Kyle’s note: To be a great content marketer requires three things: writing skills, networking ability and industry knowledge. It is difficult for one person to have all of these things, but your team can help fill in the gaps. This post from Sean Blackburn outlines a few different strategies that you can use to create a “content culture” and leverage the collective intelligence and influence of your team.
Many business owners and marketers struggle to fully engage their entire team in the content creation process. Most just don’t understand why you’re asking them to write another blog post when they have phone calls to answer, meetings to make, and sales to close.
As Head of Marketing for Sweet Fish Media, I’m part of a team that helps companies create valuable, shareable content every single day.
Below you’ll see 7 of the best strategies we’ve used to help businesses create buy-in and influence their employees to own the vision of creating amazing content.
1) Get your team onboard with content marketing
First things first, you’ve got to start with the “why” of content marketing.
You must clearly communicate to your employees why content creation is actually important to the growth of your business.
We’ve found that we sometimes take for granted the knowledge we have about the benefits of content marketing. Most of your sales team probably doesn’t understand the SEO benefits of a keyword rich blog post, or how a well titled eBook can offer them a chance at more warm leads.
Take some time, get creative and create some content of your own for stakeholders in your company. We’ve seen sales teams’ eyes get big when they’re shown things like this:
Google Analytics reports showing how people are interacting with the content you’ve created so far
Case studies of companies in your industry (or a similar one) who have had success using content marketing to grow their sales
Research that proves a lack of quality content exists for niche knowledge they already possess (use a keyword estimator)
During this conversation it’s essential to talk about measurable goals. In the end, what is your company’s purpose for creating content? We suggest one of these three goals:
Increase leads/sales
Build awareness and trust
Increase loyalty and advocacy
These numbers are not only going to help you keep your team accountable, but months later when production is dragging, you’ll be able to show progress towards a larger goal and create smaller short-term wins for your team.
Related: Content marketing: setting a purpose and measuring success
Related: The beginner’s guide to Google Adwords
2) Build an internal company knowledge database
When taken collectively, the amount of knowledge and expertise within a given company is usually an incredible amount of information to digest.
It can be be overwhelming if you’re just beginning the content marketing process to actually remember the details of so many pieces of information.
In order to scale your business’ content marketing efforts beyond just your own knowledge, you’ll need to take some intentional time on the front end to build a database of information which can be easily accessed and act as a resource to you and your content team.
Think of this as your company’s own reference library, an encyclopedia of knowledge that is unique to you and your employees.
Here is what are some of the basic things Content Marketing Institute suggests to include in your knowledge bank:
Internal Knowledge – Be sure to include things like your company’s history/timeline, key dates and developments in your story, your business processes and philosophy.
Industry Knowledge – Major developments within your company’s space, industry trends, news and projections. Be sure to also include thought leadership on the biggest issues within your industry (Pro tip: write about issues no one else in your industry will talk about)
Factual Data and Opinions – This includes actual hard data; reports, studies and interviews that inform your company’s opinions on industry issues and affect your business practices.
Since this knowledge bank will be used often to support your content marketing efforts, this database must be constantly updated. Give access to anyone from your team who is creating content or those who are informing it.
On a practical note, allow this database to be more “stream of consciousness” than your normal content (it doesn’t need to be pretty).
Here are the tools we suggest you use to house your knowledge database:
Google Drive l Dropbox l Trello
3) Creatively tap into your employee’s expertise
One of the most valuable resources for creating an amazing content marketing strategy are the people you already employ.
They are the closest people to your customers, and will provide you with some of the most accurate, poignant content that your customers are hoping to consume.
The issue is that it’s easy to lose your team’s buy-in during this attempt to “insource” your content creation.
Content marketing is a long process and it’s easy to wear your team down by randomly pestering them to write another post that doesn’t give them immediate value. In general, your employees are busy with all the other tasks that keep your company in business.
We suggest creating a culture of content creation by consistently interviewing your team.
Here’s what we mean:
Create a list of topics you want to actually be covered first. Make sure this first content wish list is easy to accomplish and are not the most complicated questions to answer for your team. You want some easy wins to help motivate your team (you don’t need to write an in-depth, industry changing eBook right off the bat)
Consistently schedule times (about once per week) to sit with your team and let them knowledge dump with you. This is simple question and answer time for your employees. You can start by asking them general questions you have from your content wish list.
Record these interviews with an audio recorder. Use a simple device for this, and don’t complicate this step. The key is having quality enough audio that you can remember what was actually said (an iPhone or Android device’s standard audio recorder should do just fine). Ask open ended questions, this or that questions (comparing two solutions), and make sure to tell them to speak like you were a customer asking them questions.
Do this consistently with your team for a couple of weeks (we suggest no more than 15 minutes per week, per employee) and you should have a ton of content to get the ball rolling.
Eventually, you can incorporate a component to these content sessions that asks your employees to bring their ideas to the meeting. We suggest this because we’ve seen it create buy-in and also keep your content fresh from a creative and topic standpoint.
Related: Why insourcing is the next social media and content marketing trend
4) Don’t be afraid to outsource/crowdsource your content creation
While insourcing content the way we described above is an incredible way to generate topic ideas and fill your content with practical information, entrepreneurs find two issues with the strategy:
Your content can suffer from groupthink
It will rarely give you the type of finished product you can just hit “publish” on.
This sometimes leads to the necessity to outsource and crowdsource your content creation.
