What’s the key strength of your content marketing function?

The content marketing functions of leading tech, financial, and professional services organizations know what they’re doing. As part of a recent Content Maturity Roundtable, we asked participants to benchmark their operations. It turns out, they’re really good at producing content.

Across the range of capabilities we tested, our participants said their greatest strength lay in content creation. Creation, they said, was aligned well with business objectives and production frameworks were consistent.

In fact, one of the most valuable insights from the session was recognition of the strong strategic alignment that many organizations have achieved.

Two key strengths emerged from the assessment:

• 78% of attendees said their content creation processes and workflows align with business goals
• 67% said they regularly review and update their strategies based on feedback, data, and insight 

Great news. These figures tell us our organizations are successfully integrating content efforts with broader marketing and sales strategies, proving the business impact of their content, and embracing a data-driven approach to optimization.

The test is a way to help marketing leaders better understand their content marketing functions by evaluating maturity across six core dimensions:

1. Plan – ensuring a strategic alignment between content marketing efforts and business goals.
2. Create – developing high-quality, relevant content that serves audience needs and drives engagement.
3. Curate – organizing, tagging, and structuring content for better accessibility and usability.
4. Distribute – effectively sharing content across multiple channels.
5. Engage – measuring audience interaction and relevance.
6. Revise – continuously optimizing content based on performance data.

The test empowers marketing leaders to benchmark their teams’ current maturity levels and uses 31 key ‘success factors’ to pinpoint opportunities for improvement. 

These success factors cover critical areas such as content governance, personalization, measurement, and sales enablement, providing a comprehensive roadmap for content excellence.

By assessing their content functions against these dimensions, organizations can identify gaps, streamline processes, and enhance their content marketing’s impact on business growth.

While the strength highlighted by our participants is encouraging, our test also revealed several opportunities for improvement, particularly in areas such as content distribution, personalization, and sales enablement.

In fact, our next blog post will deal with exactly that subject. We’ll take a closer look at key areas for improvement in content marketing and provide actionable insights on how you can address these same challenges within your own organization.

Of course, if you can’t wait for that – feel free to take our simple, five-minute content maturity test yourself.