I have a lot of thoughts about this! A lot of effort over many years has gone into our content. It's very good and I'm very proud of it. We have an in-house editorial team (including video) that currently reports into marketing but for years reported directly to me as peers to marketing. A couple of lessons over the years that has made this successful:
- Our editorial team has some content marketing goals, but their primary goal is long-term audience development. (We want you to keep opening our newsletter over years.)
- There is a lot of operational work to keep this content up to date. (Our content is primarily about product recommendations. This gets stale over time.)
- I believe in good, better and best content and that this can be qualitatively evaluated. Content development hasn't gone as well when we looked to the data to tell us is content was good or not.
- An intern wrote the first version of our guides. She sent out a survey to users about their favorite products and used that as the editorial basis for our "best product" guides. We tracked that they were making it to the front page of Google and decided to fund an in-house team.
- Our editorial team has some content marketing goals, but their primary goal is long-term audience development. (We want you to keep opening our newsletter over years.)
- There is a lot of operational work to keep this content up to date. (Our content is primarily about product recommendations. This gets stale over time.)
- I believe in good, better and best content and that this can be qualitatively evaluated. Content development hasn't gone as well when we looked to the data to tell us is content was good or not.
- An intern wrote the first version of our guides. She sent out a survey to users about their favorite products and used that as the editorial basis for our "best product" guides. We tracked that they were making it to the front page of Google and decided to fund an in-house team.