Autodesk’s Dusty DiMercurio Talks Content Governance

Dusty DiMercurio is Director, Content Marketing and Social Media at Autodesk, a multinational software company that makes software services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. In a recent interview for our Active Content Governance playbook, he talked about implementing content governance at Autodesk.

Can you tell us about your role?

I lead content marketing and social media at Autodesk, which means I’m focused on brand-level storytelling and building affinity for the brand.

I also lead content strategy for the marketing organization as a whole. It’s my responsibility to develop a framework and operational model that helps marketers plan, produce, promote, and optimize high-quality, on-strategy content.

Can you explain your content strategy?

We tend to think of content in three buckets — content that’s all about prospecting and creating new customers; content that’s focused on making our customers more successful and expanding our footprint in the account; and content that’s focused on building affinity for the company brand. Each of these distinct efforts has associated goals and KPIs.

Since moving to a subscription business model, we’ve abandoned the notion of “the funnel” because it’s so transaction focused. Instead we use an affinity loop model with “discover, decide, buy” on one side and “onboard, adopt, and renew” on the other.

This provides the basis of our overall content marketing strategy and gives marketers the context they need to develop effective content. By aligning our content with the customer journey, it becomes much easier to create a consistent customer experience that maps content to customer needs and expectations.

What’s driving content governance at Autodesk?

Our new CEO is focused on driving more clarity and accountability across the organization and this ethos has filtered through to the marketing organization. There are a lot of important questions that we can answer with better content governance. For example, what are our best-performing content assets? How are they being used? Are we getting the most out of them? Who is responsible for creating different kinds of content? And so on. 

Our main objective is to improve content quality and impact, but we also want to boost efficiency, streamline processes, and get better at measuring results. There’s a balancing act to developing and implementing standards without restricting creativity.

How do you manage the huge amount of content that Autodesk generates?

Historically, we managed content in silos but we’ve realized that this model is limiting.

Now, we’re moving toward a hybrid model, where certain things are owned by vertical teams, while other things are managed centrally. This way the vertical teams will stay flexible but best practices and efficiencies can be realized across the organization.

Is your content governance initiative restricted to marketing?

No, our business model is subscription-based so our post-sales content is vitally important. It needs to be helpful, clear, accurate, and in the right context to support a good customer experience. This is one of the reasons we have a cross-organizational content council. We’re trying to make sure everyone is aligned and producing content that’s of a consistent quality, on-brand, and aligned with the needs of our customers across all touchpoints.

To learn more about content governance and how companies like Autodesk are approaching it, check out our Content Governance playbook.