The KAPOST CONTENT

MATURITY MODEL™Executive Overview

The Kapost Content Maturity Model™

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The Kapost Maturity Model

The Kapost Maturity Model is a guide to getting started on a successful marketing content journey.

Developed from years of helping hundreds of marketing content innovators, our model offers practical advice on how to start fast and build a best-in-class marketing operation.

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Content Lifecycle

The Kapost Content Maturity Model™

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ChaosAt the chaos stage, marketers struggle to efficiently and effectively execute a marketing strategy and an aligned customer experience. Every day feels like a fire drill, and under such high pressure, important steps are forgotten or poorly executed. In chaos, there’s rarely insight into performance. Teams are siloed, with little collaboration between business units and functions. Many teams live in the chaos stage, and they can’t find the time to implement quick changes for long-term benefit.

When experiencing chaos:• Processes don’t exist or aren’t

followed, and efficiency suffers. • Marketers are forced to be

reactive to immediate needs, leading to ad-hoc content creation and duplicate efforts.

• Siloed departments create disjointed messaging and a diluted customer experience.

• Organizations have no way to track performance and optimize for future campaigns.

The Kapost Content Maturity Model™

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AwarenessSolving content chaos is a complex process, involving several stakeholders from across the organization. Without first establishing awareness of the problem through data, metrics, and examples, strategies for change often fail due to lack of buy-in. The awareness stage is critical for gaining support from both strategic (high-level) and tactical (execution) job roles, making key stakeholders aware of the negative impact of misalignment on the customer experience. During this stage, the marketing content champion must present the long-term vision and begin to implement the plan, starting with a core team resulting in quick wins that prove immediate value and cement buy-in.

When awareness is established:

• The company understands there is a content chaos problem that severely inhibits their customer experience and revenue growth.

• There is a clear strategy in place for fixing the content problem.

• The marketing content champion has delivered quick wins, giving internal stakeholders confidence in the path forward.

The Kapost Content Maturity Model™

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VisibilityOnce the problem is acknowledged and buy-in has been earned, visibility is the next step to a mature content operation. With no process for storing, tagging, and surfacing marketing content, internal teams can’t locate the content they need and performance suffers. Also, a lack of visibility into current and upcoming content leads to duplicative efforts, as teams create assets that already exist or have been planned. During the visibility stage, marketers must implement practices to (1) view marketing plans and timelines across campaigns and company-wide initiatives to create better, more relevant content, and (2) access marketing content that’s already been created to use at every stage of the buyer’s journey, so internal content consumers can use that content to support business objectives.

When visibility is gained:• Internal content consumers and

creators can find and use content to better achieve business objectives.

• The organization sees decreases in content waste and duplicative efforts across teams.

• Marketing gets significantly fewer requests for ad-hoc content and collateral.

• Insight into corporate initiatives, timelines, and deliverables makes planning ahead possible and efficient.

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AlignmentDuring this stage, the focus is on eliminating misaligned efforts, both internally and externally. Internally, different teams work within disparate tools and processes, and struggle to communicate plans, share insights, and collaborate effectively. Also, without established processes, hand-offs between teams are painful and sloppy, and important items fall through the cracks and cause frustration. This lack of alignment across teams—each creating and sharing inconsistent content through different channels and stages of the funnel—leads to a jarring and disjointed customer experience.

When alignment is achieved:• A feedback loop develops around shared

objectives and data exchange, so content creators and consumers can align their efforts to the customer lifecycle.

• Internal stakeholders strategically repurpose and replicate campaigns and content, supporting brand consistency and alignment.

• Marketers gain insight into upcoming plans, and can review the impact of current strategies implemented by other business units.

• Getting internal teams to work together results in a consistent customer experience, connected across channels and touchpoints.

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OptimizationOnce alignment is achieved, organizations move into the optimization stage. Instead of driving marketing initiatives forward based on instinct or opinion, marketers focus on creating a data-driven customer experience. With a systematic operation in place, internal processes can continuously improve and scale for global collaboration and alignment. Furthermore, feedback loops must be established so performance at every stage of the customer lifecycle (full-funnel metrics) can be pulled from across teams and technologies. The optimization stage is continuous, allowing companies with a strong foundation of visibility and alignment to innovate more quickly through constant insight and analysis.

When optimization is supported:• The content operation scales

systematically across the entire organization.

• Internal processes are continuously improved for more efficient execution.

• Marketers pull extensive data on content performance across the customer experience, and gain insight into content performance across teams and channels.

• Organizations become truly data-driven, focusing resources on the most effective marketing content and initiatives.

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The Kapost Content Maturity Model™

Getting Started

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