What is the difference between a chief content officer and a chief marketing officer?

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In recent years, there are more and more chief xx officers on the market. As content marketing gradually becomes a part of the company's strategic layout, there is a new type of officer in the marketing world - the chief content officer. So friends often ask: What is the difference between a Chief Content Officer and a Chief Marketing Officer?

The first step: distinguish different positions and see what they are doing first

According to authoritative data from home and abroad, the main responsibilities of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) are generally:

• Conduct market research and analysis to determine the company's positioning;
• Determine marketing strategies based on the specific conditions and needs of the market and the enterprise;
• Supervise the implementation of marketing strategies and achieve the company's marketing goals;
• Maintain market sensitivity, understand market demand, and find and seize market opportunities;
• Coordinate internal and external relations of the enterprise, and supervise and control the implementation of the enterprise's marketing strategy plan;
• Responsible for the enterprise marketing organization construction and incentive work.

Now let’s take a look at the Chief Content Officer . Based on extensive cases in North America and China’s practices in recent years, the responsibilities of the Chief Content Officer are mainly:

• Formulate mid- to long-term content marketing strategies for enterprises to ensure the consistency of content style, quality and tone
• Establish content workflow and enable appropriate content management systems
• Leverage market data and internal human resources to develop and process content
• Publish content to the appropriate platform matrix
• Collect data to evaluate the effectiveness of content and propose optimization measures
• Participate in recruiting and managing internal and external content marketing personnel

From the comparison of responsibilities and authorities above, we can find that the Chief Marketing Officer is responsible for the operation of the company's entire marketing system, including products, prices, channels, and promotions. For example, product design, packaging, pricing, promotions, sales channel selection, and how to promote the product are all under the sole control of the chief marketing officer.

The Chief Content Officer is different. He also cares about the above things, but he pays more attention to the unique and distinctive points of the product. He knows that starting from this point, creating creative content will almost always resonate with the audience and be widely disseminated. This is why content marketing is said to be “a small effort with a great result”.

In this sense, the responsibilities and authority of the Chief Marketing Officer are greater and broader than those of the Chief Content Officer.

The second trick: With power comes responsibility. Let’s see who has more power.

In large companies with many departments, products, and brands, a chief marketing officer is needed to integrate the company's resources and develop a unified market and sales strategy around the company's business model. He reports directly to the president, and his subordinates are the managers of the product department, sales department, and marketing department. In this type of enterprise, the chief content officer often serves one brand and is responsible to the chief marketing officer, which is a feasible approach. "There can be two tigers in one mountain."

In some small companies, start-ups, especially Internet companies, vertical management systems are often set up to reduce management levels. That is, instead of setting up a chief marketing officer, a chief content officer is directly appointed, and content marketing is regarded as an important marketing idea of ​​the company, who is directly responsible to the president. The Chief Content Officer's subordinates include support personnel such as media, public relations, market research, and copywriting .

This shows that in large companies, the Chief Marketing Officer has greater power, while in some other companies, the Chief Content Officer directly replaces the Chief Marketing Officer.

The third trick: The difference in ability and quality is the PK of core competitiveness

Since the duties and powers are different, the core skills they possess are also quite different. At present, domestic recruitment websites and headhunting companies mainly tend to look for these five qualities when recruiting chief marketing officers:

Comprehensive expertise and experience. You need to be familiar with products, marketing, advertising planning and communication, financial statistics management, and corporate management.

Practical experience across industries and positions. This will help the Chief Marketing Officer coordinate the relationships between sales, R&D, quality, logistics and production.

Good writing and art design skills, as well as fashionable aesthetic standards. Without these abilities, it is impossible to lead and manage a team that covers marketing, planning, creativity, vision and other positions, nor is it possible to make decisions on an advanced brand visual image.

Superhuman mentality and marketing training capabilities. In the face of fierce market competition pressure, we must have a good attitude. At the same time, training for a large number of sales department personnel is also indispensable.

Possessing both emotional thinking and rational character. For creativity to stand out, it requires an emotional way of thinking, while the execution and implementation of creativity requires a rational personality.

As a new thing in the social networking era, the chief content officer needs to have five skills:

Excellent writing skills: Text, pictures, and animations are the main forms of expression for content marketing, and text is indispensable. If you can’t play with words skillfully, how can you create valuable content!

Excellent planning and creativity: In the process of creating valuable content, planning and creativity are required to make the stories, scenes, and activities themselves interesting.

Aesthetic thinking: Regardless of the form used to express the content, aesthetic thinking is essential.

Analysis and evaluation skills: To do content marketing, you also need to understand the market, understand the product, whether the content is good, and evaluate the effect after the content is output, all of which require good analytical skills.

Ability to learn quickly: Facing a new market environment and new things, new ideas and routines are needed to break through, and new indicators are needed to evaluate the results. The ability to learn quickly is very important.

From the comparison of capability structures, the capability structure that a chief marketing officer should possess can be summarized in one word: "broad". He should grasp everything and be familiar with everything. This is determined by his responsibilities and powers. But "broad" often means not "deep" enough.

Looking at the Chief Content Officer, his ability structure is centered around creativity and planning, with writing, vision, aesthetics and other abilities providing basic support. It is a vertical ability structure, which can be said to be "deep" enough. There are many marketing strategies, and the reason why content marketing can be so versatile in their hands is probably because of this capability structure.

The fourth move: The fork in the road between market and content turns out that they go their separate ways

The reason why there is such a big difference between the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Content Officer is because of the different historical backgrounds in which they were created.

The position of Chief Marketing Officer came into being due to changes in the economic environment. As the technological gap between competing companies becomes smaller and smaller, consumers are becoming more and more picky, forcing them to start differentiating their operations through marketing. In multinational companies with many departments, products, and brands, senior managers such as chief marketing officers are needed to integrate the resources of the entire company and develop unified marketing and sales strategies around the company's business model. This position has existed for decades both at home and abroad.

The Chief Content Officer is a new product of the social networking era. Since the 21st century, social elements have been fully integrated into various business applications on the Internet, achieving true interpersonal connection, platform openness, and information transparency. The key to successful marketing is how to create and use effective content to communicate with consumers, let consumers understand the products, identify with the company culture, gain consumers' trust, and establish long-term mutually beneficial relationships.

In North America, where social media is relatively mature, many large companies, such as IBM, Ford, P&G, etc., have already established the position of Chief Content Officer with specific job requirements and development paths. In my country, the first Chief Content Officer did not appear until 2012. However, with the continuous deepening and development of social networks, content marketing is entering a stage of accelerated development, and a large number of chief content officers will be needed.