The People Behind World-Class Content Marketing

Many marketing agencies aspire to provide and even claim to offer a world-class service. But taking that term seriously points us in a different direction.

A world-class marketing service is extremely rare because it rests on three factors that few agencies master: vision, process, and people. You need to have the vision — and ambition — to imagine what a world-class marketing service entails. Then, you need to put pen to paper to formalize the process that will deliver world-class results and recruit the people who are capable of doing the same.

In an upcoming white paper, I’ll cover at length the three-stage process we at Sharp Pen are developing to offer our clients world-class content marketing. Briefly, we think it begins with an audit where a C-level marketing strategist assesses three things:

1) the business value (sales opportunities) content is generating across an organization’s go-to-market strategy

2) the narratives the organization is reinforcing about itself and whether they are actually differentiating the company from its competitors

3) the frameworks and technologies the client is using to measure content’s business impact

Then, the audit will lead to an action plan, which will lay out the business value content could generate if the company actually had an optimized content funnel, differentiated narratives, and effective measurement frameworks and technologies.

The audit and action plan exercise covers the first stage of our three-stage content marketing process: narrative building Once you know the narratives that will position you as your customers’ only option, you can create a quarterly editorial calendar that covers what assets you’ll create to reinforce those narratives and how you’ll go to market with them. Then, you’re ready to produce world-class content (which is where most agencies start).

But this should all raise a big question: who is going to do all of this? Determining the narratives that will drive an organization’s entire GTM is a very high-level task. It is not just CMO-level brand building; it is the ground where a marketing leader and CEO meet, and thus it must be handled by someone with the experience, strategic vision, and gravitas to collaborate with the entire C-suite on the narrative direction of the organization. In addition, it’s great to articulate a comprehensive content strategy and distinctive narratives, but if the content intended to reinforce these narratives isn’t as compelling as they are, the entire strategy will collapse in the implementation phase. So, people are as critical to a world-class content marketing service’s impact as the vision and process they implement.

The ideal team to execute our three-stage content marketing process would include the following members:

1) C-level marketing strategist: This person spearheads the content audit and narrative building exercise. They also help the client envision how content will play a role in the broader marketing and business strategy. This is a person who has the gravitas to interview the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company and advise them on marketing strategy (including both narratives and GTM).

2) World-class editor: This person has operated in renowned business newsrooms and editorial outfits. They may be a former Wall Street Journal or New York Times journalist or McKinsey or Bain editor. They work with the CMO to develop an editorial calendar that will truly differentiate the client from its competitors and set the agenda for the client’s industry. They also edit the content, ensuring it adheres to the highest possible standards of editorial quality.

3) Writer: This person collaborates with the editor to create content. They may have a PhD in literature or a background as a journalist. They have outstanding writing credentials and are also top-notch thinkers who could one day develop into world-class editors. They create content assets that are more than just a blog post or byline, assets that reposition the client in their industry and in their customers’ eyes.

4) Account manager: This person is the client’s main point of contact and advocate. They understand marketing strategy and how to deliver an excellent client service. They also coordinate among the team members to make sure everyone is aligned on strategy and delivery.

5) Project manager: This person makes sure the work gets done on time. Part of a world-class offer is superior communication and organization. The project manager owns that dimension of the account.

6) Possible additions: Designer, video producer, SEO consultant: These specialists should all be on hand to collaborate if the marketing strategist, editor, and client agree that outside help is needed in any of these service areas.

There are two reasons very few marketing agencies offer this level of talent, especially the C-level marketing strategist and the world-class editor. First, very few have the vision required to recruit this talent; even if they claim to be world-class, they haven’t put the thought into what building a world-class marketing team really means. They have a couple very experienced people at the top of their organization, and then they hire cheap junior people to do the work because that is what agencies typically do. They haven’t challenged themselves to think and build bigger.

Second, this team is expensive. So, to justify the cost, the impact of the service needs to be transformative for the client. A team like this cannot just create content. They need to build the narratives, set the strategy, and create the content that transform their clients into the leaders of their industries and put them in a category of their own. As a result of this team’s work, clients should not sound like any of their competitors; they should emerge as the undisputed experts on their customers’ problems and the visionaries who are building the future of their sectors. The team’s narratives establish this, their strategies make it possible, and their content delivers it.

If your agency cannot show you the path from, say, $10 million in revenue to $50 million and how marketing will accelerate that journey, they are not operating on a strategic level (let alone having a strategic impact). But if they can, the value of their services is infinitely greater than tactical agencies that just create content and rely on you to figure out what to do with it.

With generative AI on the rise, the hollowness of the commodity content that most businesses produce has never been more apparent. But human marketers have much greater value to offer than synthesizing the information other companies have already published.

The narratives you build and the content you create can transform you into your customers’ no. 1 option, accelerate sales, and empower you to charge a premium because you are perceived as providing singular and unmatched value.

The question both agencies and their customers have to ask is: Are we ready to be bigger and better than a commodity? And are we bold enough to recruit the people who can help us accomplish exactly that?