What if I told you there were currently over a billion sites on the internet today that were actively creating content? You probably wouldn’t be that surprised, but when you think about the sheer volume of content out there, and how much of it is actually being read – then you might start to see the real picture.
Yes. Content creation is extremely important for businesses and brands of all sizes, but so it team management and making sure your best content is actually being read. This not only applies to creating content for a website or blog, but also for those within your company or organization as well.
Through the use of online tools and team management platforms, anyone can start increasing their engagement, management, and productivity of those around them. That’s exactly what we are going to be looking at today.
We Are All Suffering from Content Overload!
As you can imagine, with so much new content going live on the internet… we are all consumed with way too many distractions, opportunities, emails, and social triggers to pull our eyes away from what we should really all be working on.
At the same time, this can also help online marketers and content creators understand what it takes to create not just ‘better content’, but also how to get it in front of the right audiences as well.
Here are some content creation and marketing best practices to follow:
- Focus on your target audience and what they are looking for, before actually writing out your content
- Go for longtail keywords when trying to rank your content in Google. They will get less traffic, but it will be more targeted.
- When going live with content on your site, don’t just stop there. You then need to focus on the content promotion aspect.
- Social media sharing is great for online content, but there also needs to be a manual outreach component in there as well. This will take the most time and effort to complete, but will also yield the best results over time.
- Segmenting and distributing the various tasks of content creation and promotion across your online marketing team is key. Always make sure everyone is on the same page, so the process can be streamlined and proven to be effective time and time again.
Once all of these actions are in place, you can then focus on the core of your business — which is likely driving traffic, leads, and sales back to your site. However, just looking at the tips above and trying to manually implement them all by yourself can be quite a struggle.
This is where employee advocacy and better group management comes into play.
How Employee Engagement and Advocacy Can Save the Day
Imagine if everyone you worked with had a valuable role in marketing your business and actually took the time to help create, read, promote, and contribute to the success of your site. The business impact of this would be astronomical, but getting 100% of your professional network involved simply isn’t realistic.
However, when it comes to the individuals and freelancers who might actually be assigned such work to help grow and business your business – well, that is where employee-centered brand advocacy really can make a huge difference.
If you haven’t heard of employee advocacy yet, don’t worry – many haven’t. But it is commonly used in everyday business, communications, and marketing. In short, “Employee Advocacy is the promotion of a company’s messages by its employees. Employee Advocacy today takes increasingly place online, with social media as the main medium for brand ambassadors.“
While that might seem pretty brand or generic, let’s back it up with some industry stats and results of how effective employee advocacy can actually be, when done right.
- Fact: according to our data, one employee share generates about 4 clicks on Facebook on average. – Smarp
- “An average employee advocate is 2x more trusted than a company CEO” – Edelman Trust Barometer
- “12% increase in brand advocacy generates a 2x increase in revenue growth” – Reichheld
- “Referred employees are faster to hire, perform better, and stay longer in the company.” – Global Recruiting Trends 2017, LinkedIn Talent Solutions
Now imagine if these same metrics were able to be applied to your online business? Good news! They can be, and now it’s actually easier than ever before, thanks to online tools and platforms that focus on making employee advocacy and a big win for companies, but also fun, engaging, and reward for all employees and team members as well.
One such solution is Smarp, which has created a platform that allows employees to connect and engage with company news, discussions and curated content, right from their computer or mobile device — all while being on a private platform that was built just for them.
Features Within the Smarp Platform
To better understand how employee advocacy works, we can look at some of the key features built within the Smarp platform. The main focus here is to provide a customized, categorized internal news feed and user environment for everyone working within a company or group. The idea is not just to consume and share out content, but to also engage and interact with others in the same work community as well.
Smarp currently has the following features available to their customers:
- Intuitive news feed
The news feed is the heart of the Smarp app. Here employees discover content, interact with each other and share knowledge both internally and externally to their personal social networks and beyond. - Employee-driven content creation and curation
Content curation and creation should ideally be everyone’s business. On Smarp, marketers and other admins can post content for discussion and distribution using automation tools or manual pushes, but thanks to submission functions and comment threads, the platform wisely makes it easy for non-marketing employees to step up as the main sources of knowledge. - Employee-generated content
Curated content is organized into themed channels called “Topics.” Users can easily change what content they scroll through by clicking across the specific topics that interest them most – or, for a complete briefing, just clicking on “All Topics” at the top. - A directory for company resources
With your company’s go-to resources and assets stored all over the place – web pages, Google docs, Dropbox and beyond – it’s hard to keep everything easily accessible to everyone who needs it. With Smarp, you can set up a topic called “Resources,” simply post links to each useful page and document, and you’re good to go with your dynamic library. It’s the perfect hub for contact details, link directories, marketing collateral, guidelines and policies, to name a few.
To see all of this in action and gain a better visual understanding of how Smarp can help improve your brand or business productivity, while also introducing employee advocacy in the process, be sure to check out the short video below.
Ready to bring your content and employees together?
This isn’t rocket science. We all know that content creation is one of the most powerful things on the internet today. Through the use of online tools that allow anyone to not just create content online, but also to connect and engage with others, there is simply no reason not to improve your game and bring it to that next level – whether you are an individual blogger, a brand, or a multi-million dollar agency.
Take the time to explore the opportunities that lie within employee advocacy and see how you can start applying these same practices into your own day to day operations.