The Team Approach Never Works

Your team can do almost anything. They can pull together to solve strategic challenges, find that next great product or service offering, and sometimes, they can even help you sell your way out of a slump.

But they can’t do everything.

You’ve decided to embrace content marketing as a way to build brand awareness, show your expertise, and maybe even generate some activity in your sales funnel. More than likely, the first mistake you’ll make as a leader is placing the burden for content generation on your team of salespeople, marketers, subject matter experts, and executives.

You’ll think to yourself: they’re all very bright and great communicators, one and all. After all, you see what they can do every day, through their emails, presentations, and the way they rock your company meetings. Surely they can each take turns generating blog articles, white papers, and social media posts.

Companies almost always try this approach, and it makes sense on paper. So why does the team approach to content marketing fail, almost every time? People are creatures of habit, and you’ve ingrained into them the roles they’re expected to play. You made it pretty clear in the job description and all of their performance reviews. They know what they need to do to exceed your expectations, and churning out marketing content isn’t included.

At first, everyone will be excited about the new strategy. You may do well for a few weeks, and then... Your sales leader has a raft of proposal requests come in, and their article goes on the back burner. Your vice president gets tied up on an important project and can’t handle social media anymore. One by one, marketing assignments slip by the wayside.

As soon as you hit the play button after pausing to create your content strategy, all of those other, very important demands on everyone’s time will come rushing back into their lives.

So what’s the solution? Ownership. Somebody’s got to own this strategy, just like somebody owns every other area of your business. When you think about it, there are areas where you have internal champions who own a strategy, and there are others where you’ve decided that a deficit of expertise, time, or just a simple cost-benefit analysis means you should take that particular burden off of your team and hire a partner.

In all likelihood, you should hire a content agency and have them own your content marketing strategy. They will be your champions and your experts. It’s not just about the outputs, either—it’s about how they arrive at all the articles, white papers, case studies, posts, and more. They’ll get the best source material from your team, run with it, and only bother you for final reviews and approvals.

It’s not that my people are smarter or more organized than yours. They just don’t have anything standing between them and generating content. Thus, we have the time and energy to generate dozens of content pieces each month, without fail. It’s just what we do, and it’s our only job. So we own it.

Have you made that same mistake of thinking your team, with no one owning the strategy, will fuel your marketing with great content? Just know that there’s help, and it’s only an email away. Contact me at brian@parklifecomm.com to get back on track to achieving your business goals.