The greatest challenge facing content marketers continues to be the production of quality content. For the second consecutive year, the “2012 B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends” report shows that “producing engaging content” and “producing enough content” top the list of content marketers’ struggles.
For content to be effective, it needs to speak to the authentic challenges and issues that customers face. And it becomes daunting for content marketing teams to uncover these customer issues day after day and produce compelling content.
How then can content marketers better understand customers and produce great content? The answer comes in a message we’ve heard before. All across the organization, employees are meeting with customers and developing insights into customer challenges. For companies to succeed in content marketing, they must engage the entire organization and use its collective knowledge of the customer to power content production efforts.
The process: Tying your knowledge into your content
Converting an entire organization into a content marketing machine is no simple task. Buy-in at the highest levels is necessary to make such a comprehensive program work well. Let’s discuss the critical processes and priorities involved to mine organizational knowledge for content marketing success.
Submission/filtering. Establish a process whereby:
- employees can easily submit content marketing concepts.
- content marketing teams can easily filter them and respond. Clear guidelines are essential, as is quick feedback on submissions.
Production: Pairing employee and content expertise. As you gather insightful concepts from employees (who are unlikely to have expertise in content production), pair them with writers, who will produce a draft and then get feedback from the employees on issues like technical accuracy.
Closing the loop. To keep the employees fully engaged, inform them of the content’s progress. Let them know when the content is published, for example, or provide insight into how it’s performing (e.g., number of pageviews, retweets, leads, etc.), so they know how their efforts are impacting marketing objectives.
Employee recognition. Generally, employees will participate robustly in a company-wide content marketing effort only if they have the proper incentives. This “voluntary” contribution to the content marketing program should also be recognized during regular employee reviews. Helping the company in its content marketing efforts should benefit employees in their career development and compensation.
Utilize scorecards and tracking to support this effort, turning recognition into a fun and competitive part of your office culture. Imagine a leader board organized by department that measures who makes the greatest contributions to company-wide content marketing success. Employees or departments could earn badges and other rewards for helping to generate more leads and more sales.
Connect the organization to the conversation
Rather than relying on the one percent of the organization that operates your content marketing efforts, 100 percent of your workforce should be incentivized to play a part. The knowledge of the full organization—coupled with the right processes and systems—can yield the insight that fosters greater content marketing success. Of course, the benefits of such a program go beyond content marketing.
Businesses today realize that the heart of their existence lies in how well they interact and communicate with their customers. It is in this interaction that innovation is born, morale is boosted, and customer problems are solved. But when organizations grow bigger, employees often become too detached from this conversation. As a result, innovation and morale suffer. Through the power of the Internet, we’ve all been drawn into the global conversation.
The essence of content marketing is in how we participate in that conversation to win customers. Integrating your entire organization into the process not only improves your chances of success; it also helps you tap into those crucial customer interactions that are so vital to innovation and employee morale.