Regardless of the size of your organization, you may have a small team focused on and supportive of content development. Say there’s only a handful of people across marketing, sales and business functions whom you can count on. You have to be especially tight about your planning. You definitely want some easy wins. Here are some practical suggestions for getting done what matters most when your team is small.
Where to start
First, what are your goals? For purposes of this discussion, let’s say they are to:
- Make your team and work relatable, and
- Demonstrate awareness of and contributions to industry topics.
Second, who are your contributors?
- What are they already good at? Think about they already know that could simply be written down and, voila, there’s useful content.
- How many content pieces a year are a fit? Make a content calendar for the year, by person.
- Should you assign them topics or just slots? Aim for a balance between providing direction and creative freedom.
Categories
Third, define your audience and how you’ll measure success. Make sure you’re ready to measure and adapt based on what works. When time and resources are tight, you can’t afford to create time-intensive content your audience isn’t going to engage with. One of the best examples here is webinars. They can take a ton of time without a lot of participation. Maybe you’re better off just writing a brief blog post on the topic.
Once you’ve thought through those things, you can find further efficiencies via the ideas that follow.
Specific ideas
- Create a Q&A series introducing your own employees. This is pretty easy to pull off, particularly if you create a preset list of questions for your team members to engage with. Make most of the questions about their work, including their career journey. Include one or two that offer a personal touch.
- Create a Q&A series with friends of the firm. This is a neat way to demonstrate your connection to industry themes. It can also extend your reach as participants share with their own colleagues and professional acquaintances. Consider clients, trustees, business advisors … even former employees and quasi-competitors. You could apply a “five questions” model and use the same set every time, to keep things as simple as possible.
- Briefly comment on news articles. You could call this “quick takes” or “what we’re reading” or another name that connotes brevity. Think of these like slightly souped-up LinkedIn posts that comment on a third-party article. Don’t summarize the article in your comments. Make a point of your own and say why the article is timely or otherwise interesting.
- If your strength is video, emphasize that. You don’t have to spend a lot of time writing. Maybe you’re great at sharing your thoughts extemporaneously on video. Millions of people do so on TikTok. You could, too. Especially if you can be a little personal and a little reflective.
- Don’t try to make everything “thought leadership.” If your goals are like the ones we’ve assumed here, you can fulfill them without putting pressure on yourself to advance the industry conversation with every piece of content. Maybe one or two a year like that is enough.
- Slice and dice. If you have a longish article, how can you use piece of it in other contexts? Say you write something for an annual report. Is an excerpt useful for your website? Can you pull charts from an investment commentary to make standalone posts on LinkedIn?
Celebrate success
All of the above assumes that you’re delivering your content online. Wonderful. From the emails you send to the social media you post to the web pages you promote, all are measurable and can give a barometer of where you succeeded and where you may have fallen short. Are you looking for a way to motivate competitive colleagues? Add a unique identifier to each authored piece so you can provide relative performance tracking in your reporting.
Interested in discussing content development? Send us a note.