How do you ensure that your content is relevant and targeted to your audience? How can you ensure that it addresses any questions they might have? The answer is simple: Content operations.
What is Content Operations?
It is a relatively new term that has entered into standard business language, even if most people don’t fully understand it. Content operations refer to an organizational structure and department tasked with managing content and customer experiences (CX). In more traditional companies, CX falls under marketing. But many of today’s B2B organizations are changing their models for how they view their customers in order to create better buying experiences. According to the experts at Contentful, “Content operations encompasses the set of processes, people and technologies for strategically planning, distributing and analyzing content”.
Content is an essential part of all businesses, whether you’re running an eCommerce site, an ad agency, or something else entirely. However, managing content can quickly become overwhelming if you don’t know what tools are available to you or how to optimize your strategy to make sure your content team’s efforts are successful.
Defining Operational Excellence
Operational excellence means providing a high level of customer service, regardless of whether customers contact you through phone, email, or social media. If you don’t include a CX goal in your original business plan, it’s time to add one! Creating a plan for CX operations can make you stand out from your competitors, who may be falling short on customer service. It also helps prevent common operational issues and gives you an objective measurement against which your staff can assess their performance.
How to Optimize Your Operations
1. Enhance your customer experience with real-time marketing based on their behavior, voice, and sentiment (KPI: conversation ratio). Analyze results in 24/7 mobile view – how are you doing today?
2. Compare 24/7 different segments of customers by geographic, demographic, and behavioral patterns, i.e., gender, age, and lifestyle (KPI: leads generated for a given campaign), so you can set up different digital campaigns to reach various groups based on their habits.
3. Identify and target key customer segments based on purchasing history and/or online behavior (KPI: better leads, ROI).
4. Optimize your customer experience by creating digital campaigns explicitly designed for individual groups of customers at each point in their purchase funnel (KPI: improve conversion rate and sales per visitor).
5. Tailor these operations for each group by making them specific, relevant, and timely (KPI: more conversations, increased credibility).
To truly have a cohesive, multichannel customer experience (CX), you need someone or something working behind the scenes, listening for customer and community feedback. These tools need to collect, evaluate and act on it in real-time—or at least quickly enough that they can incorporate an individual’s needs before they spread negative reviews and comments online.
How Digital Marketers Can Benefit From It
A content operation refers to a team or department whose sole purpose is managing content, whether in-house written content or guest posts. The reason it’s so important? Customers judge companies by their interactions with other customers. And if they don’t have any, they’ll instantly hold your business through a negative lens.
Content operations are critical to achieving success with content marketing. Your customers expect more than a one-off piece of content; they want to engage with an organization on a regular basis.