Content Marketing With a Small Team Can Reach Your Goals
Eight years ago, we started The Campaign Workshop blog to share our knowledge with an online community of advocates, nonprofits, labor unions, staffers, campaign operatives, political candidates, and progressive groups and organizations. Today, we have over 1,000 blog subscribers and 20,000 monthly unique page views to our website, which has far exceeded our expectations.
Now, this blog isn’t to tout how much of a hit our blog has been (although we do recommend that you sign up to receive our weekly blog emails!) The main purpose of this blog is to show small companies that an investment in content marketing can be, for the most part, hassle-free.
Interested in starting a blog?
It’s easy for content marketing to fall at the wayside, especially when blogging and content generation isn’t everyone’s full-time job. However, if you’re like us and have a small team, you’re going to need and want all of your staff to write unique, quality content, especially if you’re going to post consistently. In our case, we post every Monday and Thursday.
In the last year, we’ve crafted a new content marketing strategy that ensures that all company voices are being heard for the least amount of work. Our tips are as follows:
Be clear about deadlines: Create an annual content marketing calendar that lays out when blogs are due for every single staff member. This way all staff will have clear deadlines and can include blog writing into their day-to-day work and plan accordingly around big, client projects. At TCW, all account, training, marketing, and sales staff members contribute to the blog at least once a month. Thus, we all know that we’re responsible for writing at least 12 blogs in 2019. We can choose to crank out all 12 blogs at once or write one blog per month. We get to pick our own journey!
Assign all staff members to blog teams of two: By creating teams you can ensure that people are accountable to one another. Having blog teams are also beneficial for brainstorming new topics and proofing content. Every blog that you produce should be clear, concise, and include a keyword. These elements will ensure that your content will boost your website’s search ranking.
Use themes to anchor blog topics: If you don’t set expectations ahead of time, you may end up getting blogs on the same topic or blogs that don’t cover all areas of knowledge that your team is well versed in. To avoid repetitive blogs, we’ve assigned each one of our blog teams to one of the many fields that we are experts in: digital advertising, direct mail, political consulting, and marketing and training. These topic assignments are broad enough that our staff still have the autonomy to write about whatever they want, but also sets parameters to ensure we’re covering all of our bases.
Create a blog process sheet: The blog process sheet should be used as a resource that staff members can go to when they have questions. We have a google doc sheet that all staff have access to that covers everything from the style and format for headlines to keyword tool suggestions (e.g. ubersuggest). Having all this information in one place will make it easier for all of your staff to get their questions answered efficiently, so they can focus on the important stuff: writing good, quality content.
Be sure to check out our 100 Political and Advocacy Campaign Tools List for more tools that will help you streamline your content marketing process.
Have more questions about content marketing? Comment below.