Rethinking Marketing through Just-in-Time Content Operations

A Content Disrupted podcast with Axel Kirstetter, Vice President of Global Product Marketing for Guidewire.

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How often does your marketing team produce content based on internal opinions or requests? Many of us are guilty of this practice, despite knowing it's ineffective and wasteful. In this conversation with Axel Kirstetter, VP of Global Product Marketing at Guidewire, we explore methods to enhance your marketing's precision, effectiveness, and efficiency through just-in-time content operations—an approach that combines audience insights with streamlined execution for timely and relevant content delivery.

Axel developed a comprehensive understanding of marketing by moving through brand, communications, and product roles early in his career. Frustrated with opinion-based strategies, he gravitated towards the analytical nature of product marketing, merging creativity with a reliance on hard facts. Axel advocates for a rational, feedback-driven approach to content creation, emphasizing the significance of maintaining an on-demand content library to effectively influence product awareness and the purchasing process.

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Episode Highlights:

• The Non-Linear Buyers Journey: Axel acknowledges that measuring success across a linear buyer journey doesn't work anymore. Buyers can enter and exit the funnel at any point, so content strategies must adjust accordingly. Axel advocates for leading with educational, informational, and insights-driven content to build trust and credibility, even if it means discussing competitors. He explains the need for a "just-in-time" content operation to address the challenges of content departments struggling with how to deliver value and keep up with changing audience needs.

• Serving Buyer Personas Across the Customer Experience: B2B marketers, in particular, face challenges in identifying and targeting the right personas, as the decision-making process involves multiple stakeholders with varying levels of influence. Axel discusses the importance of understanding who makes up the buying center and addressing the buyer experience post-purchase, using content to educate and retain customers continuously. He shares an example of building content for an M&A platform, using incentives and curating the audience to gather feedback to inform content.

• Just-in-Time Content Creation and Planning: Axel discusses the importance of pre-defining the design and format of content to standardize creation while ensuring effective communication. He compares the process of creating to the fast fashion industry, highlighting the importance of industry knowledge in determining what trends to focus on, and how AI can help achieve agile development.

• Long-Term Positioning vs. Short-Term Messaging: Casey and Axel discuss AI-powered content atomization for efficient content creation and how this must stem from a solid messaging framework. Axel underscores the fact that executives must clarify the brand purpose and values that drive long-term positioning, checking in with the audience via panels and surveys to ensure timely messaging is adapted to the current problems that need solving.

• Marketing Metrics, AI, and Data Quality: Axel advocates for a focus on quality input and output metrics, such as target audience engagement, to measure marketing success. He highlights the importance of quality content in a just-in-time content operation, emphasizing that regurgitating unqualified or low-quality content can negatively impact a brand's reputation. Axel and Casey discuss the importance of expertise and proprietary data in the industry, highlighting the challenge and implications of AI tools being used as resources for research and advice.

Follow and subscribe to Content Disrupted on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. Every other week, we host candid conversations with pioneering CMOs, and researchers on the topics most relevant to enterprise marketers, from the psychology behind today's digital buying behaviors and how to craft more relevant creative to maximizing internal trust in the marketing team.