Your first content meeting in January sounded something like this..

“Maybe another infographic? That seemed to get some retweets last year.”

“Oh, we can pay for social engagement. That might help.”

“Video! A game! A quiz! A silver bullet!”

Humanizing Content

We all know it’s not that easy. In 2015, hustle and volume simply aren’t enough to hit goals and create great customer experiences… it takes vision, strategy, brand power, and a team effort.

As I discussed previously, looking inward to organizational culture is often an untapped well of great ideas for brand-powered content – content that is truly authentic and has staying power.

Culture is a filter that humanizes and generates authentic content ideas when used effectively. This doesn’t mean saying no to infographics, it means harnessing the voice of potential thought leaders to slather your content with your delicious secret brand sauce.

Create a Culture Calendar

Implementing a culture calendar can be an easy win to boost team engagement and interaction. Think of it as a series of events, or institutions, that reflect the values and vibe of the organization, which can in many cases even be “run” by the entire team itself (as opposed to the office manager or HR).

This can include cultural activities that occur on a weekly, monthly or annual basis such as team meetings and Beer Friday, monthly lunch & learn events for customers, volunteering days and company outings.

Once a comprehensive list has been created in calendar format, you can tap the team to engage by sharing behind the scenes stories such as team learning points, personal stories of growth and the moments when work is truly fun for your team.

Try one on for size with this free Culture Calendar template.

Monthly Team Survey

Half the battle of publishing fresh content is finding inspiration. Sending a company-wide monthly prompt via email can help uncover great stories from across the organization that go missing or get swept up in a flurry of busy activity.

Add these stories to your editorial calendar and help team members develop their own articles to establish a more authentic voice and ultimately “humanize” the brand. Use this employee thought leadership to, in turn, populate your community blog.

 Customer Feedback

Organizational culture is as much informed by employees as it is by customers. Solicit customer feedback and create a word cloud to find forgotten stories from the customer vantage point.

A simple way to do this is to ask customers for 5 words to describe their experience working with your organization. Then, use a free tool like Tagxedo to create a word cloud. This has a dual purpose, as it can help gauge brand perception, but also showcases what is most important to customers, which can then be prioritized in editorial calendars.

Promote Externally  and Internally

Most people love talking and reading about themselves. When stories written by or featuring team members are published, share them internally within the organization. Don’t skimp on the kudos or high-fives.

Encourage the team to outwardly promote this content and, suddenly, you’ve doubled down on content promotion: Not only is it being shared through brand channels on social media and email lists, but your team is sharing it on their personal channels.

For culture-powered marketing to work, you have to invest in your organization’s culture. While facilitating fun events and creating a culture calendar is a great first step, it also requires a regular pulse check through employee and customer satisfaction surveys. Incorporating internal and external feedback demonstrates humility, which ultimately inspires the creation of that humanized content you’ve been searching for.

The post How to Pull Content From Your Culture appeared first on Relevance.

“Just download my ebook,” it says, taunting you with a quick fix to your complicated organizational challenge.

“Want to know the 5 secrets?” Why yes, yes I do.

“Submit your email address and enter our complicated marketing automation funnel.” It’s never that simple, is it?

Content marketing is broken

In today’s world of listicles and infographics, content marketing has become a commodity-fueled numbers game that oversaturates social media feeds, inboxes and our brains to the point where we spend more time trying to avoid bad content than actually solving our challenges.

So the question becomes: how do we, as marketers, conceptualize and create meaningful content that has staying power? Most marketers would tell you to look outward: follow the trends closely; capitalize and creatively iterate on a concept that is popular, trending, or currently buzzworthy; and then promote, promote, promote (and spend, spend, spend).

But isn’t there another direction? Looking inward, toward our organizational culture for inspiration, is often an untapped source of ideas, inspiration, and energy. If you’re willing to spend the big bucks on clogging your neighbor’s Facebook feed – why not invest in your own nest instead?

Marketing from the inside out

The basis of a truly modern brand goes well beyond logo and tagline. It is heavily influenced by organizational culture including core values and the employee experience, including things like common language and cultural activities and events.

As you can see illustrated above, modern marketing is influenced by much more than a strong brand image. Culture and even HR play a role in shaping a meaningful customer brand experience by creating a great experience for employees. Employees are at the forefront of customer interactions and ultimately create brand experiences at every interaction. A happy team = stronger brand interactions.

At its core, a brand is only as strong as those who believe in it. The time has come to extend ownership of our brands to its most valuable asset: engaged employees.

What it looks like in action

Let’s use an example of this with Southwest Airlines. On a recent flight to New Orleans, my flight attendant took liberties with the in-flight instructions and inserted a few hilarious quips. This has apparently become “a thing” with Southwest attendants to the point where a similar episode caught the attention of about 2 million people:

The best part about this trend is that it was completely organic. There wasn’t an internal marketing campaign that provided guidelines for how to make the flight instructions more entertaining, the Southwest culture has grown to celebrate individuality and personality.

Using the example above as a guide, one way we can extend ownership of an organization’s brand to the employees is by crafting an intentional employee experience with core values and culture at the center.

Empowering brand ambassadors

I like to think of these passionate team members as “Brand Ambassadors”– they eat, sleep and breathe the brand throughout every customer interaction…especially through content creation.

The easiest way to bring cultural influence into your content is to leverage a core group of highly engaged team members to become a content “special ops” team. Allow them ownership over the content calendar, encourage them to share daily happenings via social media and even to share stories from key influencers within the organization to elevate your content.

This will lead to a collection of inspired articles from authentic, passionate voices drawing on real life customer experiences that go way beyond “How to” to actually solving core challenges for your customers.

How has your team leveraged internal culture to elevate content?

The post Using Culture to Humanize Your Content appeared first on Relevance.