Expand the goals for content strategy While brand awareness and thought leadership are still the top goals for most content strategies, we are seeing a shift towards achieving more revenue-centric goals. This includes lead generation, direct purchase, or cost-saving metrics such as efficiency. Our research shows that the content teams focused on these commercial goals were more digitally savvy and sophisticated than teams focused on brand awareness and thought leadership. Additionally, these teams were more likely to collaborate with a range of customer-facing teams such as sales and service, as opposed to only serving the brand or marketing functions. By expanding the role of digital content to directly impact the bottom line, content teams are likely to receive more investment and be seen as a strategic tool in the business model. This makes it easier to fund capability improvements such as data analysis and real-time personalization. Evaluate the content producing organization The most popular organization model today is to have a central content team that acts like an internal agency and produces content for multiple teams or departments. As the demand for content grows along with the size of the company, this model can become difficult to sustain. Companies must then weigh the trade offs between continuing to centralize content and potentially have it become a bottleneck, or decentralizing it and potentially compromising quality, consistency and compliance. Most digitally mature companies are choosing the latter route, and enacting appropriate controls to ensure quality. However, there are cases where a centralized model may still work best. For companies focusing on thought leadership or lead generation, a central model is suitable since the content produced is specialized. But for other goals such as brand awareness, a decentralized model may work better, since it allows multiple lines of business or products to own their own awareness campaigns. The key is to evaluate the goals of the business’ content strategy, the availability of the technology, and the skills of all potential content producers within the company. Based on these inputs, the organization can be restructured into any number of decentralized, centralized or hybrid organization models. 28