Interview: Ray Horan, Co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Marketing.AI

This is the second post in a new series called Interviews at Content Hero, where we’ll be chatting to industry leaders, influencers and agencies about content marketing and how it can affect success.

Today we are chatting to Ray Horan, co-founder and chief content officer of Marketing.AI, a company who specialise in content marketing software.

Tell us about Marketing.AI, who are your products for?

Marketing.AI is content marketing software for corporations, SMEs and marketing agencies. Our calendar-centric software allows content strategists, marketing directors and agency managers plan out, assign and manage the workflow for all of their content marketing tasks. Then, content creators can draft content items and once they have been reviewed and approved can be published directly or scheduled for publication to CMS such as Hubspot, WordPress, Tumblr and Expression Engine, and to social media profiles on Twitter and Facebook.

Your editorial calendar software is intriguing; how important do you feel content planning is to a strategy’s success?

Planning the content your are going to create and formulating a cohesive structure is key to a successful content marketing strategy. This is why we have included a Buyer Persona tool, customer journey matrix and ideation tools in our software. We have found that taking the time to make an appraisal of your target audience and addressing the content gaps you currently have are vitally important steps for your content marketing strategy. Once you have completed these steps, you will have generated several months worth of content ideas that you can begin to populate your editorial calendar with.

What do you think is the biggest challenge modern content marketers face?

From the content marketers I speak to on a daily basis, organization seems to be the biggest stumbling block. Companies have multiple websites, blogs, social media accounts and promotional channels. Keeping on top of all of these publishing and promotional channels, assigning and monitoring work, and determining the success of the content being published is proving to be a increasingly difficult task. The majority of companies are still struggling to use shared spreadsheets and online applications such as Google Docs in an attempt to manage their workflow. This approach is becoming increasingly outdated and those companies still employing these tools are starting to realise there must be a better way to get their work done.

Have you been inspired or influenced by any companies recent content marketing efforts?

We’re continually inspired and influenced by what our customers and partners do with the software to build out their overall content strategy and implementations. A good example of this is ChristianSteven Software that has used a well-thought-out strategy, combined with consistent content output to establish themselves as both thought leaders and a go-to-resource for information for their customers in the Business Process Automation and Report Scheduling industry.

Blue, rare, medium or well done?

Knock off its horns, wipe its ass, and throw it on the plate.

You can find Ray Horan on Twitter @RayHoran1, LinkedIn ca.linkedin.com/in/rayhoran1/and on Google + .