Coming up with the ideal content marketing strategy isn’t something that can (usually) be done overnight. It takes a lot of time and dedication, and ideally, it takes a team. If you have a team to help you, you’ll receive more ideas and have a lot more to work with. In other words, the more people collaborating on your content marketing strategy, the more likely it is that the end result is going to do what you want it to do.
However, just because you have a team doesn’t necessarily mean all members will pull together to give you any useful results. As a leader, you need to maximize their engagement and help them as much as possible, especially if you are a startup and no one has dealt with content marketing before (but even if you are a veteran of the marketing world, encouragement is always a positive thing). With that in mind, here are some tips about how to ensure your team works together when creating your content marketing strategy.
Make Sure They Know The Why
Simply telling your team what you’re looking for and having them get on with it, it’s crucial to let them know why you are doing what you’re doing. What are the reasons behind this content marketing campaign? In that way, everyone involved will understand why the time and effort they put into coming up with new and exciting ideas is going to be worth it. It will help them to work harder rather than put in minimal effort because they’ve had no clear direction or because they don’t care about the outcome.
Before any work begins, gather everyone together and give a detailed explanation as to exactly what it is you’re looking for and what the reasons are behind it. You can let them know about how much growth potential it will bring to the business, for example, and what the result of making more sales (and having more profits) will be, including buying the new equipment such as a glass writing board or 3D printer that will help your employees do their job better. The more they are invested in what they are doing, the more effort they will put in, and the results will be much better.
Go into Detail
Once you have explained why you are asking your team to do the work you want and need them to do, it’s wise to give them more details. If they have numbers they can work toward, it will be much easier for you and them to see how well the campaign is going and whether it’s something you need to focus on or whether a new idea is needed.
By setting targets, it will be easy to tell what’s working and what isn’t. Some ideas of targets to use include:
- How much organic traffic you want to visit your website
- How many engagements on social media
- Whether bounce rates are lower
- How many new signups to your newsletter
- How many more sales are made
By looking at all of these things, you can determine whether or not your content marketing strategy is working. Offer this information to your team, and they will be able to make the necessary changes, and they will feel like much more a part of the process.
Make it Easy for Them to Get Started
No matter how many great ideas your team might have, if they don’t have the tools or the information they need to put those ideas into practice, they may never come to fruition, and you will have lost out on the traffic generation they would have brought you.
Some of the best tools you can show or provide to your team include online blog post title generators, log in details to keyword searches, a list of competitors to check on, even access to a premium design website such as Canva. Of course, the more tools they have at their disposal, the more your content will be appealing to visitors.
Automate Where Possible
Although you might not want to automate the writing of blog posts and the designing of images just yet – there are tools that allow for this, but they are basic, and the results aren’t always ideal – you can automate other aspects of your content marketing, making your team’s work much easier.
In fact, the more you can automate, the more your team can work together to create the content without having to lose their focus when uploading any posts or blogs. They will need to collaborate on the content itself; the rest can be in hand.
By automating your blog uploads and your social media posts, you can save a lot of time, and you can be sure that you are posting regularly, which is great for SEO purposes. Your team can also cut down the time they spend creating your content; they can spend a few hours a week dedicated to the task, utilizing their time on just one day rather than spreading the job out across the whole week. By doing this, they can be much more productive, and the teamwork won’t be affected.
Conclusion
Teamwork is crucial in business, and making sure your team works well together has many benefits. When it comes to content marketing, having more than one person’s ideas to work with and allowing everyone on your team to have some involvement in the process means that the end results are far more likely to be what you’re looking for.
illustration: design by stories