Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies today because of the fact it helps with your branding initiatives, accelerates your SEO campaign, and helps you build an audience. For this reason, many companies opt to set up a team solely to implement this strategy. But it shouldn’t be just limited to such a team. Promoting a culture of content can help generate great ideas, increase production, and new strategies.
You can start this by encouraging everyone to contribute and allowing anyone to contribute. Get rid of the perception that one needs to be a great writer to write a great piece or that one needs to have some kind of qualification as an expert. With that said, make sure that you create some guidelines so that everyone creates within the right publishing standards.
You can really get this going by getting all the employees to blog and publish meaningful articles on a regular basis. That is the simplest piece that can be created and is the most accessible to people stylistically. To take it further, you want to reward people for creating a great piece. There are going to employees that love writing but never would have thought they’d get paid for it. Just make sure that the compensation is respectable to keep the motivation alive. You can even take it up a notch by holding contests on a regular basis.
Another great way to get things going is to create a conversation. Bring up company events, industry trends, and interesting ideas in a central blog and get employees to write a piece on it. You have to take the initiative and be the leader. Bring up your topic or blog post in meetings, email announcements, and post it on bulletin boards to get the word out. Try to make sure that it’s an engaging topic so that your employees want to be a part of the conversation.
Many people forget that the idea comes before anything else. That’s why you should encourage everyone to submit ideas to write about or create a piece around. Everyone has a unique perspective of what’s happening in your company whether it’s customer support, research and development, or marketing. Working within a small team will never allow you to experience any of these perspectives, so everyone will have a unique and valuable insight to offer.
And if the goal is to create a content culture in your company, just limit pieces to just articles. There are many other pieces you can create like viral videos, infographics, banners, photography, white papers, podcasts, and more. Setting limitations on what should be produced will only hurt creativity and discourage employees. For example, there may be somebody that’s an expert in capturing great photography, but is far from a great writer. You have to remember that all kinds of pieces can be used successfully.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more things you can do to create a company content-culture. Just make sure that everyone is aware of how to submit their piece and that there is a process to do so. This is important because it will keep the creation process organized and streamlined, which helps your team get ideas and choose which pieces to use in your company’s campaign.