[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Supporting the content marketing for a brand as large as Pitney Bowes is not a simple task, especially given the company’s broad portfolio of solution offerings and its global footprint.

To learn more about how the company is structuring its content organization, as well as its plans for using new platforms and tactics, we recently connected with Samantha Patel.

Although part of a relatively new group, the Pitney Bowes team has already won a Killer Content Award for its video content this year, and Patel and the team have some ambitious plans for optimizing their efforts going forward.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator border_width=”3″ el_width=”50″][vc_column_text]

What are some of the top priorities for you right now in your organization?

Our content team at Pitney Bowes is a very special cocktail of disciplines that works together really well. We were pulled together organizationally at the beginning of this year after months of informal collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas.

I always describe us as a four-legged stool:

• Client references
• Product content
• Thought leadership
• Translation and localization

I think our priorities are to grow the collaboration across the team and increase the visibility of the value we can deliver to the business by delivering on awareness and leads.

The newest arm of the team is thought leadership and the breadth of the Pitney Bowes portfolio spanning everything from location intelligence to solutions for financial crimes and compliance is magnificent fodder to develop good thought leadership.

We are establishing a network of third-party vendors to help us craft this thought leadership, including Forbes Insights, IDC and Harvard Business Review. This is going to be a great learning curve.

What new technologies or approaches are you either rolling out now or excited about checking out in the future?

We are rolling out Seismic for our content management approach and we are hoping to be live with a pilot in July. It is bringing a new discipline to everything from file naming to what it means to truly own a piece of content. We are excited about the rewards we can reap from this approved approach to content.

Interactive content and some of the technologies—like SnapApp—are very interesting and we want to pilot that, too.

How are you seeing expectations/goals of B2B marketers change in the current business climate and how are you and your team responding?

I think that we are past the hamster wheel mentality of content development and are in the phase of seeing the value of content across the entire buyer journey. Just being more strategic in not only what you plan to produce, but in how the channels that will use it—such as demand generation and social—can maximize that content.

Are there any new campaigns or content pieces your team has created lately that you are especially proud of?

Forbes Insights has been a great partner for us and has helped us craft our story on huge, complex issues like the Internet of Things (IoT), the power of place and location intelligence. They are hefty pieces of work that we are using in both a physical setting and, of course, online.

We also just completed a great client reference video featuring Geoffrey Insurance and how they are revolutionizing the client experience with our EngageOne Video project. The metrics presented in this video make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up!

Now that we are a few months removed from the B2BMX event, can you share any key takeaways you’ve been able to bring back and apply to your business?

We’ve applied some of the key takeaways I outlined in Nine Things I Learned at B2BMX, which includes some practical but powerful game-changers. For example, what we once considered a rule of thumb—a single call-to-action per piece—is really just a wasted opportunity. Now, we literally add as many relevant links as we can to the end of a document to support and encourage content bingeing.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]