Content Conversations

Conversations and resources for small business, startup, and solopreneur content marketing and social media.

15 Great Books For Marketers To Inspire Your Innovation and Creativity

July 18, 2022 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

A good book will teach you something new. A great book can transform your worldview entirely. That’s if you can find the time—and the right book, of course.

It is hard to step out of your day-to-day grind. We get it—there’s a seemingly never-ending list of to-do’s, your pile of laundry looks more like the Leaning Tower of Pisa each day, and we’ve all got to sleep.

But there is something special about escaping in a book of any genre. Even the ones you’ve read before, or especially so. Books help us challenge our thinking, shift our perspective, and relieve us from the stresses of everyday life.

If you’re looking for new books to escape in or want to gift that feeling to a friend, let us help. We’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite books for marketing and business professionals, based on #ContentChat community favorites and the books that our team turns to time and time again.

15 Great Books for Content Marketers

Below are enough book recommendations to keep you busy for months, if not years. Unless you’re a speed-reading bibliophile (Erika, I’m looking at you), in which case months or days are likely more accurate. The list focuses on marketing and business innovation books, with a few others sprinkled in.

While these are some of our favorites, we recommend you browse a few pages online or—if you want to make us jealous—during a trip to your local bookstore or library (what a dream!).

Every author’s style and tone are not for everyone, and that’s perfectly OK. Find the ones that hook you, and let the pages take you away.

Do you have a favorite book you want to recommend to us? Let us know in the comments or tweet us @ErikaHeald with the #ContentChat hashtag.

Billion Dollar Brand Club by Lawrence Ingrassia

Looking to make waves as a business newcomer in well-established markets? Former New York Times editor Lawrence Ingrassia examines how brands like Casper, Dollar Shave Club, and Warby Parker ushered in the direct-to-consumer revolution.

Building A StoryBrand, by Donald Miller

Brand messages are often a confusing mix of jargon and buzzwords, written entirely from the “our product is great” perspective. But customers don’t care about your product. Customers care about themselves, and how you can help them in their journey to accomplish whatever it is they’re doing. Donald teaches you the not-so-secret (but incredibly untapped) formula behind what makes for a great story—ones that become box office hits and literary bestsellers—and how to make your customers the hero of your story.

Content Inc. by Joe Pulizzi

Most business stories are not ones of success. Time and time again entrepreneurs launch ambitious products that flop. Luckily, Joe is here to help you break that cycle. Joe, who is regarded as the ‘Godfather of Content Marketing,’ explains how to build a business with a content-first and audience-focused approach before you even have a product. Trust us, this book will leave you inspired and fully aware of how content can drive your success. Want a preview of what you’ll learn? Check out this #ContentChat recap with Joe.

8 Steps For Social Listening To Improve Your Content Marketing

June 17, 2022 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

Your customers are telling you what they need from your brand through social media—but are you listening to them?

Although 90% of marketers agree that data from social media enables them to stay ahead of competitors (Sprout Social), we know from firsthand client experience that many teams struggle to lead an effective social listening program. Too often, teams rush to implement a social listening solution without setting a clear strategy, or they fall short by focusing on social monitoring, not listening.

To help your team extract the greatest value from your community conversations on social media, we’ll explain what social media listening is and provide a step-by-step guide to help you lead a successful social media listening strategy.

What is Social Media Listening?

Social listening is a process where you monitor conversations across social media platforms to gain direct customer and key audience insights (also known as social monitoring) and analyze that information to adapt your strategy (that’s how you show you’re listening).

In its simplest form, social listening involves looking for direct brand mentions on social media. Every platform notifies you when another user directly ‘@’ mentions or tags you in their post or comment. Engage with all brand mentions, and thank your community member for sharing their thoughts.

