Embolden your team to grow enduring and resilient roots for your business.
A tree does not grow strong without sunlight, water and rich soil. A business is the same. To grow enduring and resilient roots, it must be nourished through valued offerings, fresh ideas and proven skills — provided through relevant channels.
In business, the sunlight and water can’t be dependent upon nature’s cooperation. Consistent nourishment is necessary to ensure continued exposure for your business. Content marketing offers a proven strategy, acting as fertilizer to attract search engines and resonate with visitors. However, both the creation and the distribution process can be labor-intensive.
It’s imperative to leverage your creation time investment by maximizing the visibility for your content in relevant channels. Hopefully you’re already following best practices like adding relevant hashtags, utilizing plug-ins and scheduling tools to share your content socially, and tracking your analytics to promote your top-performing posts.
So what else can you do?
Capitalize on your people resources to extend the reach of your content. Start by encouraging your team members to share on the platforms they use routinely and are comfortable with. Once they’re in the groove, raise the bar by offering training in new applications to keep your posts alive and active in the news feeds.
Let’s say you post a weekly tip on your LinkedIn company page … one isolated, solitary effort each week. What if over the following seven days, each of your team members added their own perspective in a comment, shared in LinkedIn groups where they actively engage and posted as their status update? And if each of you shared, liked and commented on each other’s updates as well? If the original post was evergreen, you and members of your team could re-share it well beyond the initial publication, leveraging it repeatedly over time. To facilitate that ongoing sharing, routinely create a series of introductory benefit statements when crafting the initial blog post.
Perhaps Twitter is the platform of choice for one of your employees. Even if your company post is published on different platform, a team member can simply capture the link to post on their Twitter account, introducing the content to a whole new audience. Varying the lead-ins provides an opportunity to re-post the link with a new perspective. Other Twitter users on your team can retweet the post, adding their own personalized introduction, by utilizing the “copy link to tweet” option. Other strategies to leverage content on Twitter? Utilize click-to-tweet functionality within the blog post to enable any reader to easily share your article.
While its audience has shifted in recent years, Facebook is still an extremely popular platform. If you utilize a company Facebook page, encourage employees to engage with your company posts beyond the “lazy like,” adding their perspective in a comment and sharing on their personal accounts and in relevant groups where they are active. Do the same on your personal account. Use those introductory benefit snippets to create and schedule additional posts to re-share content that isn’t time-sensitive. Those who utilize Facebook and Twitter can nimbly extend the reach from one social platform to another using tools like Hootlet.
Leverage beyond social media
Don’t overlook other ways to gain exposure for your content. Research relevant forums, online community sites and new channels where you can share your posts. Add a set of social sharing icons to your website and blog to enable others to easily share in their platform of choice. And consider repurposing your content in different ways, like creating a visual image from a customer review or developing an eBook from a blog post. If you use email marketing, capture the attention of email subscribers who didn’t open your initial email by including re-mailing as part of your process.
Like a healthy tree, a business needs strong roots to continue to flourish. Draw on your team to help develop a robust foundation and nourish growth by dispersing seeds to fields ripe for germination.
