In my role as manager of content strategy in our Marketing organization, we had to define what our approach was, not copy from another company or seek the advice of a 3rd party subject matter expert. My background is heavy on the IT side, and I leveraged an approach dubbed Five Point Troubleshooting that has not only served me well as a professional, but also in life. The approach allowed us as a team to define what needed to be solved, how to go about executing a plan, and determining what success looks like, not only for us as FedEx, but also for the customers we serve.
 

Our vision: To build an enterprise wide, best-in-class “Content Marketing” practice that enables FedEx to proactively engage audiences in a relevant dialogue throughout key stages of their lifecycle to drive profitable revenue growth.
 

Our mission: Execute and continue to iterate an intelligent “Content Strategy” that provides streamlined and efficient curation and governance of content through analysis and research to attract new customers and deepen existing relationships.

The best advice I can give is to 1) figure out what your content marketing approach looks like for you… For some, it could be centered around actually getting content created. For others, it could be how best to enable content creation like it was for us at FedEx these past two years. 2) Appreciate that this is not an overnight process and celebrate small wins as you look to execute your content strategy. And 3), don’t be afraid of setbacks… setbacks offer a moment of reflection and clarity for new breakthroughs.

For us at FedEx, shipping sometimes is not the easiest process. We really want to make things as easy as possible for our customers, and leveraging interactive content simply put makes it easy for us as marketers to accomplish this.

Personally, I think the exposure that content marketing is getting these days is AWESOME. Content is truly KING when wanting to connect with customers, and organizations that make it a priority will certainly reap the benefits of maintaining relevant conversations.

I’m not really sure… I do think its prominence within organizations will continue to grow, where more budget and resources will be allocated. The emergence of new platforms will certainly have an impact on how content is developed and distributed. And as more organizations become more content aware, competition in the space will certainly be more fierce. Definitely exciting times for any professional working in the content arena.