According to a recent Forrester Research survey, 72 percent of B2B marketing executives say that less than half of their marketing staff plays a primary role in content marketing at their organization. This is a big problem that many businesses need to correct in order to properly execute content marketing strategies to reach their customer bases and become thought leaders in their industries.
To prevent content marketing from becoming an afterthought at your organization, it’s important to put a system in place that empowers your marketing team and other staff members to contribute to your ongoing efforts and help establish your company as a thought leader.
Create a Pipeline to Involve Your Company Stakeholders
To properly involve your marketing team and other employees across departments, you must develop a specific process for managing content production at your organization and follow it consistently from start to finish. It should entail everything from brainstorming topics to content distribution, and it will help you earn buy-in from management.
This process will make it easier for your organization to see who does what, how’s it’s done, how your content is performing, what’s happening at what times, and more—all in a quick snapshot. Such an overview will provide insights on where to place employees across the organization based on their individual strengths and weaknesses. Also, your team will be able to easily identify where and when to add or subtract resources as needed. When you include all the members of your marketing team and other company stakeholders in this pipeline, you’ll be able to pull together the best original ideas and skill sets to create strong, original content.
Working as one coordinated content marketing team will show you the subject areas that matter most to your audience and help you identify industry-wide trends that should be addressed through your content. Without this coordination, your business is likely missing out on some of the best talent at your disposal.
Create a Powerful Series of Original Content
Once your team is assembled and focused on one pipeline that fuels your content strategy, it’s time to create a few series of original content that are of interest to your audience. Think of these as a TV program that’s on every Wednesday night at 7:30—the show’s audience knows to tune in at that same time to see a new episode. This is a great format for your content series to emulate.
Your content series can be blog posts, YouTube videos, a podcast, or any other form of content that is regularly published in a frequency that matches your audience’s consumption habits, whether it’s published on a daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.
The topics covered should be valuable to your audience and connected with your company’s offerings. By frequently creating and distributing content, you’ll slowly be able to position your organization as a leading expert on these subjects.
Develop a Platform for Industry Discussion
In addition to using original content to establish your business as a thought leader, build platforms that facilitate industry conversations on your own online properties. Interview industry experts, facilitate the discussions happening in your industry, add your unique angle to the story, and have these exchanges live on your company’s properties.
In many cases, this can be done in conjunction with your original content series to achieve two different goals with one execution. For example, hosting a podcast about topics related to your company’s interests could also serve as a platform to regularly interview industry leaders, executives from other companies, your business partners, and members of your staff to help further position your company as the expert on your vertical.
Thought leadership is crafted from not only creating important conversations with content, but also facilitating conversations with others about similar topics. The process of crafting and distributing content to a relevant audience is a powerful way to position your organization as an expert.
Focus on Storytelling by Identifying Industry-Wide Patterns and Trends
The angle at which you’re approaching each piece of content should deliver your organization’s unique point of view and help you identify and provide insights on worthwhile industry trends and patterns. By highlighting these newsworthy trends in your vertical, you’ll provide value to a larger audience, stand out due to your unique perspective, and be able to facilitate a discussion on the most important data and information for your industry to analyze.
To establish yourself as an expert, you can read the content of other players in your industry, survey your customers and other organizations in your vertical, and hold frequent discussions about what is and will be important to your customer base today and in the future.
Regularly offering a valuable and unique perspective on relevant topics will help further establish your organization as a leader while reinforcing your team’s efforts on the content pipeline.
Your Content Must Be Trustworthy and Reliable
Lastly, in order to become an authority in your industry, your organization’s content must be extremely transparent—and therefore reliable and trustworthy. To do so, make the content-creation process explicit, the sources of information and data clear, and the quality of reporting high. This will ensure your audience understands that your company is a source of ongoing, reliable insights on key topics that are of interest to them.
When it comes to the way your content is developed and presented to your audience, it’s important that your team focuses on all the details to ensure you’re presenting the most accurate and complete story with each piece of content you’re producing.
It can take a long time to build trust with your audience, but you can lose their trust in asecond. That’s why it’s so important to strive to be a reliable source of information that your customer base can count on. Your trustworthy, quality content will strengthen your company’s reputation as a leader in its industry.
What are your organization’s biggest problems when it comes to creating compelling content? Has your team been coordinated appropriately to work as one unit on your content marketing strategy? Share your thoughts below.
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on The Content Standard.