Turn Your Company’s Scattered Expertise Into An Expert Internal Marketing Team

Getting Your Reluctant Internal Experts On Board The Content Train

1. Share The Vision…And The Responsibility
Communicate to your contributing team what it is that you want to accomplish and why it's so important to produce engaging, helpful content. Be open to their feedback, delegate some responsibility so they can take some ownership of the process and lead by example. Remember to encourage participation in the process. Let your contributors take an idea and run with it, so long as it's in line with your marketing goals.

2. Establish A Content Schedule
The best way to make sure all your contributors are producing timely content that is in line with your marketing goals is to create and follow a content schedule. Your contributors can organize around an effective content schedule and know what's expected of them and when.

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3. Strike A Balance
The trick is to strike a balance with your contributors somewhere between creativity and responsibility. Be flexible when it comes to their ideas, as long as they align with your primary goals, but be firm when it comes to deadlines.

4. Creative Passion Thermometer
Not as juicy as it might at first sound, yet handy nonetheless. You’ll find that content will flow more easily from the people who are passionate about their work. If you have a large pool of potential contributors at your company - those who are experts in what they do - go around and ask if they'd be willing to write regularly about their area of expertise. Gauge the responses that you get. You may want to stick with the folks that light up when ask them to be a contributor. They may be the more naturally prolific at churning quality content.

5. If No One Lights Up When You Ask
Smaller companies will often have higher and more hastily constructed Walls of Reluctance. You may have to gently knock them down by incentivizing the content creation process. Perhaps this means negotiating their busy schedule to allow more time for them to devote to content marketing. Or maybe you offer a monetary incentive to any contributor who’s content brings in a certain amount of visitors or goal conversions within the span of a month. You’ll know what works best for your contributors, if you don’t…you can always just ask them.

6. Support Each Other’s Content
Here at Edge we recently published an article about our favorite charities and places to volunteer. Until I read it, I didn’t realize how much we were doing as a team within the community. My point is encourage your team to read each other’s content, Like it, share it and give each other constructive feedback. You may learn a lot more than you think about the folks in your own company, while generating better ideas and sharing content within your collective spheres of influence.

7. Put A Name And A Picture On It
Make sure that the content you’re publishing on your website doesn’t look generic. Generic looking content is equally unappealing to search engines, humans and possibly even hyper-intelligent dolphins, who knows!? One way to avoid this is by making sure the human contributor’s name and photo is posted along side their content. This also helps build better content. When your contributors know that their name will be pinned next to their content, they tend to give that extra 10%. You should also set your site and contributors up for Google’s Author Rich Snippets.