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Your Next Marketing Hire: The Content Experience Manager

Within various marketing positions in a company (demand gen, design UX, digital marketing and content marketing), no one person owns the full content experience — at least, not at most companies. If you’re serious about creating a content experience aligned among departments and unifying communication and collaboration across an organization, then it’s time you think about adding the role of a content experience manager.

In the below (slightly edited) excerpt from my new book, "F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue & Relationships," I take a deep dive into what a content experience manager is.

Introducing the content experience manager

A skilled content experience manager is capable not only of unifying your marketing team, but also of interfacing with the rest of your organization and making sure your content experience is aligned across departments.

If you’re looking for a good comparison of what a content experience manager does, the sales enablement manager might come closest, as each is deeply concerned with how content is presented to prospects and customers as a reflection of the business.

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A stat from Salesforce says 50% of deals stall in a pipeline due to the customer not understanding the relevance of your product or service.

The sales enablement manager is tasked with ensuring sales reps place content in ways that create an experience by considering the greater environment, ensuring proper structure, and assessing its ability to increase engagement.

The problem for sales enablement managers, however, is that they have no one to provide feedback or facilitate requests to the marketing team. With no checks and nobody minding the big picture, breakdowns begin to happen—such as the content marketer getting continual requests to create new content when similar assets might already exist.

That’s why having a content experience manager is so important. Some organizations are already hiring for this or similar roles. While the precise descriptions and responsibilities vary, common elements include:

-- Being able to identify the right assets for the right place in the funnel to arm sales with personalized content experiences.
-- Facilitating communication between the demand-generation team and the content marketing team to ensure their goals are clearly communicated between the earliest and latest steps of the content experience framework.
 --Acting as liaison between departments to ensure organizational alignment of the content experience between departments.

Did this get the wheels turning in your head? If yes but you’re still wondering how you can define this position, here’s how we define the position at my company: “The content experience manager is responsible for managing and optimizing the end-to-end, omnichannel experiences around content, including but not limited to blogs, resources, white papers, ebooks, videos, podcasts, webinars, customer and prospect emails, sales collateral, and online properties. This position reports to the VP of Marketing (or CMO) and works cross-functionally and collaboratively within the marketing department and across the entire organization.”

At the end of the day…
When you have a dedicated content experience manager who owns the experience, you bring validity, accountability, and visibility to your content marketing (creation) efforts. To me, that’s the best triple threat one could have.
So, what are you waiting for? If you’re a company who touches marketing in any way, shape or form, it’s time for you to consider adding a content experience manager to your team.

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