The conventional wisdom in content marketing is that it takes significant amounts of time and resources to generate, refine and deploy content. And that’s largely correct - there’s a broad surface area to cover if you want effective content. Teams need to stay up-to-date on news and trends in their field, what competitors are saying, and what audiences are looking for. They need to produce content pieces on various engaging topics, in different formats, for dissemination on different platforms. Content must conform to brand guidelines, compliance requirements and stakeholder feedback. After copy editing and final review, teams need to publish their content across multiple channels, measure engagement and re-optimize their approach. With so many moving parts, it’s not surprising that the end-to-end process is manual, expensive, and slow.
Some organizations, however, create an operational content system (OCS) to enable these processes to scale. Like a software design system or a factory assembly line, content systems enable teams to execute sophisticated content marketing strategies with minimal overhead. At Pirate Hat, we like to ask: how can a single content marketer function like a 10-person team? The answer is an operational content system.
What is an OCS, and how is it different from the ad hoc workflows you’re probably used to? A content system contains the following elements:
These elements can be deployed in concert to execute powerful, dynamic content strategies that run hyper efficiently.
Just as a software application design system has base components from which engineers can compose user flows, so too does a content system have a set of “primitives”: a library of base content from which new content can be assembled. Thanks to AI, and in contrast to a design system, these primitives can be largely unstructured. In other words, you don’t need to modify or standardize the components you already have - as long as they are high-quality, you can just toss them into your library.
Primitives often include items like past blog posts and articles, sales collateral and other marketing artifacts, website copy, knowledge bases, product specifications, code repositories and internal documents. Interestingly, teams can also include more freeform inputs like their own running thoughts about their product, business and/or audience. And optionally, teams can add what we call “meta-primitives”, i.e. primitives that instruct your system on how to manipulate other primitives. These can be objects like brand guidelines or compliance requirements (e.g. for regulated industries).
With primitives in place, now you can use your system to compose new content pieces with extraordinary efficiency. For example, suppose you want to build a blog post about the release of a new product. Your primitives will contain the product specs, value proposition and target customer profiles, as well as your blog post templates, brand voice and writing style. If your primitives are well-organized, it becomes very quick to pull the relevant elements from each primitive to generate your new blog post.
Even with a good set of primitives, operationalizing your content system can require significant manual work. Building a new blog post still necessitates a lot of reading, assembly and editing of primitives. But which parts are truly dependent on humans versus mechanical in nature? What if you could automate the process? For example, what if for every new feature release, you could automatically generate a corresponding blog post?
Using AI, it turns out you can. A reasonable mental model for a Large-Language Model (LLM) is that it’s a linguistic translator - so imagine the concepts embedded in any feature you’re releasing just being “translated” into a blog post. If it’s connected to your content primitives, AI can pretty trivially build your new product launch blog post (or press release, documentation… whatever else is needed) for you. You can go even further and create an automated pipeline where this happens autonomously based on an event that occurs in your organization, such as code being deployed to production, a feature flag being switched on, or even a slack message announcing a new release.
With automation tools you can also make your content system highly dynamic and responsive to external events. Let’s say that your audience looks to you for thought leadership and guidance on current events in your market - to be concrete, let’s use cybersecurity as an example. Perhaps your customers and prospects look to you for help interpreting recent breaches and threat patterns, as well as the latest technologies for securing systems. To do this effectively, you’d have to constantly keep up-to-date on news in the industry - which, to be fair, you may already do. But then you’d have to carefully pick out what’s most relevant and spend time thinking through and drafting commentary that might assist your audience. You might also have to prepare your commentary in different formats such as a newsletter paragraph, a blog article, or a LinkedIn post. With automation tools, however, you could run this process programmatically. A scraper can scour the web for relevant news from trusted sources, and an AI layer (trained on your content primitives) can automatically prepare commentary for you, slice it in different formats for cross-channel publication, and even generate different versions for different audience segments.
Okay, now to the real power of an OCS: the workflow orchestration layer. Workflow orchestration is the process whereby you deploy your content primitives and automation tools in concert, such that you can run your content strategies (nearly) autonomously.
Let’s take the last example - a cybersecurity company would like to put out commentary on recent developments in the cybersecurity space. Let’s suppose they’ve tried this and found it to be successful, so they want to publish commentary on a weekly basis. The team could “orchestrate” a workflow that does the following, with minimal human intervention:
Now the company has a dynamic, topical content marketing workflow that runs itself. The only human intervention required is to perform review and approval of content before publication (because, given the state of current AI models, it’s still best to have a human in the loop) and to tweak the workflow as desired. While there’s some upfront investment involved in set up, the workflow can be run with minimal maintenance and, as a result, very limited overhead cost.
The three elements of an OCS - content primitives, automation tools and workflow orchestration - provide extraordinary leverage to your content marketing efforts. With these foundations, content marketing becomes one of the highest ROI activities in your go-to-market playbook. Implemented correctly, an OCS can greatly expand your following and grow your funnel, without draining resources or distracting your team.
Best of all? An OCS enables even a single person with a clear vision to create unique and meaningful content - without the committee meetings, consensus-building, or watered-down messaging that kills most content programs. It allows you to focus on being creative and developing your voice, which in turn leads to better audience engagement (and better business results).
