5 questions to answer when creating a program for employees and content marketing

Once you’ve made the decision to enhance your content marketing with employee participation and contributions, your next step will be to answer the following five questions to ensure your program will be successful.

1. What are our first steps in getting employees to participate in content marketing?

• Show them the value of their participation.
• Customers are Googling salespeople. Have employees Googled themselves?
• Alleviate their fears with easy-to-understand information and process-driven guidance.
• Make it fun! Gamify your goals wherever possible.

2. How do we motivate employees to participate?

• Establish WIIFM (What In It For Me). Help them understand the benefits of participating.
• Compensation always helps. The companies who win in this new sales paradigm will offer rewards to employees who share their expertise.
• Check in at sales meetings. Recognise the wins and learn from your missteps.
• Design a bonus program for online reviews.

3. Should employee participation in content be mandatory?

• Yes, but it must not be perceived so. Everyone has something to contribute.
• You make other things mandatory, right?
• It’s all in the delivery of your requirements and how well employees assimilate content creation into their job duties. 
• It’s a delicate balance because you’re introducing something very new and weird for most.
• Recognise and reward for ‘superstar’ participation.

4. What tools can we use to make it super simple for employees to contribute?

• YDMA CONNECT is our goto option, we can setup your employees to contribute to us directly. 
• Shared Google Docs are also a good option, depending on the technological aptitude of your team, we can provide them access to a content area in our shared Google Docs folder!
• Stay away from emailing back and forth. Through hard-won experience, we’ve found this gets out of hand quickly because email threads are very difficult to manage.

5. Should employees be compensated for their contributions?

• Yes, it’s a task like any other and that needs to be compensated.
• Adding more work without recognition or compensation will produce the opposite effect you’re looking for.
• A solid, sustainable process means compensating your people. Don’t expect quality content if you’re not willing to pay for it.