by JASON BRADWELL for B2B Byte
You’ve got to invest in more content.
“Damn Jason, what is this – 2005? We’ve been creating content for years!”
…to which my response would be…
“Sure. But when did you last create good content?”
If the recent phenomenon that is ChatGPT has taught us anything, it’s that we are on the precipice of a huge acceleration in the publication of mediocre marketing collateral.
Particularly on blogs.
Volume is no longer the aim of the game. Dialling in on doing less that says more must become the new normal. And a great way to do this is by investing in employee-driven content.
Here’s a stat from the Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Study for you:
B2B decision-makers use thought leadership to vet a company’s capabilities. 59% agree that an organization’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy source for assessing a company’s capabilities than the company’s marketing material.
Yet many organisations totally fail to invest in putting their people front and centre of their marketing efforts. And this is harming their ability to acquire and nurture new leads.
Why?
Because people buy from people. Cheesy, but true. Especially across the enterprise buying cycle.
One company that does this extremely well is Sweet Fish Media. They invest a ton of time and money in helping their employees develop thought leadership content for their own personal social media channels.
And it’s not just a vanity project. It’s helped them net $311,000 in annual revenue directly attributed to LinkedIn – plus secure a bunch of invites to speak at shows, and grow their collective following to 80,000+
(this isn’t a paid post btw – just really admire their approach)
So – how do you start building out an employee-driven content programme?
Keep it simple with this four-step framework I liken to going on a road trip.
- Destination. Where do you want to get to? You need to understand what success looks like and how you want to measure the collective efforts of your team. Keep them SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely) and split across short-term/long-term thinking. For instance, using Sweet Fish as an example, immediate milestones to look out for would be comments and shares (indicative positive signals) while pipeline and revenue will likely take longer to manifest.
- Vehicle. How are you going to get there? This is your strategy. What questions keep our prospective clients up at night and where are they looking for answers when they wake up? What is our unique belief (or set of them) about the market we operate in and how does this translate thought leadership? Work backwards from these prompts to begin to identify content pillars and the right channels to activate. Remember – the most successful programmes provide a framework employees can operate freely within. Any content written by a brand will reek of it.
- Fuel. What is going to propel us forward? Think of this as the resources you can create to facilitate more effective thought leadership. This can be as straightforward as providing prompts – e.g. “consider posting a personal story about how you overcame an obstacle in your career today” – to internal training resources or workshops on how to be an effective content creator. Depending on resources, you may also consider what operational levers you can pull to help scale production – like a dedicated design or video resource set aside to help employees create content.
- Passengers. Who are we bringing along for the journey? You can only go so far working solo. Build a structure that encourages employees to engage with one another’s content. This could be a shared Slack Channel where each new post is shared to encourage replies or weekly post-mortems to analyse what worked and what didn’t. Ultimately, the aim is to foster a culture of encouragement and belonging – where each individual is celebrated and supported on their journey to become a content creator – in turn creating habits that stick.
