Book Review: Global Content Marketing

Some business books are built on received wisdom, the so-called best practice ideas that you could harvest by reading a dozen blog posts or eBooks. Others feel authentic from the first page to the last – because they’re written by real-world, front-line practitioners.

Pam Didner spent almost two decades in one remarkable global company, Intel. And, while not all of this was spent as a marketer, you can tell she’s been there and done that when you read her new book, Global Content Marketing: How to Create Great Content, Reach More Customers and Build a Worldwide Marketing Strategy That Works.

(Disclosure: Pam interviewed me for the book and uses a Velocity case study in it.)

There are lots of really good books on content marketing (those by Ann Handley, Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose top my list). But until now there hasn’t been a book specifically about global content marketing. If you’ve ever tried to create a content marketing strategy for more than one region, or execute one across many geographies, you know how many new challenges this entails.

Scaling up content marketing means taking a practical, systematic and realistic approach to centralization, localization, collaboration, skills, culture and change management. Didner covers all this and much more in a remarkably short book that makes an impact far beyond its page count.

The core of the book is an analysis of the Four Ps:
Plan – how to create a strategic global content marketing plan that comes from a company’s business goals.
Produce – including an eight-step guide to collaborating around a central content kit to share with local teams
Promote – a market-driven content distribution process using paid and social media
Perfect – optimizing content programs and measuring their impact
Didner then wraps things up with a chapter on Skills and another on the future of global content marketing. Every chapter ends with a summary of action points for the three different types of reader plus case studies that demonstrate the issues discussed.

It’s clear, smart, practical and based on experience. And there’s a companion website at globalcontent.marketing in which Didner practices what she preaches, offering lots of advice and useful resources for global content marketers..

If you’re trying to drive content marketing programs in a big company – or a small company with global ambitions – you’d be crazy to do it without this book in your back pocket.

Didner has captured the unique challenges facing every global content marketer and shown how to address each one. All you have to do is read it.