Do You Have A Chief Content Officer Yet?
By Bill King
Do you have a Chief Content Officer in your equipment manufacturing company? I’ve yet to find one in the water and wastewater industry. There are many examples in more B2C enterprises such as Goldman Sachs, HP or Uber. As consumers turn to online search and phone apps more frequently to understand issues and identify solutions, companies are finding they need to take a more strategic approach to generating the types of reader-facing content that will guarantee them a fair share of online interest.
If you do a LinkedIn search for Chief Content Strategists, you’ll see a bewildering list of content marketing startups where these job titles proliferate. Examples include SKIP, EDited, Content Empress, ElementIQ and InnoFuture. It’s no surprise when the latest Content Marketing Institute data suggests 83% of companies outsource their content creation.
Over the next decade, I expect we’ll see the first CCOs arrive in our industry. The growing importance of marketing is beginning to be seen already. Companies are already recognizing that their corporate websites need to do more than act as an online business card or brochure for what they manufacture.
Marketers are being asked by their sales leaders to “generate more demand” for their salespeople. We are already seeing Demand Generator job titles appear in the industry. And to generate demand, marketers are having to ask themselves what marketing content and promotion will attract prospective customers. This in turn is leading to many conversations about subject matter expertise within water and wastewater companies and who they can tap to create content that engages prospects and starts the demand process.
As more and more companies join the fray, the supply of good content rises and competes for prospects attention as poor performing content gets lost in the lower pages of a Search results set or the Unread section of the Inbox. Eventually a content marketing star will rise in this industry like a phoenix from the ashes of an outdated go-to-market strategy and most likely anoint themselves a Chief Content Officer endorsed by a CMO or progressive Sales VP.
In the meantime, I suggest looking around your organization. Encourage that engineer with a penchant for writing peer-reviewed content. Support that sales manager who has a good network on LinkedIn and posts regularly. You’ll be richly rewarded.