Involving employees in the company’s content marketing strategy isn’t a new idea. But employee-involved content can be much more than that. At Aveda, our head office employees would often be models for our social media hair photo shoots. #avedaartist #stylesbyalexis pic.twitter.com/76oi5G4CyM — Gordon Salon (@GordonSalon) January 10, 2019 At Davines, our employees get involved in our community events in New York to help bring the brand to life and capture content at the event, we’re often hair models too. Employees can run Twitter chats or ask-me-anything sessions where they can interact with the customers and potential customers. We include blog posts, videos, social media posts all about their process, their progress and, of course, the supplements they are using. This not only helps us get involved with our community of customers, but also helps us sell more products. Shelby Rogers, content marketing manager, Solodev Don’t say stupid We involve employees in team meetings and brainstorming sessions. The most important aspect to a creative session is to remember that there’s no such thing as a bad idea, just poorly executed or insufficiently fleshed-out ideas. Ann regularly combines words and strategy for B2B, B2C, and nonprofits, continuing to live up to her high school nickname, Editor Ann.
Involving employees in the company’s content marketing strategy isn’t a new idea.
Employees already are asked to share content on their social channels. C-suite and subject matter experts often collaborate on thought leadership content.
And you likely know the value of connecting with your sales and/or customer service teams to get frontline insight into what your brand’s prospects and customers want to know.
But employee-involved content can be much more than that. I put out a call to learn more about how marketers involve their non-marketing coworkers in their content. While many responses reflected the typical examples, several brought a unique perspective and others offered some fresh approaches.
The inherent takeaway through all the ideas? Employees can give your content marketing the zing it needs to stand out, be remembered, and build relationships.
Now, let’s get to the ideas, tips, and examples.
Have fun with them (and relevant news)
We’re a merged real estate team with a marketing department that handles five brands across many digital platforms. Over the holidays, our team came together to stage a Christmas parody video about Amazon’s HQ2 arriving in Arlington sung to the tune of Santa Claus is Coming to Town. We had dancing elves, agents dressed in Christmas pajamas, a large inflatable reindeer costume, and more.
Nick Tozier, content specialist and copywriter, Keri Shull Team
Connect with their contacts
When looking for content partnerships, such as guest blogging, we leverage employees for their contacts. Your first- and second-degree connection list becomes much bigger when you’re able to tap multiple networks instead of just your own. Because of this, we’ve partnered with platforms that would normally be difficult to reach.
Catherine Giese, SEO associate, Fundera
Use their external education
If staff members attend a seminar, symposium, workshop, or some other type of skill-building (or industry) event – ask them to document their experience. Then you can work with their notes to create a lessons-learned piece based on the event. We did this with one of our developers when he attended a security conference, and it was interesting to see the amount of positive feedback the content received from our staff, other conference attendees, and people interested in the topics covered.
Colton DeVos, marketing and communication specialist, Resolute Technology Solutions
Write about their day
Employees at CIENCE help our marketing efforts by participating in day-in-the-life pieces. We’ve produced a number of these to inform future customers about what it’s like to be a researcher, sales development representative, customer success manager, etc.
These in-depth articles have helped our sales team relate to customers the future experiences they may have when hiring CIENCE.
Eric Quanstrom, chief marketing officer, CIENCE
Make them your personas
At Prep Expert, we use some of our employees as customer avatars because of their roles as parents or guardians of children within our consumers’ age range. Our consumers are a specific niche – high school students between their junior and senior years. That’s tough to track.
That’s why we’ve looked to our employees who are raising children and know what issues their kids have when studying for these college-prep tests and the common questions that come up when tackling our course.
Shaan Patel, founder and CEO, Prep Expert
Show them
To boost our recruitment marketing, our 100% remote team at Worldwide 101 invented a video series called “Meet the…
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