Part of the success of an inbound marketing strategy relies on your creative team to produce quality inbound content on a regular basis. Some companies choose to outsource content, which is fine, but often times this content ends up sounding forced and amateur to say the least. A large departure from the true method of inbound marketing, indeed. For some companies the answer is to go directly to the experts. In this case their employees.
Although the content will be personal and unique much of your battle will be keeping your internal writers motivated. Adjusting your management strategy a bit and rewarding top performance can allow you to get the most out of your team.
Clear Out the Dust
Ensure each member of your content team understands both the purpose of the content requested -whether that is sales, visits, or search engine optimization- and how the results are calculated. Their aim will be truer if they can see the target.
Taking the pain out of keyword content strategy development, tools for measuring keyword density and other SEO measures before the writing is assigned should make the writing less painful for employees.
Don't Be Hasty Now
There is no doubt your going to get the occasional "too busy" or "I'm an awful writer" come through. Proceed with caution!
Hasty writing is never optimal, and sometimes creative works take time to develop completely. Be generous in your deadlines wherever possible to help ensure projects have time to evolve and the best finished product can be extracted. A good way to not fall behind is developing an editorial dashboard for your writers/employees to see. Queue your articles well in advanced to supplement the inevitable late article.
To discourage procrastination, make friendly check-ins a regular occurrence -this also guarantees your inbound content strategy is flowing the direction you would like.
Embrace Simplicity
Help your team fight the urge to elongate and elaborate where not needed. When using content in an inbound marketing strategy, simple content captures attention and is easier to read, as well as being elegant in style.
Reward concise pieces of work and your creators will focus on show-stopping content rather than filling out length.
Reward Top Content
One of the best ways to make an employee want to work harder to climb to top performance is to place a coveted reward there. Try rewards like; top ranking inbound content gets to skip their next turn, will be featured in next months newsletter or get an extra few days of vacation.
Give them something tangible to strive for. In addition to enhancing the target, this shows you care about your employees.
Recognize Performers
While most people immediately think of monetary rewards when considering incentives, the effect of recognition on employee well-being should not be ignored. When you let people know that you appreciate the hard work they do for you, it reinforces that working hard for you is worth it.
Employee of the month programs and other ways to publicly thank top performers are a popular way of showing appreciation, as are employee events. Small gifts and time off are also highly appreciated.
If you commit to proper management of your marketing content team, you will be rewarded with more motivated players and better content strategy before long.