Council Post: 3 Ways To Generate More Content By Engaging All Employees

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Christine Slocumb is a transformational B2B marketing leader and the President ofClarity Quest Marketing.

Enterprise buyers come from all departments, often in teams of 10 or more for large purchases. Consider a health system that wants to onboard a new patient billing system. The chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief medical officer, chief financial officer, chief operations officer and procurement director will likely have a say in the vendor selection.

The vendor’s content may not resonate with the CFO because it misses the nuances that the financial community considers impactful. The campaign using this content fails, and the leadership blames marketing.

Successful lead generation and brand awareness campaigns demand content that speaks to each persona throughout the buyer journey. Yet, too often, the job of generating the content falls solely into the hands of marketers who don’t understand the needs and challenges of the other disciplines. Everyone in the organization should be responsible for creating the content needed for lead generation and brand awareness efforts, not just marketing.

Create A Culture In Which Everyone Has A Marketing Mentality

It’s crucial that employees in every department, from development through customer service, understand that they’re responsible for getting the word out about the company’s products and services. Not everyone has strong writing skills, but every employee has insight into different parts of the buying committee’s psyche that they can share in an interview or bullet points.

Set content creation goals for most people in the organization—especially those at the C-level and those interacting with customers and prospects, such as sales and technical support—as part of their performance objectives.

Make sure that content creators have access to subject matter experts from multiple disciplines and that they interview subject matter experts and C-level leaders at a regular cadence.

Writers can get back to basics by asking the five W’s and an H:

• Whom does this affect? With whom will this message resonate?

• What product feature is strongest? What problem does our service solve for this buyer?

• When will the buyer need this product? When did competitors first emerge?

• Where will our product be used inside the enterprise? Where are the economic and influencer buyers geographically located?

• Why does a particular department see our solution as crucial?

• How is our service solving problems now? How will it be critical in the future?

Reach Different Kinds Of Learners With A Vast Array Of Resources

Not everyone learns by reading, yet marketing mostly generates copy-heavy content such as blog posts, briefs and white papers.

Your target personas fall into these learning categories:

• Visual learners: They need to see charts and graphics to visualize information. The majority of the population falls into this group.

• Auditory learners: They need to hear information to best process it.

• Read/write learners: They absorb information by reading information and writing about concepts. They are the easiest to reach because marketing organizations typically have many written-word pieces in their content libraries.

• Kinesthetic learners: They are generally the toughest to reach because they learn by engaging in activities.

By tapping into a more extensive pool of knowledge within your organization, the marketing team can develop not only written content, such as blog posts and white papers, but also infographics, interactive graphics, videos and podcasts.

Interview your CFO for a podcast, capture your CEO discussing brand stories on a video, run fun multi-department activities at user groups, and sit with engineering managers to develop interactive graphics.

The Demand For Content Will Keep Growing, So Everyone Needs To Help Generate It

As buying team numbers grow and attention spans shrink, it’s critical to have personalized, accurate content for every economic buyer and influencer at every stage of the journey. Make sure every department in your organization believes that “content is king” and assists in developing impactful pieces.

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