Plan, execute, accelerate: Step Three in making content marketing work for your business

If Step One and Step Two in this content marketing journey could be seen as putting the technical necessities in place for further motion, Step Three is all about acceleration.

Gearing the ‘hearts and minds’ of the entire company workforce towards the content marketing agenda takes more than an enthusiastic kick-start email from the CEO. How can we make content marketing sexy, compelling, in our staff’s best interest and something that everyone wants to be part of?

Step 3: Win in-house hearts and minds

You can nurture a content marketing culture by carefully planning how teams and individuals mesh together to achieve the collective goal. Corporate experience comes into play here and it takes a deep understanding of company functions, centres of power and personalities to create a friction free cultural transition. This is change management 101 and to do this, we would suggest three top-line elements:

1. Align cross-function teams: Take cross-functional teams (for example, PR and legal) on your content marketing journey – share the business case for content marketing and agree how it will work in your organisation and what everybody’s role is. Collaboration is key.
2. Create in-house ambassadors: Identify people with unique skills, energy or interest in particular fields (for example social media or macro-economic trends!) that can help the content marketing push and make them ‘ambassadors’ of change. Enthusiasm is contagious.
3. Manage internal relationships: Any change of culture, structure and tasks will probably also shake-up some relationships. You can (and should) control this risk carefully by using a seasoned manager to identify which individuals could be affected and set out guidelines to avoid potential conflict.

This week, BlueChip hosted a content marketing event for CMOs. Michael Kirsten, Director of Global Content Marketing & Strategy at Kelly Services, was one of our guests and next week we’ll be sharing some of his content marketing tips to take you further in your journey, so stay tuned!