Blog: Digital Marketing Trends - Whittington Consulting

3 Articles Your CEO Needs to Read About Content Marketing

Written by Sarah Greesonbach | July 20, 2016

While content marketing consistently proves itself to be an effective way for businesses to drive engagement and grow revenue online, there’s still a fight going on in the modern workplace about exactly how effective it is and how heavily businesses should invest in it.

You floated the idea about starting a content marketing program using your company website and got pushback from the CEO.

As a marketing manager, it’s up to you to show your leadership team that digital marketing is worth it -- that budget spent online is going to get a better return than dollars spent elsewhere.

Don’t let the pressure get you down, because you’re not alone. Here are three articles you should share with your CEO to help you make your case and get the support of the C-Suite in your daily marketing operations:

1. Revolution from The Harvard Business Review

The Harvard Business Review is trusted voice for leaders in the C-Suite. Its article, “The Content Marketing Revolution” is a quick but thorough look at the evolving context of content marketing.

This article thoughtfully positions content marketing as a way to empower organizations to leverage their ideas, not a "flash in the pan" marketing strategy that sucks up the budget and may or may not deliver an ROI. After reading this article, your CEO will understand that content marketing is not a fading trend but rather a calculated adaptation to the way today’s consumer wants to learn about companies.

2. A Day In the Life from Marketo

In “A Day In the Life of a Content Marketer,” Marketo details the many competing tasks that make up the responsibilities of a typical marketing manager. This is a great opportunity to show how much strategy, execution, and integration goes into the work you do without asking your CEO to sit for another boring daily update.

3. Storytelling from Copyhacker

Researchers from The Harvard Business Review to Forbes to Fast Company all agree that storytelling is a powerful tool for business growth and customer retention but rarely do they ever address how or why.

This mystery is finally revealed in Copyhacker’s ”Storyhacking: Cracking the Code Behind the Irresistible Selling Power of Stories,” and it’s a great opportunity to give your leadership team a deeper understanding of how storytelling connects with the bottom line.

For extra study on storytelling, follow this post with a TED Talk from Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, “The Clues to a Great Story.”

These perspectives will help your CEO understand content marketing, why companies do it and how it's connected to the bottom line. Pair these posts with your own commentary to show your leadership team that the business is on the right track with content marketing.