In a 2021 survey provided to Insider Intelligence by Provoke Insights: Roughly a third of USA B2B marketing and sales professionals said they struggle to implement brand identity because they cannot ensure standards consistently. In other words. there are no uniform guidelines, and brand importance is undervalued.
Your company has a social media presence and you are following the best practices for posting consistent branded content, but is it working? My objective here is to outline areas that you can encourage improvement with your sales and marketing teams and that can act as leverage to solicit buy-in from executive levels as well.
Being a CMO, I am sure you know why marketing is a key to success, and as Drucker once said: “There are only two things in a business that make money – innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.”
5 Ways to Maximize Your Team’s Efforts in Content Marketing
1) Create A Clear, Consistent, Repeatable Style
Create a clear and concise style guide for all employees so they are able to speak about your brand with uniform messaging, with this they will be able to keep messaging and style “on brand.”
One of the best ways to maximize your team’s efforts in content marketing is by providing a style guide for employees that will help them speak about your brand with uniform messaging. With this, they will be able to keep their message and tone on-brand, which can only help you achieve better results from any content effort.
You might ask: “Why does it matter if my company has an official voice?” Well, when everything is one consistent message across all channels, there are many benefits. For example, consistency leads to customer loyalty because customers know what type of experience they’re going to get every time; it also means maintaining higher search engine rankings due to websites having more semantic value; as well as improved visibility among industry influencers.
2) Get Everyone On-Board And Moving In The Same Direction
Everyone needs to be moving in the same direction and be engaging their audiences and posting relevant content, which results in having more conversations and deeper relationships.
If we’re to maximize our team’s efforts, everyone needs to sing from the same hymn sheet and be engaging. For your content marketing strategy to work effectively you need two things – consistency in what you post across all channels (so that there is a consistent message), and engagement with followers so they are interested enough in your posts for them to want to share it on their social media network.
Don’t forget that consistency in message and quantity of content being produced are equally important to the overall strategy.
The more people that engage with your content, the higher visibility of your B-to-B branded content will be on LinkedIn, Twitter, or within Google search engine results pages. In addition, successful content promotion helps generate valuable leads by targeting prospects with relevant messages at opportune moments – when they’re closer than ever before!
Make sure everyone knows that they should be sharing engaging thought-provoking content with their networks and in particular their supportive peers and other influencers who can amplify their messages and conversations to their audiences too.
3) Make Sure Employees Understand Your And Their Audience
Knowledge is power and getting your employees to understand your audience is important but equally important to the success of content marketing is making sure that they understand their own personal audience. Their audience will sometimes be slightly different from the general company audience. The way to reach those valued target audience members within both groups will differ, but if they know their audience, they can reach them.
Encourage employees to research what their networks care about (culture, hobbies, personal interests, etc.) so they can connect more easily with them and provide valuable information/content
The first thing to note is that if your employees are not social sharing the company’s branded content on social media, it is a missed opportunity for traffic and possible conversions.
If they do share their own posts, then there should be consistency in what they post about and in how frequently they post. Creating guidelines together as an organization will help this process.
Social Media Sharing Guidelines outline why B2B Branded Content Marketing Matters: because people want more than just text from companies; they want photos, video clips, and anything that will help them connect with the brand through familiar topics or interests. It has been shown time after time that people prefer this type of brand engagement over traditional advertising campaigns since individualized interactions really resonate within people’s minds.
4) Guard Against Complacency
Ensuring that your team doesn’t get complacent and lazy and just start to only click “share” on company content is a key to keeping their audience engaged.
In order to keep audiences engaged, it’s important that your team shares the company messages in a more personal way. Sharing news about other employees or talking about why they like working for the company will help build rapport with their audience and increase engagement rates. It also helps create an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up without fear of retribution which can be crucial when dealing with sensitive topics such as those involving sexual harassment and discrimination incidents.
5) Have Employees Share Their Knowledge
Encourage employees to engage on the topics they are knowledgeable about. Your employees won’t be knowledgeable about all aspects of the brand nor about every piece of content you produce. Have employees engage and amplify the content that they actually know about will really help to keep their credibility intact. If they engage in conversations without knowing the topic or at least being able to call upon someone to assist them in specific expertise they will damage their brand and yours.
The key to success for content marketing isn’t just about writing copy, but more so about making sure that you’re getting consistent engagement with the audience. The more interaction your posts have on social media or comments and shares from other employees of yours shows how engaged they are in what you’re doing as a company.
It’s important to remember though that not all content will be engaging for everyone, so don’t let your sales or marketing executives get discouraged if some topics don’t go too well- this is actually an opportunity to find out where their audiences’ interests lie and can only help when developing future campaigns.
Keep these things in mind as you write your B-Corp content marketing strategy:
Your audience is always on social media – take advantage of this! Use catchy headlines, lists, polls, photos, etc. All of these tactics are proven ways to get attention from potential customers before they ever reach your sales funnel and it will give your business the intel you need to understand more about your audience and the micro audiences that are within your sales teams and management teams social media channels.
Does your company utilize a digital engagement platform to ensure all of these best practices are being executed and scaled effectively?
