How to Get Everyone on Board with Content Marketing

For the past few weeks I have been writing a lot about content marketing challenges. I’ve shared my tips on driving website traffic, boosting customer engagement, and addressing a lack of resources. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about the top issue of motivating your employees to participate. After all, why should your sales people care about creating content – they have a quota to hit!! And why should customer service reps write blog posts – they have customer issues to solve!!

Of course I am being extreme here, and of course I think that content responsibilities should be spread through the entire organization rather than simply within the marketing department. When the entire organization is behind content develop and content marketing, it is a beautiful thing. The company is able to churn out tons of valuable content and it gets eaten up by its target audience. Don’t believe me? Take a look at HubSpot – this is an excellent example of a balanced content marketing strategy at work. As an outsider it seems like EVERYONE at Hubspot is engaged in its content marketing and inbound marketing strategy.

But this is in a perfect world, and the pieces simply never fall into place that easily within startup and expansion stage companies, right? Is the HubSpot model an anomoly?

So, how can you motivate your employees to participate as actively as Hubspot’s?

Earlier this morning the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) ran my guest blog on motivating employee bloggers. These lessons and tips can really be transferred to any content marketing activity, so here is a quick overview:

1.Put someone in charge to be the bad guy and the good guy. Ensure that there is at least one person orchestrating the entire content strategy in efforts to simplify the program.

2.Hold regular training sessions to keep your content creations well informed. It is important to regularly train your employees on the following topics: writing to your target audience and personas, using social media, executing against your goals, etc.

3.Share the results on a regular basis. Simply put, if people can’t see the value in their activities, they are more likely to stop executing. Be sure to show the value that your employees’ content efforts are driving in!

4.Hold retrospective or reviews throughout the year to identify ways to improve. Virtually a no brainer. Retrospectives are critical for improvement and your employees will fill more valued (and motivated) if they have the power to shape the program.

5.Have a contest. Tap into the competitive edge within your company and have a contest! Check out my post on CMI to see a few examples.

How do you motivate your employees?