A complete social listening strategy includes monitoring for indirect brand mentions, including common misspellings of your company name and untagged brand mentions, as well as competitor and industry-focused conversations. This process can include:

Monitoring influencers to listen to conversations about trending topics
Tracking hashtags to brush up on industry trends
Searching for common job tasks associated with your brand solution to learn the emotions that people have when completing the task
Listening for customer questions and challenges

Shruti Deshpande, a B2B marketing and content professional, says that “social listening enables you to be aware of conversations around your brand. Monitoring questions around your brand allows you to know where to improve your presence across social media channels, help retain existing customers, or monitor your competitors.”

8 Steps to Conduct Social Listening

Give your team a competitive advantage and run a successful social listening program by taking the below eight steps:

Step 1: Set Social Media Listening Goals

18 Elements Of A Truly Useful Brand Content Style Guide

June 2, 2022 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

If someone reads a piece of your brand content without your logo or brand name, would they know the content is yours?

With a practical content style guide, the answer should always be yes. Unfortunately, however, many teams fail to harness their style guide’s full potential. This is often because brand style guides focus on the look and feel of brand content, omitting the critical audience details and background necessary to bring your brand content to life.

Whether you’re building a new style guide or refining your existing brand style guide, here’s how you can create a robust content style guide that will help all of your brand content creators thrive.

What is a Content Style Guide?

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a content style guide (also called “content creation guidelines”) explains and showcases how your company speaks with and presents itself to your community. It serves as a one-stop-shop for your entire team to understand your brand personality and visual identity and convey that on every brand asset they create.

Why Are Content Style Guides Important for Marketing Teams?

Content style guides are valuable for teams of all sizes, not just companies with multiple writers. Here are just a few reasons why content marketing style guides are an essential resource for your content team:

Consistency: A style guide ensures consistency across your content, which helps to reinforce your brand identity. This consideration is amplified as your team grows—more writers could mean new styles and tones creep into your brand copy—or as you partner with outside writers that are not immersed in your brand messaging.
Efficiency: Reinventing the wheel is a horrible use of your team’s resources. Style guides answer common questions and give creators the resources to complete their work confidently. The style guide is also a valuable document during any employee onboarding.
Streamline workflows: No more waiting for someone to send a logo or approve a description. Instead, this document allows team members to self-serve.
Strengthens your value proposition: Melanie Graham, a seasoned writer and content marketer specializing in the healthcare industry, says that a “style guide provides critical details on your customers and the messaging that addresses their pain points. This information helps all teams use the strongest, most relevant value props that ultimately sell your product or service.”

Tod Cordill, founder of Moderno Strategies, adds that style guides are valuable for channel partners, too. “A style guide should also include guidelines for channel partners that detail the correct usage of your logos, trademarks, and other brand assets,” he says. “For companies with a lot of brand complexity, this might be a separate document that is maintained in parallel with the style guide used internally and by contractors.”

What Should A Brand’s Content Style Guide Include?

A helpful content style guide will explain your guidelines and showcase them in action. Below are the main elements to include in a style guide, and, when possible, include examples or images that reinforce your points.

Audience or Key Personas

Who does your brand hope to reach, and what do you need to know about these personas? Overview your audience personas and explain the challenges they face, their goals, and how your product or solution helps them thrive.

“Don’t duplicate content if personas are extensively described in other documents,” Tod says. “Maintaining duplicate content is either extra work, or you end up with different versions. Whether to include detailed personas in the style guide, or mention and link out to them, depends on how often you are comfortable editing the style guide.”

Brand Colors/Color Palette

List your brand colors with multiple ways for designers and content creators to use those colors. The CMYK, HEX, RGB, and Pantone codes are all important inclusions (and you can learn more about each here).

Company Naming and Taglines

List all company products, trademarks, and taglines or slogans with any necessary trademark or copyright symbols. Also include your Board members and executive team members and their official titles and preferred names.

Company nicknames are essential to note, too, says Tod.

Company Overview

A thorough style guide will include a company description and key company facts for easy reference when creating content. Consider also including your company press release boilerplate, plus company descriptions of typical lengths to make trade show listings, social bios, and other such uses consistent.

