How to Include Your Co-Workers In Your Content Marketing Efforts

Your co-workers may be a lot like your distant relatives -- they don't know what you actually do. Here's how to explain your content marketing efforts.

Taken out of context, a single post on a content calendar can't show anything about your content strategy to even the most advanced content marketer. Why, exactly, is the second Tuesday of the month the optimal time to share that new cat meme -- and how will it contribute to your current lead generation campaign? Yet, answer it you must, as it's part of your job to show your company why they're investing in content marketing. We've collected advice to help you involve others in your company in what you do to show why it's important -- because it might not be obvious to the naked eye.

See also: How To Manage an Effective Editorial Calendar

Align Your Editorial Calendar With the Company Calendar

Start your editorial calendar by highlighting company campaigns, holidays, promotions, and even company culture events -- so that your content efforts clearly align with what the company is actually doing that month. Keeping these events noted on one calendar will help keep your department from forgetting or missing out on opportunities. If the IT department is having its annual hackathon, see if there's a way you can mention and promote it in a piece of content.

Create Themes and Categories

Editorial themes are excellent ways to give a content team a wealth of ideas while keeping them focused. When editorial themes are combined with a flexible system of organization -- grouping posts by format and topic -- it's easy to show your work to those outside marketing.

For example: A theme may be innovative products from R&D department -- a top priority. Allocating 50 percent of your content to this topic will help align content creation with the right objectives. Each company will have different priorities, but knowing that you will need five blog posts, one infographic, two quizzes and two videos will help you plan ahead and explain how your content is supporting different company objectives month.

Include Other Departments in the Content Creation Process

It's a difficult position to be in when you're asked to explain your content marketing department's contributions when no one understands what you do -- especially if you're the only person overseeing the content strategy. However, it's actually incredibly simple and beneficial to get others within your company involved. The best way to get others to appreciate your job is to ask them to help you do it.

To do: Invite members of other departments into your editorial meetings. They'll not only see the hard work involved in creating strategy and effectively filling a content calendar, but their contributions -- coming from their unique perspectives in different fields -- will make your content stronger and more engaging.

See also: Spice Up Your Content Calendar With These Creative Solutions

Collect & Show The Results

If you've been running your content marketing campaign for a long time now, then you likely know its milestones by heart -- when you experienced the greatest engagement/traffic growth, increases in search ranking and social media visibility.

To do: Show how that growth corresponds to your efforts. Did your clicks shoot up after a paid-promotion campaign? Did your social media visibility rise after a concerted six-month campaign? Connect the dots for co-workers in a presentation -- don't expect those outside your department to do so.

Any single post, even the greatest post shared by thousands and ranked high by Google, won't seem like that to the naked, untrained eye. The CFO signing off on the content budget surely won't connect the dots on why your "Moving Day Checklist" post is going to rock the inbound marketing world. Make it easy for them to see the big picture by explicitly showing them the big picture.

How do you get your company involved in content creation efforts? Share your thoughts with us below.

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