Well, you’re the Marketing Content Manager responsible for putting quality content out there regularly, day after day, to fulfill various needs like – web content, campaigns, social posts, blogs, product updates, videos, white papers, case studies, PR – you name it. Now perhaps you’ve got all this under control, and you’re on top of things, but if not, this blog presents some ideas and suggestions which could be of use to you.
To be successful in Content Marketing and build brand, generate leads and support the Sales team requires a regular supply of meaningful, relevant and quality content. A company needs to generate content to satisfy the information needs of its target audience at various stages of the buying cycle from need recognition to purchase to up-selling. You have to beat the competition, you have to announce news, run campaigns…
The problem faced by many organizations is that the marketing department is not fully equipped to write on every subject and nor does it always have a large number of resources to create content.
The deep knowledge of the product resides within the product, implementation and R&D teams. The client stories are hidden inside the sales/ product/ implementation/ service teams and these have to be gathered from various departments and people in the organization.
Though there are many experts in the company who have the knowledge, they are too pre-occupied with their jobs to create content. The Leadership team can provide key inputs, but they are unavailable. Content is required even from HR and employees to create a sense of the company for prospective employees.
And content is required in a volume and at a pace much faster than your department can handle. There are website updates, campaigns to run, social media to feed and respond to, blogs to post and so on. Moreover, content has to be created in various formats like text, graphics and video. In short, many organizations face a huge content gap.
Typical Content requirements of a business organization.
Content is required in many formats
How do you achieve your content goals?
How do you source and develop your content and build up your library.
Start with a content calendar
Ideally, you should have a documented content marketing plan which includes your goals and the content that you need through the year to meet these goals with different target audiences. Plan the content you need to create around events, product releases, campaigns, sales goals and so on.
Then an Editorial Calendar is very useful to set up a schedule to publish content regularly and on time. For example, you will know in advance how many blogs a month you need to write and the topics on which you will write.
Having a content calendar helps you stay on top of your game.
A content marketing editorial calendar is a great tool to help you plan your content. It has all the content listed and its publishing schedule, but you still have to find the right sources to write it. People who have knowledge, people who have insider information and people who understand the target audience.
Figure out your sources
Now who’s going to create all this content? What part of the list can the marketing content team produce, and where do you need others to contribute? How do Do you have the resources to create all the content within the marketing team? Where will they get the raw information from? Who will create
Internal sources
Important information resides in various internal groups of the company – The Sales team, R&D, the production team, delivery teams, implementation teams are the repository of important information. These teams hold knowledge which is required to create quality content and can also provide ideas on which to create content.
How to get content from internal sources
- Persuade – Encourage by explaining benefits of content. Explain the importance of content marketing and the need for content for different purposes. Explain that they can help improve the quality of content published and how that builds the company’s brand. How it helps in sales.
- Promise a reward – many organizations do offer gift cards and such to employees who write an article or white paper. Sometimes white papers can be published in reputed sites and that itself is a reward.
- Give ideas on what to write from your editorial calendar – sometimes people don’t know what to write and at such times, send them a topic with the outline.
How to get content from the CEO and the Leadership team
Your leadership team possesses key information which is highly marketable. They have access to the latest, they know the market and target audience first hand. They know what sells. However, rarely are they going to write for you.
So one way to get this information from them is:
- To interview them from time to time and record the information – write the article from this recording.
- Send them a questionnaire – which they can fill in 5 minutes.
- Set up a monthly or quarterly meeting with them where you get briefed.
Content from external sources
There are people outside your company who can write quality content for you!
You should consider inviting external sources to write content. Expert blogs can be a valuable addition to your website. Your old time customers will be happy to write their story for you on how valuable your services have been and may participate in a video. Vendors can add to your brand by writing about the quality of their components that go into your product.
Outsource content to a professional content company
Professional content companies can support and complement your content creation efforts by helping you with writing skills or creating certain format types for which you may not have any skills inhouse. Outsourcing produces better results in a long term engagement because it enables the partner to understand your organization, products, target market and positioning. Over time they can even write almost anything
Other means of creating content
Contests
Surveys
Interviews
Testimonials and reviews
Outsource
As a Marketing Content Manager, you want to explore all options and tap all sources available to you to produce quality content. Only this can bring you success in your goal to build brand, generate leads and support the Sales efforts of your organization.