If you’re a small business leader juggling multiple roles, researching and writing valuable content is probably at the bottom of your to-do list. Or perhaps you’re considering outsourcing content creation, but that often comes with a higher price tag and no guarantee of measurable ROI. But that doesn’t mean you should put blogging and content writing on the backburner.
In the B2B space, overlooking the value of blogging can put you at a huge disadvantage. In fact, B2B companies that blog see 67% more leads than their non-blogging counterparts.
Luckily, you don’t have to resort to publishing mediocre content or spending hundreds on a blog post written by someone unfamiliar with your industry. Your team has deep insight into your customers and industry— which means you have a strong content strategy and resources within your own walls. If you want to have one of the best company blogs out there, you need employee-generated content.
Table of ContentsEmployee-generated content is content created by employees, as opposed to outsourced or ghostwritten work. This content can take many forms, including blog posts, social media updates, images and videos.
Employee-generated content has numerous benefits for businesses. For starters, it helps build brand awareness by giving customers a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to work at the company. Additionally, employee-generated content can help increase website traffic and leads, improve SEO rankings and establish the business as a thought leader in its industry.
When it comes to creating great content, there are many factors to consider, from finding the right topic to ensuring your writing is engaging and on-brand.
But not everyone enjoys writing. So how can you acquire engaging, well-written content straight from the experts — without turning the process into a burden?
Here are some real ways we’ve helped clients incentivize content creation among their teams — and even better — extract employee-generated content and launch a strong employee blogging program that fuels conversions.
Ideally, someone from the marketing team should take the reins with your blogging initiative from A to Z. Without a dedicated project manager, your dreams of creating rich content will quickly turn to dust. This person should be in charge of communicating the program details to your team (and following up), collecting and qualifying blog posts, scheduling and publishing, creating and distributing rewards and sharing success stories.
Most importantly, you must understand that this is a time-consuming but highly valuable task. Make sure your liaison has time to dedicate to your company blogging initiative or rearrange priorities, so it doesn't get dwarfed by other responsibilities.
Like the C-suite, your employees probably don’t have much time or energy to commit to projects that stray from their usual scope of work (like blogging). Incentivize them to write by offering rewards to team members who submit blogs that meet your criteria. Take it a step further and up the ante for when they hit key milestones. Here are some example rewards we set up for one client:
Your employees are deep in the trenches every day. No one has better insight into your clients and prospects. Help jog their blogging creativity and extract fresh ideas with these questions:
For those who aren’t natural-born writers, drafting up a blog can feel intimidating. Ease your team’s fears by providing some blogging best practices, and designate a QA person to review and edit posts for spelling and grammar. You may also want to consider drafting a content style guide to keep all contributions on brand.
Read: Content Marketing Tips (For People Who Hate Writing)
Before your team starts writing (or possibly even settles on a topic), provide them with these blogging tips:
Once you’ve set the foundation, decide which action your target audience should take after reading the post. If there’s a particular service that aligns with your blog post or even an existing blog post that offers more information, be sure to link back and give readers an opportunity to continue the education process.
However, your underlying goals should never come at the expense of quality. The primary objectives should be providing new, valuable information and establishing thought leadership.
Your team members poured their soul into writing a compelling, value-driven blog post. Don’t let it die a slow, painful death on the web! The biggest way to get traction with blogging is to share it with your social networks and publish it on your LinkedIn page. And, is your team part of any relevant LinkedIn groups that could benefit from the content? Encourage them to share their posts there. Setting up rewards for new visitors and hits can also incentivize them to share their posts.
Read: The Ultimate Guide to Content Promotion
Make your content marketing strategy go further by involving your employees. Are you pushing to increase rankings for a specific keyword this quarter? As you monitor and research keywords, pass along low-hanging fruit for your team to use as blog inspiration and to fuel your marketing campaigns.
If your team members don't understand the value of blogging, they’ll be hard-pressed to get involved. Did a particular blog post contribute to closing an upsell opportunity? Did an employee blog post pick up some serious SEO steam? Share success stories with your team to show how blogging fuels the sales cycle and the company’s bottom line. (Here are some Blog Metrics to Help You Measure Organic Performance.) It’s important to remember that the ROI of content isn’t instant, so success might not become apparent for months or years down the road.
Employee blogging programs are a powerful way to display your team's knowledge, share your brand voice and engage customers and prospects at every stage of the funnel. Your team members should be the ones contributing!
We've found success employing these tactics with our clients and encourage you to give them a try. If you need help getting your employee-generated content initiative off the ground, learn how Human Marketing's content marketing services can help.