When you’re working in a small business getting a project or initiative off the ground requires all hands on deck, and content marketing collaboration is no exception. If you want to achieve a scalable and sustainable content marketing process, getting the rest of your team involved is essential.
How to Maximize Content Marketing Collaboration
I’m the Product Marketing Manager at Glasshat, a small business based in Sydney, and for the past six months I’ve been working on creating and promoting content for business. In this post, I’ve outlined a few successful strategies I’ve used to help me build a collaborative process and reap the benefits of scalable content creation.
1. Make sure your team knows the WHY.
Before encouraging the team to get stuck into creating content for the blog I found that it was really important to explain the why behind the time and effort that’s being invested. Aligning the team with the rationale behind why content marketing collaboration is important, along with the goals that we want to achieve, means that the team was on board with what I was trying to achieve from day one.
Rather than send an email around asking people to share my latest blog post, I decided to host a team workshop one afternoon. Blocking out an hour every week gave people the chance to ask questions, look at examples and get familiar with some of the tools I use to help me create content. To make it easier I’d suggest breaking your group sessions into smaller sessions as it can be quite a lot of information to take in at once. For example, one lunchtime I held a session on “how to write a killer blog post”.
It might seem like an investment of time from your end to begin with, but once you get a stream of quality blog posts you can use it’s worth it.
2. Make sure everyone is clear on WHAT you want to achieve.
Sharing the targets I was looking to reach with the rest of the team has been a great way to motivate others to contribute. Being able to show the progress we’re making in our content marketing collaboration helps other members of the team to see that their extra effort is paying off for us.
Some of the metrics I share on a monthly basis include:
- How much organic traffic we’ve had to the website via the blog
- Social traffic to the website
- Key engagement metrics such as increased page views on the blog or lower bounce rates
3. Share the creative process.
Coming up with the ideas is the fun part, but I’ve learned to make sure that I get others involved to help keep things fresh and mix things up. Speaking to the sales team who speak directly to the customers on a daily basis helps to give me a fresh perspective on some of the challenges they face, while reading through the tech support queries can kick up some interesting ideas for guides and FAQs.
Getting people to talk, ideate and come up with ideas for their specialty is a great way to ensure that I’m getting unique and high quality ideas and we’re not just churning out the same stuff week after week.
4. How can you make it easier for the team to get started?
Because I create content regularly I’ve come across lots of handy tools and websites that help me to streamline things. So I figured, chances are if they help me, they will help someone else.
Sharing a list of tools that people can dip into when they’re feeling stuck is a great way to make things easier for people – especially if they are just getting started and have never written a blog post. Here are some that I shared with my team:
- Glasshat SEO tool – generates a list of blog post ideas for your website (with step-by-step instructions and exactly which keywords to target). (Disclosure: I work at Glasshat, so I’m partial to their great tool.)
- Blog post title generator – stick in a single word and generate endless blog post titles. It’s a great place to start if you’re stuck for ideas.
- Canva – amazing free graphics design software.
- Hemmingway app – an awesome online editor that tells you which sentences are too long or complex.
- Crowd sourced thesaurus – great for inspiration if you’re stuck for a word.
5. Automate what you can.
There are some simple hacks here that can really help to make your life easier. My favorites include using Zapier.com or Ifttt.com to connect two online services together. For example, I set up a Zap on Zapier so that every time I upload a new blog post it lets LinkedIn know and posts on my profile there.
What this means is that I can quickly distribute content to my company’s social profiles, my professional profiles and the profiles of my team – without having to do anything.
Other ideas for how you can use automation include:
- Automatically Tweet when you post a new blog
- Post new Instagram photos to WordPress or Blogger
- Automatically add articles you bookmark to your content calendar
Getting your whole team involved in the content marketing process can give a fresh perspective as well as help achieve your marketing goals. It can also give other team members a chance to share in the creative process and even stretch their knowledge if they don’t usually create content. The benefits are great and with a little planning team collaboration can be a boost to your content marketing strategy.
What are tools you use for your team content marketing collaboration? Comment below. Let’s discuss.
