I was recently asked a question by the CEO of management consultancy about how we manage to get the senior leaders at our client companies to write content that is delivered consistently and influences the right people.

Besides our technology and gamification, we discussed the importance of an on-boarding strategy and involvement of employees and senior leadership in the process. I soon realised that he viewed our deployment as a change management program; an undertaking that is notoriously hard to implement successfully.

The video below by McKinsey provides a great insight into this. According to their report 70% of major change programs don't achieve the objectives. The main reasons identified:

• management not on board
• top team not engaged
• employees don't understand or personally motivated

Certainly, from a content strategy perspective, the reason for a failure would be a combination of all three.

Why?

An expert-driven content strategy relies upon the experts to create the content. If they do not fundamentally know who they should be influencing then they are lost when it comes to creating content and even with encouragement to write, it is simply not sustainable.

One way to remove this problem is to hold a workshop where the experts are encouraged to review their target audience. Fortunately, often the experts are the top management so you can solve all three of the above common issues during a single session. Frequently, posing a simple question like “What do you want to be known as?” can help to get focus on the desired outcome. This drives authors to think about who they are trying to influence and to what effect, instead of simply publishing some “stuff” because they have been asked to.

(if you were wondering more about e2e marketing, take a look at this post here).