Outsourcing
As a business owner, you know your team’s strengths, but you also know their weaknesses. If you don’t have a team of people passionate about writing B2B long-form content, don’t force them into it.
People often view outsourcing as something that’s really tough to manage, but it’s not. When paired with employee interviews, you can find writers who can create incredible content for a fraction of the price it would take to pay an employee.
Here are some of our favorite content creation tasks we’ve seen business owners outsource:
Audio transcription
Article writing
Customer surveying
Market research
Photo editing
Related: How to scale your content marketing with a process for guest writers
Crowdsourcing
Your brand’s content and messaging can suffer when it’s only idea generation is coming from the inside. You never want to be writing in way that your audience (read: customers) find difficult to understand or follow.
Business owners find that some of their best converting content can actually come when they involve their customers in the process.
Asking customers whom you trust some pointed questions will freshen up your message and keep you on topic to specific pain points your customers are feeling.
Here are some of our favorite questions we’ve seen businesses ask their customers:
What are your most burning questions about ____?
What do you wish you understood about our industry?
Why do you pay us to ____(the service you’re providing)?
If you were me, what would you explain to all of my customers?
One of the strongest reasons we suggest to business owners to outsource and crowdsource some of these tasks is the longevity it helps them pursue.
Creating consistent, quality content for months and years on end is a tiring process. Outsourcing and crowdsourcing will help you scale and sustain your content creation long into the future.
An HVAC company, Kalos Services, had this post to show for after following this process of insourcing + outsourcing. The content manager took one of the new techs aside and asked him what were the three most surprising things he had learned so far. His answers were recorded, fed to a transcriber on Upwork and then formatted and posted by the content manager. Viola, a beautiful, human story and experience the company could share with their audience.
Where we suggest finding writers: Upwork l Elance l Sweet Fish Media
Related: How to create better content for your customers
5) Emphasize content marketing within all of your business processes
A lot of research can be found to prove why content marketing is great for websites and businesses.
While it’s absolutely essential for SEO and branding purposes, we’ve also found that firms see incredible value from content marketing when they use it in every aspect of their business.
Content marketing’s specific function is to convert users/visitors/people into actual paying customers. So why can this only be done through a blog?
Content is strongest when it’s addressing a particular pain point and has legitimate utility for the consumer. Firms that use content throughout their sales process can see real breakthroughs in conversion and a warming of leads.
We’ve seen companies use content to:
Fill their website with keyword rich blog posts that answer questions potential customers type into a search engine
Answer customer emails and inquiries (and really “wow” them with the thoroughness of the response)
Assign pre-sales appointment reading “homework” to their customers (telling them which questions to ask their salesperson and what to be wary of from companies in their industry)
Marcus Sheridan and the team at River Pools and Spas use this tactic when they confirm sales appointments.
Follow-up emails to clients who might be having doubts to the validity of a salesperson’s claim
Sponsorship opportunities in local Chamber of Commerce
Progressive Plumbing, Florida’s Finest Pest Control and Kalos Services teamed up to create content, infographics and slideshare presentations for a seminar a local trade organization was having (the CFVRMA)
Related: Assignment selling: the essential sales technique of the information age
Related: How to create content that follows the buyer’s journey
6) Share results and celebrate milestones
One of the most important strategies in keeping your content marketing flowing is keeping your team motivated and informed of your progress.
Make it easy for your team to share content you create.
Inform them of your content promotion strategy
Share shortened, trackable links and give employees suggested headlines and hashtags to use when they post to social media
Make sure you celebrate and give credit generously to those who have caught the vision. Make sure each piece of content created by them has a link to a site/profile for their personal brand and give them social recognition in your company as well in your next memo or company sales meeting.
Most importantly, consistently share the company’s progress towards the measurable goals you laid out in the beginning of this new commitment to content marketing.
Are you seeing more conversions to sales since you implemented these new changes? Share the results and either celebrate the success or re-calibrate the strategy with your team.
Bitly – free link shortening and tracking
Thunderclap – An easy tool to help your team share content on their social media channels
Related: Publishing is a team sport
7) Attach monetary rewards for results
Nothing shows you’re committed to a project like investing cash into it.
Start rewarding employees monetarily and watch as interest suddenly picks up around how employees can help you achieve your content goals.
Ideally, this should be the final step in cementing a culture of content creation into your team.
One thing’s for certain: Pay for quality, not quantity. The last thing you want is to dole out extra cash for content that’s essentially worthless and doesn’t speak well to your customer or convert them into further sales for your company.
As a content marketing agency ourselves, even we pay our writers by the article in order to ensure a quality output from our team. Writers don’t get paid until the article passes an editorial review and then also a client review. This ensures our quality is always at the forefront of our writer’s goals. Otherwise, they won’t be compensated!
If you do implement monetary rewards for employee’s content creation, make sure it’s clearly in favor of content that’s of the highest caliber. Instead of paying per article, pay for each month’s best converting blog article or for an article that hits the first page on Google for a specific keyword.
Related: Make content creation a benefit, not a burden
Conclusion
By bringing your team together, you’ll be able to exponentially increase your ability to reach larger audiences and impact your business’ bottom line. If you implement even half of the techniques mentioned above, you’ll see favorable results before you know it.
Do you have any tips and techniques to get your team involved in the content marketing process for your company?
We’d love to hear them in the comments below!
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