Email Signatures

“Set a standard email signature for everyone at the company,” Melanie reminds us. “Consider whether to include the company logo, calls-to-action (“Sign up for our newsletter!”), phone numbers, emails, and job titles.”

Font and Typography

What are your brand typefaces and font sizes, and when are they used? Name all primary and secondary typefaces and explain how they should appear across different uses. For example, your brand style guide could (but, truly, should not) list Comic Sans as your primary typeface, with a bold 18 pt font with title case for headlines and regular 12 pt font for standard text.

Frequently Asked Questions

Your team will inevitably have questions about your brand style, even if you think you’ve covered everything in the style guide. So, track and address these questions in a dedicated FAQ section within your style guide.

Images and Photography

Define your photographic and graphic design style. Does your brand prefer hand-drawn illustrations? What about well-lit photos of actual humans doing their jobs? Or are you all about product shots and nothing else? Don’t forget to add a link to the approved image repository in this section.

Tod advises you to include guidance for various use cases where images are used, such as a website, social media posts, digital or print ads, print collateral, and banners.

Logo Use

Detail how your brand logo should appear, including all color, shape, or size variations, plus versions for social media platforms. Link to a folder containing logos for download, with various file types (.jpg, .png, .svg) and sizes to meet any web or print needs.

Messaging Framework

Embed a messaging framework into your brand style guide, or include a link to a separate document. Melanie reinforces the importance of this, explaining that “your messaging framework should be an overview of your company’s positioning, differentiators, proof points, customer benefits, and some example messaging (one-liners) you use in external channels.”

Mission and Values

Explain your company mission and values alongside your company overview. A well-built brand will have a cohesive narrative across its purpose, mission, and values, and the brand style should complement this narrative.

Preferred Style Guide and Dictionary of Record

“Explain your preferred style guide (MLA, APA, etc.) and dictionary of record for your organization/brand,” says Carmen Hill, founder, principal strategist, and writer at Chill Content. For example, “unless otherwise specified, we follow AP style and use the Merriam-Webster dictionary.” If your preferred guide does not have guidance for commonly used words, she recommends you create an A-Z word guide specific to your team.

Melanie says that “this section should also call out any brand-specific grammatical preferences that don’t fit within the preferred style guide—Oxford commas, academic degree styles, etc.”

Publishing Conventions

Carmen says that formatting and publishing conventions are another must-include item, especially for internal team members and contributors. “Detail your formatting and publishing conventions for headlines, subheads, titles, calls-to-action, lists, metadata, quotes, and references and source citations.”

Templates

Include links to any branded templates your team may need, such as slide decks, social visuals, or letterheads.

Video

Video is becoming more prevalent in marketing communications and deserves a spot in your brand content style guide. According to Tod, “videos should have consistent intros and outros, voice style, music, tempo, and graphic style that is consistent with brand images. This can be difficult to define in a written document.” Link to exemplary videos to help your video creators understand what an ideal brand video looks like.

Voice and Tone

Every brand should have a distinct personality. Do you want to be a fun, playful brand? Would you prefer a direct and instructive tone? Your brand style guide should define the brand’s voice with plenty of examples that showcase your brand tone in action.

What Not to Do

Use this section to outline whatever you don’t want your team to do—like using a specific word or phrase, or evoking a particular emotion. Carmen recommends you provide guidance on what to do, instead of simply saying “no.” For example, she says you can create a table with words or phrases to avoid with suggested alternatives, such as “Instead of ‘leverage,’ try ‘use, take advantage of, or maximize.”

Tod recommends you include a list of companies, most likely competitors, that content creators should never mention.

Additional Resources

The final section of your style guide can include additional resources that will empower your team and coach them to be better writers. For example, Carmen recommends you link to plainlanguage.gov and its guide for writing in plain English, Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips, grammar and spelling tools like Grammarly, and this guide to UK vs. US English.

