Creating a Company Culture of Content Marketing

There’s no escaping social media or blogging today. Companies worldwide are using social media and blogging as a means to connect with consumers and showcase their expertise. We’ve all seen the advertising commercials on TV or heard them on the radio; “Follow us on Twitter,” “Like us on Facebook.” No matter where you turn, businesses are embracing social media and your company has joined the masses, too. You’ve set up your profiles on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and you’ve set up a company blog. You’re ready to rock and roll…but first you need to get your team on board.

Who better to promote your brand than the people who work with you? They know better than anyone how to market your product and should want to do whatever it takes to create new relationships as well as maintain current relationships with existing customers. The most important thing is that everyone is on the same page with the same goal in mind, and the best way to ensure that is to put a structure in place using five areas of focus that everyone can follow.

Leadership

It all starts at the top. The first thing you want to do is make sure that the Big Men on Campus are on board with your content marketing plan. From experience, CEOs, company owners, and board of directors like to see statistics. So give them what they want. Showcase your goals and how you plan to attain them by creating a presentation with information they can get behind. You’ll want to touch on a few key points:

• Show competitor statistics on social media and how their reach and engagement has grown their business


• Explain how employee participation in social media can generate leads


• Demonstrate how your company is currently using social media and how you can improve on your current strategy and what you’ve missed out on due to the old approach

Encourage the higher-ups to lead by example and create their own social media accounts to engage with customers and even contribute to the company blog.

Agreement

It’s so important to have everyone on the same page as far as what is appropriate and what’s not appropriate when it comes to company and person social media pages. Discuss what social media platforms you’re going to be active on and explain ways each team member can help build your brand on those platforms.

It’s imperative that your team is aware that their actions on their personal social media pages can be misconstrued as company opinion and the last thing you want is to bring negative attention to your business. We’ve all seen it before. An employee Tweets their opinion on something that may not be politically correct and their ties to a company generate negative publicity resulting in the company having to apologize for their employees remarks, emphasizing it is not the opinion of the company. It’s a mess and not something anyone wants to deal with.

Benefits

Your team is going to want to know what the benefits are for participating in this social media campaign. It’s not like they’re just sitting around doing nothing (hopefully) and creating social media accounts takes time, so you need to articulate to them how important it is to create personal brands and how everyone should want their company to be the go-to place for customers in your industry.

It’s important to also reiterate that social media is about being social. Don’t create these pages and neglect them because that’s just a waste of time and money. You want to create connections with your consumer and potential clients in an engaging way that will draw people in.

You can also offer tangible benefits to your team, perhaps a bonus to those who can get their Likes and Follows to a certain number in a certain amount of time. We may be adults, but there’s nothing like a good incentive to really light the fire under someone. Kind of like when we were kids and our parents would bribe us to clean our rooms. You mean I get a new toy if I clean up my existing toys? I’m in!

Training

Now that you’ve explained to your team the proper way to utilize social media, they need the proper training in order to effectively implement your strategies. This is extremely vital because your team is going to need direction on what to blog about, what posts to make on their social media platforms and the best practices to do so. There are always seminars going on that discuss these very subjects and showcase the best way to execute your plan. Having been to a few seminars myself, the main points you want to come away with are:

• Determining the best blog topics based on customer inquiry


• How to utilize SEO


• What the most effective social media posts are and how to reach the most people


• The most successful ways to market your content on social media

Send your team members to these seminars and maybe have them write up a summary of what they learned and the next steps they need to take in order to put what they’ve learned into action.

Point

While you might have a few different people on your team writing blogs or coming up with social media posts, there is such a thing as having too many hands in the cookie jar. You should assign one person as the point person who will post the blogs for the entire team as well as create and schedule the social media posts so that there is no unnecessary overlap in posts or content. Creating a schedule helps with this as people know what they’re responsible for and when they need to have certain things done. The more organized your team is, the less confusion there will be.

Getting everyone on board with your content marketing strategy should be easy if you have a team that is willing to do whatever it takes to expand your brand. Once everyone starts to see positive results, that will start to be their incentive to continue to work hard and expand your brand. It’s extremely gratifying to see all your hard work pay off.

Creating a Company Culture of Content Marketing