my friend Ari Weinzeig says, "Success means you get better problems." (link)
Okay - so here are some ideas you may want to consider...
1. With a giant backlog of content needs, can you start with a "backlog grooming" session where you do a "Keep, combine, kill" activity? This was introduced in the book Traction and how a management team is supposed to prioritize their issues list. Maybe you can combine a few topics into fewer content pieces, maybe that gets your list down 30-40%, and maybe there are some topics that you say "okay, that's a nice to have and not a need to have" so you kill it.
2. Expand the team - Marissa is awesome and is killing it. Maybe it's time to bring on a second writer, an entry-level journalist, to work with Marissa. Freelancers are another option but I'm not sure you'll be happy with the end result.
This is really where there's multiple things that are at play, it's not a one-answer/quick-fix solution.
Some of this may call for additional resources or reallocation of resources so Marissa can fully be in the content manager role, better alignment with the sales team, and better systems set up in Hubspot to track which content is actually making the biggest impact so you can learn from it and apply going forward.
Here are some tips to creating support content in a maintainable manner:
Video can be fantastic, but if you overuse it for support resources, you will end up in a content maintenance nightmare.