You work hard to get your content in front of the right audiences: your target personas, existing customers, industry influencers, etc. But there’s an important group you are probably forgetting about, and ironically, getting your content in front of them isn’t difficult at all. You just have to walk down the hall or lean over the cubicle wall and show it to them.
I’m talking about your coworkers, of course. In many cases they may not (sadly) even know you have a content marketing program! There are a number of reasons why they need to know. And further, why they need to be on your content distribution list.
- Smash the Silos — It’s easy to believe that everyone in your organization has the same understanding of how your products and services work, what their features are, who your key business partnerships are with, etc. Guess again. If your company is like most, quite often, the right hand has absolutely no clue what the left hand is doing. Sharing your content internally can go a long way toward breaking down walls between departments, and that can go a long way toward improving communication and increasing productivity.
- Singing From the Same Hymnal — It’s hard to build trust with your prospects and customers if they’re not getting the same message when speaking to different people within your organization—and that tends to be more the rule than the exception. Your marketing content can actually be a great (if unintentional) tool for standardizing how your staff talks about your products and services.
- All Eyes on Deck — The business world seems to be moving at an ever more frenetic pace, with products and services being updated darn near daily—or at least it feels that way. Consequently, for all your good intentions and subject matter expert sign-offs, it’s easy for your content to contain errors or inconsistencies. Having your peers read your content before it goes out the door is a great way to ensure it is as accurate as possible.
- Get the Wheels Turning — Continually coming up with new fuel for your content marketing engine can be a challenge. And if you’ve ever gone to someone in another department to ask if they have ideas for a new piece of content and received an answer other than, “Nope,” consider yourself lucky. Interestingly, however, when content is being shared around the office and the people who helped contribute to it are getting kudos, suddenly all kinds of ideas come out of the woodwork. Don’t be surprised if your once anemic content calendar is suddenly quite healthy.
- Share the Load — As the content that you have produced starts to generate more suggestions from your peers, you can (and should) start to ever-so-gently rope in people who have presented ideas and have them become authors/contributors. I stress gently because you don’t want to spook others who may have thoughts to share but don’t want any new tasks on their plate!
Ultimately, your most overlooked group of content consumers can turn out to be one of your most important. Time to start servin’ up some home cookin’!
