How to tap in-house talent to get content and build a strong brand voice?

Harnessing your own employees’ creativity, experience of operating in a social media platform and innate sense of enthusiasm about content creation is probably the cheapest way to have more content.

Not all of them may be tuned into marketing, but a little training and orientation on how they can turn their social media addiction into a sustainable skill will help unlock something very powerful, which your organization can make use of.

Writer and editor Dawn Papandrea has this beautiful post on how the whole company can thrive on content. This might seem ridiculous at first, but Papandrea never sweats her brains on explaining the benefits. Instead, she presents the experience of Marcus Sheridan who desperately tried to keep his swimming pool company to stay afloat by putting together some website articles that ended up making revenue.

“Today, Sheridan is a content consultant who shares his knowledge and stories — and those of many other businesses his firm helps with content marketing to make the point that all types of companies in all industries can benefit from content marketing if it’s done the right way,” Papandrea writes in her article.

No matter what type of company yours is –B2B, B2C, solepreneur, or influencer— Sheridan says the core of all content is simple: ‘they ask, you answer.’

Papandrea has put together Sheridan’s COC strategy in eight points.

·         Ensure that the whole top management is supporting and budgeting the strategy. Without the top executives seeing the benefits and enthusiastically supporting the Culture of Content strategy, you may not find it sustainable.

·         Shared vision: Whether everyone contributes to content or not, shared vision is anyway an important aspect of a company’s growth. It means everyone is able to imagine its greatest growth and feels enthusiastic about contributing to it. Of course, give them the understanding that shared vision is also shared growth. It will ensure every employee contributes to their best level in helping you find in-house content.

·         Collect the questions your employees frequently get from customers. Each of them will give you a problem to address, therein give you a unique piece of content.

·         Appoint a content officer who could coordinate your content strategy and ensure you achieve all your goals and KPIs. This person is also the one that sources content from your employees.

·         Use an editorial calendar: streamline the ideas you’ve gathered from employees, fix the time period for them to produce the content so that they know they need to be ready with their content at a specific day/date in a week/month.

·         Simplify the work for your employees: Get the core idea from the employee, give the job of giving heading/title, fixing a picture etc to your content team.

·         Play to the personal strength of your employees: While the ‘writers’ among them will be too happy to write an article. Sheridan  says only 10% of the employees will fall in this category. But a sales guy, for example, has potential to explain the idea in a conversation. Make sure they give a five-minute video about solving a problem which will yield you a 500 word article. An hour of content a month with sales people will give you several articles. Some of them might like to talk and not to come in a video. Get audio content from them. Some of them are good at keeping track of questions though they may not answer them necessarily. They help you with more problems to solve through content.

·         Keep the content creating culture going: probably with a newsletter saying someone in sales wrote an article that generated three new leads or the podcast someone did brought 10% more traffic.

Content creation exercise can keep your employees more enthusiastic and more result-oriented. It makes them realise that they are an important cog in the organisational wheel and that sense of importance will also reflect in their overall performance.