Question: I head up a small marketing team for a mid size company and we are working to grow our content marketing. One of the big challenges that I have is getting our internal staff to promote our content. Any ideas on how to increase sharing within an organization like this?
Whenever someone asks me this question or a similar question I always find myself reminded about just how important it is to build an organization that embraces sharing and promoting the content that it creates.
While you would think that this is a no brainer, I can’t tell you how often I hear from employees of one company or another who have almost no awareness of the content marketing efforts of their company nor have they even read any of the content that they are providing.
To me this is crazy…
I always say that if your own employees aren’t reading, sharing and engaging with the content that your company is creating, what in the world would make you think that anyone else would want to.
So then what should a company seeking to build a stronger sharing culture do?
Since every organization is different, there isn’t necessarily a one size fits all philosophy but there are a few things a company can do to promote sharing and drive a more engaged culture.
- Create Awareness: Does your organization from top to bottom understand what your content marketing strategy is? Many times there is an assumption that no one reads B2B blogs or that Social is silly. There are so many great pieces of content on how untrue this is. Have you shared this data to make your coworkers more aware?
- Internal Promotion: What is your method for letting your team know when new content goes live? Would your employees say “Yes, I get our blogs in my feeds?” or would they say “We Posted a Blog?” Either way, make sure to regularly update when content goes out.
- Simplify Sharing: In addition to your internal promotion efforts, simplify the sharing. First of all, make sure that social sharing bookmarks are easily identified on your blog so no manual work has to be done to share. I have seen even big brands mess this up pretty good. If you want to make it even easier, create pre-canned messages for different social platforms like “Tweet This” or “Here is a LinkedIn Update.” If you make it more copy and paste as opposed to extra work then it will be easier to get busy team members to embrace sharing.
- Stay Persistent: You know the statistics when it comes to building trust through marketing. If not, here is a good reminder. According to Edelman 64% of consumers need to see a message 3 to 5 times before they trust it. This isn’t limited to outside sources. This goes for selling to your team as well!
Building a strong sharing culture will drive more readership and authority to your content and doing it is about creating awareness, making it easy and staying persistent.
What are some of the most effective ways your organization gains internal support to build a culture of content sharing and brand allegiance?
Check out this short video for more on how approach Sales in your B2B Content Marketing and Blogging.
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Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.
