"How can I get my team to create better content?"

"How can I get my team to create better content ?"

Do you struggle to get your team to create consistent content? Perhaps they are reluctant to do it – don’t see it as an important part of their job. Maybe they are lacking in skills and confidence.

Or maybe they lack structure. They aren’t consistent in tone or style. They don’t post regularly or share new content.

Maybe they are posting without a strategy. They share funny memes but never any valuable insights or promotional content.

Whether your team lack motivation, confidence, direction, skills or something else, there are steps you can take to fix the problem.

Show them the bigger picture

Maybe the non-marketers in your company don’t think of marketing as part of their job.

Maybe the marketing team don’t view sales as part of their job.

Maybe your sales team aren’t interested in doing any marketing activities.

But here’s the thing. Marketing and sales should be part of everyone’s job.

If a company doesn’t make money, it doesn’t need employees. And you only make money if you’re making sales. And you only make sales if you’re attracting and retaining customers.

Too many employees don’t view the big picture. They don’t realise that their jobs rely on the company making sales. They don’t realise that the more sales a company makes the more opportunities there are for pay rises and bonuses and promotions.

So the first step in getting your team to make better content is to show them why they need to do it. They need to care about sales even if they aren’t directly involved in sales.

And the good news for them is that they don’t have to cold-call their way through the phone book or hit up every networking event in town to contribute to marketing and sales.

Promoting your products and services, showcasing your expertise, building credibility, engaging with potential customers, talking to existing customers, being visible, sharing successes, and supporting your customers and suppliers – all these things can be done on social media. And all these things can be done by any team member.

The second part of getting them to see the bigger picture is to show them how these small things contribute to the customer journey. Help them understand how a simple marketing and sales funnel works.

A potential client might see a social media post that one of your employees shared. That might lead them to click through to your website, sign up for your emails, or download a brochure. And that could lead to them booking a sales call or making a purchase.

Don’t silo marketing and sales. Get everyone on board with the customer journey so they can see where their contribution (however small) fits in.

If your team can see the purpose behind what they are creating, they will be more motivated to do it. Plus it’ll make the experience better for your customers.

Make sales and marketing collaborative

It never fails to amaze me how many companies have sales teams and marketing teams that don’t work together.

The easiest way to improve your content is to get your sales team speaking to your marketing team.

Let’s say you work with businesses in lots of different sectors, but next month, your sales team are going to be focusing on accountancy firms. They have a list of companies they want to contact.

If they let the marketing team know this then the marketing team can start doing some groundwork. They can create content that accountancy firms will relate to.

They can share case studies and client feedback from accountancy firms you’ve worked with in the past.

They can put a blog post on your website that appeals to accountancy firms.

They can start finding these companies on social media and engaging with their content. They can start conversations.

When your salespeople contact people in those firms, those people are probably going to check out your website and social pages. And what they’ll find is content they can relate to, relevant content, relevant reviews, and case studies showing you can get results for firms like theirs.

Isn’t that going to make it easier for your sales teams?

Let them get to know your customers

Your marketing team need to understand your ideal clients. If they don’t understand them, how can they create content that is going to appeal to them?

Get them to listen in on sales calls so they can hear the kind of questions potential clients are asking or the concerns they are raising. They can then create marketing content that answers these questions and addresses these concerns.

Put them in charge of collecting feedback from customers. If possible, get them to do this by actually speaking to customers over the phone or in person.

Make sure they are interacting with your customers and potential customers on social media and paying attention to what they are doing. What kind of content are your customers interacting with and sharing? What interests them and what might they find useful?

Marketing isn’t just about making a post for whichever international day or week it is. Marketing is about connecting with your potential customers and existing customers. Your team can’t do that if they don’t take the time to get to know your customers.

Have a strategy

Telling people to create content for social media is all well and good, but what should they be creating?

You don’t want everyone in your team sharing pictures of their dogs and talking about which biscuit is best all the time.

So you need to give them structure.

What are your goals for the different platforms? Are you trying to build a following, raise awareness of your products and services, establish your expertise and credibility, build trust, stay front of mind, become a leading authority in your industry?

How are you going to do that? How will you measure success?

Give your team guidance on what type of content they should be sharing.

Do you want them to focus on engaging content, educational content, or promotional content? Ideally, you need a good mix of all three so how can you achieve that?

Is there someone in the team whose strength is writing informative blog posts and someone else who is great at creating visual content? How can you utilise their skills? Can you get them to upskill each other?

Don’t just let your team loose on social media without having some kind of strategy for making it cohesive. The ultimate goal might be to attract leads but there are different ways to do that.

Create a style guide

A common issue I see when delivering training is a lack of consistency. Some people share stuff that sounds like it was written for an English teacher. Others write posts like they are texting a mate after a night on the beer. Then you have the people who are just not confident in their written skills at all.

Having a guide can help.

It can cover tone of voice – give some examples of how posts should sound.

It can provide a list of words you want associated with your company, products and services and a list of words you don’t want to use. For example, you might say it’s ok to use “good value”, but not “cheap” when referring to your products.

Your guide should also include some rules for writing things like times and dates, using capital letters and so on. These are only minor details but they can help build consistency across all your communications.

Having a guide gives a bit more structure which can help people feel more confident writing marketing and sales content.

Give people time to work on their content

You can’t expect your team to be banging out loads of content for social media if you aren’t giving them time to work on it.

Some people can come up with posts on the fly, whereas others find it beneficial to pre-write content. Some people would rather have a little time each day to work on one post at a time whereas others prefer to block out a chunk of time and bulk write content.

Work with each member of your team to find out what works for them and then give them time to work on content creation.

Perhaps the first thirty minutes of the day could be set aside for creating and scheduling content. Or maybe you could set aside a quiet space (a meeting room or office) where people can sit and concentrate on writing their content when creativity strikes.

Build a content 'bank'

You don’t need to come up with new ideas every day. You can reuse, recycle and repurpose content on social media.

Make sure all the best content is easily accessible. This should include links to blog posts (and any text that can be used in the supporting post), videos, images, infographics, top tip posts, promo posts, templates – anything that can save your team time when posting.

If you have people sharing from different accounts, make some kind of schedule to ensure everyone isn’t always sharing the same stuff at the same time.

Invest in training

Confidence is a huge barrier to content creation.

People don’t think they are creative. Or that their writing skills are up to scratch. Or that they know enough about the products to write sales copy.

My Write to Sell training addresses all these issues.

It looks at the customer journey – the entire marketing and sales process. It helps people understand how to create content for each different stage of the process. It gives people the skills they need to create promotional content and sales copy.

If you don’t have a dedicated marketing team, I can teach non-marketers the basics.

If your marketing team isn’t generating leads, I can teach them how to change that.

If your sales team aren’t getting anywhere with their cold outreach, I can show them how to get better results.

Whether you need to upskill a team of non-marketers, a marketing team, a sales team, or your entire team, I can help.

Write to Sell can be tailored to your team and your needs. So if you want to get your team creating better content, let’s talk.

About me

I started trading as Lisa Slater Copywriting in 2014 and incorporated Make Your Copy Count Ltd in 2017.

Prior to the launch of Make Your Copy Count, I had been focusing solely on “done for you” copywriting services. During that time, I identified a real need for simple, practical copywriting and content marketing training. So as well as launching a new brand, I also launched two courses: Blogging for Business and Write to Sell.

Since 2020, I have moved away from offering done-for-you copywriting services, focusing more time on delivering high-quality training, consulting and mentoring services.

If you would like to improve your team’s copy or content writing skills, I’d love to hear from you.