We encourage marketing teams to distribute the burden of creating content to the experts. After all, the people talking to clients know what challenges your market faces and the experts in that area know how to solve those challenges. 

Marketing is the facilitator for this content, removing the barriers, making it as easy as possible and feeding back the results to keep the momentum going.

But marketing teams also need to lead the way with content and inject some energy and best practice into the mix. By producing some core content pieces, marketers can lead and encourage their colleagues to publish insights of their own.

How Marketing can lead with content.

1. Capture the core themes for this quarter - get your leaders involved

Experts know the market and their customers, but they might not have a birds-eye view of the strategy and message for the firm. One way to extract and communicate that throughout the firm is to organise a few short posts on core topics by your senior leaders.

For example, here at Passle our founders Adam & Tom will often have a few key themes such as distributed leadership, software as a service or efficiency savings. This is a good way for them to refine their own ideas and for the rest of Passle to access and understand them. We’re then able to share these core messages easily and directly with our key clients and prospects.

2. Create the “hero content” others can use as the start of a post

Short, timely content is shown to be preferred by buyers. But longer hero content has its place as well. Whether it be industry research, a compilation of different shorter posts or some other long-form whitepaper - hero content serves as a great inspiration for others to write content about.

The marketing team at Passle has compiled research from industry experts, conducted some research of its own and done some more comprehensive industry analysis for a larger campaign. All these things make good talking points that your experts can add their opinions to in their own insights.

3. Build content into other activities and plans - especially events

On the marketing calendar, there are usually a few events, campaigns, and activities that stand out as “pillars” of the marketing strategy. That could be the big annual trade show, customer conference, research report, sponsorship of a team or activity or something else that acts as a focal point for that part of the year.

Content is an easy, flexible way to support these events and spread the word both internally and to the market about your activities. As they are often tremendously expensive it is critical that there is proper buildup, something to show from the day and something to use as a follow up from the activity. 

For example at Passle, when we send someone to an overseas conference, they have to commit to writing content on the talks that they see. We then send this as a follow up to the attendees as a handy reminder of the conference content and a way to showcase our own expertise.

4. Organise multimedia content - video, podcast & images

Marketers are best placed to create more complicated but more engaging content like videos, podcasts and imagery. If you have experts creating content, a great way of informing your multimedia content is to work from existing posts from the experts that know the market.

A short, regular podcast, built off the back of the posts and featuring your experts is a great way to build their brand and deliver your message in an authentic way. These take less than 30mins to record and less than an hour to edit yet are a slick finished product that is easily reusable. We commit here to doing a podcast once a month on our core concepts. I’ll usually reference and work from an existing post.

Videos on your key topics, supporting events or explaining industry challenges are engaging and offer a more visual form of content better suited to paid social activities. These too can be produced with an insight as the base and an expert as the subject. Because your expert knows what they are talking about, your videos are much more authentic and candid whilst actually being easier to produce. 

An infographic, or even a small sharing image is an easy way to help make a post more professional and engaging. The actual insight is already written so marketing and design teams can easily produce a small branded piece that helps drive greater reach.

5. Send out a regular newsletter

Your people are sharing and your posts are performing well in search results but are you front of mind for the people that matter? In your sales pipeline and among your wider network are the people that you’ve already spent the sales and marketing effort to build a relationship with, the people closest to buying and best able to help your team achieve their revenue targets.

A regular email keeping people up to date is something we do at Passle to keep our clients up to date with the latest in the industry and share any ideas or commentary we have on what others are doing. We aren’t updating our readers on our firm, but offering them an insight into any new developments that are relevant to their firm.

For marketers, there is a real opportunity to be a leader with content, whether that be to lead by example or to encourage and distribute content from the other leaders in the firm. As the energy in the content creation process, you really need to be setting an example for the rest of your organisation.