Don’t Limit Your Content Marketing Team: Grow Your Content Production and Reach with Contributors

Despite what my friend Eddie would say, even Messi can’t do it alone. Let’s see if some of these quotes I heard or felt about my content marketing team sound familiar:

“I’m always behind on my publishing goals”.

“I know if I had more content to distribute I would have more traffic on my website, but I don’t have enough resources to write this content”.

“My co-workers who are supposed to write something for me keep pushing back the deadline”.

“I can’t constantly follow up with all my co-workers to make sure they share my content to their social network”.

Sounds familiar? Don’t worry there are ways to cope with that.

First of all, if you’re still not sure how content curation can solve some of your content struggles, then have a look at this must-read post by Heidi Cohen on the 3 no-brainer reasons you should start curating content, and then come back here for more tips.

I’ve identified two reasons to expand your content marketing team that can really help you increase your content production and your content reach: extend the party committee so others can write and curate with you, and/or leverage your co-workers’ social audience.

You don’t have to do both, it all depends on your organization, your culture and your means.

Before we start, let’s back up this post by data. Here is the breakdown of the posts we published on our blog since April 1st: out of 33 posts, about 40% were written by freelancers or contributors (not counting curated content from our Scoop.it pages that also contribute to our content hub). This means that by combining contribution (from contributors and freelance writers) and content curation, we were able to publish 4x more what we would have done by just relying on our own content.

Expand your content marketing team: how to onboard co-workers and freelancers to scale your content volume efficiently

Even with the help of curation, you’ll need some backup to maintain your ambitious publishing goals. So involve more people in your writing or curating efforts, whether they are employees eager to write to build their personal brand, outside contributors that have something to say about your industry (clients, connections, etc.) or freelance writers.

Ideally, you’d like them to be able to see your content plan, but this can be tricky if you rely on a content calendar spreadsheet that you have to share with every potential contributor. You also don’t want to give everybody access to the backend of your blog with full publishing rights.

No, you want to keep a hand on what is published under your brand and for that, the best is to use tools that let you manage this as an integrated workflow.

That’s why we built user profiles in the new version of Scoop.it Content Director: so that you, as a content marketing manager, can leverage resources to participate in a collective content writing and curation effort!

Share a common calendar with contributors. Limit their publishing rights to drafts so you can review and validate.

This is the overview my planner for the week, you can see this article as we speak: it’s in orange because it is still a draft, and once validated it will become blue.

Contributors can write an article or curate one (like in the screenshot below) and then submit it as a draft (and only as a draft):

Any administrator can then review the post and validate it to publish it on your blog or schedule it for later.

For more details on this new feature of Scoop.it Content Director, read our knowledge base article here.

Benefits: more content and better content.

• Publish more relevant content – even if you have no budget for freelance, you could still have a 20+% increase in content published by leveraging contributors. As shown above, we only authored 1 posts out of 4 since April 1st…

• More content means more views – About 40% of our traffic came from freelancers and contributors’ posts.

• And thus more leads – 44% of our leads came from our own content, but contributed content and freelancers content added another 40% to our demand generation efforts.

Leverage your co-workers’ social audiences to increase your reach and grow their online presence

Connect their social accounts to your publishing tool to share content on their behalf

How much time do you spend distributing your content on all of your social media channels – either manually or with a tool like Buffer, TweetDeck or Hootsuite? Now imagine multiplying that by the number of co-workers willing to let you use their social media accounts. Scary huh.

Since I started using Scoop.it Content Director, I’ve been sharing my content on 14 platforms:

• The 4 accounts for Scoop.it (Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Google+).

• The Twitter and Linkedin accounts of 5 employees including my CEO and my President.

In just a few clicks I choose the content to share, select the platforms to share it to, customize the messages (who wants to see #hashtags on LinkedIn!) and schedule the social post according to on each account’s defined publishing window – very useful for our co-workers who are not in the same time zone and want content to be shared when they’re online.

Benefits: broader distribution of content, growth of thought leadership

1. You get more reach for your content.

2. Your co-workers don’t lose time following and sharing your content.

3. It builds their online presence.

Conclusion: Your content marketing team can be as large as you want it to be

This is just a glimpse of all the ways Scoop.it Content Director helped me increase my traffic and generate more leads. Have a look at our latest release for a broader view of the new features we developed to get you more ROI on your content marketing.

Don’t hesitate to tell us what you think in the comments section below!

And for more tips on how to make your content marketing strategy lean as an SMB, download our free ebook.

Image by Citizen59

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