Creating content, especially in a lean marketing team, is an all-hands-on-deck endeavor. Having a dream team in place to create not only the social posts, blog pieces, and video snippets, but the strategy, big picture campaigns and creative long-term vision should be a top priority for marketers in 2015.
Source: www.b2bmarketinginsider.com
Michael Brenner makes an interesting list of all the various creative talents you would need in an ideal Content Marketing team. But while there’s no denying that this would be a dream team, it’s anything but lean.
Of course, he is totally right about the fact a combination of talents will get more done. Relying on just one content format (eg: blogs) produced by a single individual (eg: blog writer) could mean missing out potential success from visual content or podcasts. But does big team means bigger success?
Not necessarily.
As an Entrepreneur turned Marketer, I first wanted to use the term lean content marketing because I saw a lot of similarities between what SMBs needed to do with Content Marketing and what I had learned from the Lean Startup movement.
Startups are small by definition and have limited resources. But yet, they change the world. How do they do that? By experimenting and then focusing on one thing they do really really well. One thing on which they develop know-how, unfair advantage and eventually success. Yes, they eventually expand to other things and embrace more but only once they’ve become bigger and are no longer startups.
Our vision for content marketing for SMBs, built on discussing with hundreds of them who are using Scoop.it and on exchanging with many content marketing experts we regularly collaborate with, is that SMB content marketing should also be lean, in the same spirit as lean startups.
SMBs should experiment, fail, learn and experiment again until they find what works for them. Doing so is much easier with a small team of flexible people than by trying to combine all the talents that Michael mentions (which – to be clear – make total sense to have in a large Fortune 500 enterprise). And even once they found initial success, it’s also probably much faster and easier for them to start scaling it through on-demand marketing (recruiting free-lance talents, curating content to fill the gaps when needed, etc…).
Would SMBs call a 10-person team lean? Could they afford such a team?
I’d love to hear from you.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...
Ten is way too many people. Corporations don’t understand editorial content they understand marketing but they are not the same. Employing journalists won’t help if they are led by marketing people.
Good point @TomForemski:disqus. Beyond the managerial challenge to make any team with extreme diversity work together, there’s also the cultural challenge. Not easy.
Thanks for dropping by our blog: hope to catch up soon!