The Essential Role of Employee-Generated Content in Modern Marketing

One of the consequences of keeping your employees out of your marketing strategy is missing out on audience engagement and losing advantage to a major competitor, as was the case with the fast food giant.

A valuable lesson in this regard can be learned from Chick-fil-A’s recent blunder of banning their employees from making viral content.

In fact, your employees should be a driving force in your marketing strategy—not only serving as brand ambassadors but also helping your organization publish content that resonates with target audiences.

Notably, siloed teams can be disastrous for business outcomes. According to a recent Forbes article, 67% of managers cite silos as the biggest obstacle to cross-team collaboration. A lack of collaboration among teams can prevent innovation, employee frustration, and disengagement.

This can also mean your organization misses out on great business opportunities because of a lack of collaboration across teams.

Here’s why you should include your employees in your marketing activities and how they can elevate your organization’s brand strategy.

Far-removed technical teams

Marketing strategies are often delegated to the marketing department alone, with employees in more technical roles (such as engineers and product managers) never getting the chance to contribute.

From the marketing perspective, this can lead to disastrous consequences, such as not capturing the full potential of your offering’s value. More specifically, this alienation can disrupt workflows for producing content.

For instance, a marketer not as familiar with the technical aspects of a newly launched product may lose valuable time researching and chasing the correct information. Another serious potential problem is not marketing the product or idea to its full potential.

Another risk arises with team capabilities. Some employees don’t feel like venturing out of their comfort zones, which also raises the threat of hitting the glass ceiling of their full potential to develop skills spanning multiple areas. For example, an engineer could learn a thing or two from a marketer about powerfully communicating a product’s benefits.

Nurturing a culture of cross-collaboration

Some employees need that extra nudge to broaden their involvement beyond the strict remits of their roles. This incentivization could be in the form of bonuses or name exposure through published articles they can share on LinkedIn.

Competitions are a fantastic way to encourage technical team members to get involved with your organization’s content strategy. Depending on your strategy, these could be held monthly or quarterly as blogs around trending topics or subjects that may be relevant to existing and potential clients.

To get employees to flex their creative muscles, blogs can be selected based on various criteria, such as the topic’s novelty in relation to other industry discussions and the demonstrated prowess in writing style and eloquence.

For example, Trond Røvang and John Oxenby from SAP have amassed over 22,000 followers from their engaging content around the company’s products and services. Another example is Gramener’s initiative called the CoCreate Blog Competition: Individuals from various teams, such as data scientists and product engineers, have been contributing to knowledge-sharing and vocalizing their perspectives on the most interesting discussions in the industry. Since the initiative gained PR exposure for the company, Gramener will be continuing it for a second run.

Unlocking new growth potential among teams

What do employees stand to gain from getting involved with an organization’s content strategy?

Not only are they broadening their skill set and enhancing their career growth, but they’re also gaining name exposure.

This is great for their networking potential, whether online or in person. For instance, employees can share their authored posts on their LinkedIn profiles, which may ignite interesting conversations with leads and industry acquaintances.

Organizational benefits include enhanced collaboration between teams and reducing the risk of siloing. Additionally, this incentivization can be hugely helpful for marketing teams to keep pace with trending industry topics and ensure they’re tapping into the right narratives and talking points that will resonate with audiences.

Moreover, technical employees can indicate to marketers and business development teams, through their contributed blog posts, which subject areas they need to explore. This helps uncover potential business opportunities.

Involving your technical teams in your organization’s marketing content strategy can reap wider, longer-term business benefits, including having a closer ear to the ground on what’s trending industry-wise. What’s more, you’re expanding your workforce’s skills across multiple areas, which nurtures better adaptability and cross-functional collaboration.