How To Gain Team Adoption Of Your Content Style Guide

Creating your content style guide is a significant step. But for your efforts to pay off, you need to socialize your style guide and ensure all team members are aware of its existence and actively use it for content creation.

“A style guide, like any tool, is only useful and valuable if people actually use it,” says Carmen. “This is really the biggest challenge. Regardless of how you decide to share the guide, include a link to the shared document in any channels and tools that inform content writing and creation, like your content brief, content templates, and guidelines for guest writers/contributors.”

Melanie adds that “it’s helpful to include your style guide in onboarding materials for all new employees, so they understand the brand guidelines and resources from the get-go. You may also want to consider short training sessions on the style guide, either at an all-hands meeting or with individual teams.”

Example Content Style Guides

When building your brand style guide, it helps to look at other teams’ brand guidelines for inspiration. Some organizations even encourage you to use and adapt their style guides for your needs.

As a starting point, check out these great brand guideline examples:

MailChimp: This thorough style guide covers everything in short, easy-to-digest sections. There’s even a TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) that summarizes the most important things to know, and the word list is a perfect model to follow.
Salesforce: This microsite houses everything related to the Salesforce brand. Check out specific sections on logo guidelines, color, and brand voice to see how Salesforce activates its branding.
Skyscanner: Audiences should notice when you change your branding. This Skyscanner page announces its branding update and clearly communicates the brand’s visual identity. We love the descriptors on the brand colors that put the choice into context.

Style Guides Are An Evolving Brand Asset

By addressing the key brand style guide elements we outlined above, your team will be able to create more consistent content faster, no matter who’s helping. Regularly update your style guide with necessary background or details, and communicate these changes as they happen. Consider creating one-sheeters that distill vital information for specific use cases, like graphic design or blog post writing.

To help you start writing your content style guide, download our free brand content style guide template. And in case you haven’t already, download our brand and content style guide checklist for ongoing reference.

For more background on how to create an effective brand style guide for your team—including common mistakes to avoid along the way—check out this #ContentChat recap with Maddy Osman, founder of The Blogsmith.

Need some help crafting a style guide for your content marketing team? Get in touch—we’d love to help!

How Can a Fractional Chief Content Officer Level up Your Content Marketing?

May 25, 2022 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

$A pizza with a slice taken out of it and the words "should you hire a fractional chief content officer.$
Once you’ve gotten started with content marketing and seen how it can build long-term relationships with your ideal customers, chances are you’ve started to think about adding a Chief Content Officer or another content marketing leader to your marketing team.

But as someone who has fielded pitches for these roles for the past ten years, I’m going to tell you why it may be a much better investment to hire a fractional content marketing leader instead.

The Rise of the Fractional Marketing Leader

If you’re a marketing professional who has spent any time on LinkedIn in the past year, you’ve probably started to see a number of Fractional CMOs in your news feed. While the fractional chief marketing officer title may still be a little unconventional, the services they provide aren’t.

In a nutshell, fractional CMO services are a pithy way for marketing consultants to describe what they do when they have an ongoing engagement with a marketing team to provide marketing leadership as an external—yet embedded—part of the marketing department.

But what, exactly, IS a fractional CMO?

A fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is a contract or freelance marketing professional who is hired on a part-time basis to run a company’s marketing team and oversee its marketing efforts. The “fractional” element is a reflection that this unconventional hire provides the level of marketing leadership your company needs, but at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time salaried employee with benefits, bonus, time-off, and other benefits.

Yet the CMO isn’t the only fractional marketing role that growing teams deploy to define and execute their marketing strategies. There are a number of roles that employ fractional marketing talent.

While I haven’t officially used that title for my work, I’ve typically had one or two fractional content marketing leadership engagements at a time since I first started my consultancy.

As a fractional chief content officer, I typically owned:

Auditing current content and social media content
Defining content marketing plans
Documenting editorial calendars to support those plans and demand marketing campaigns,
Creating all types of content to execute against the agreed-upon content strategies

The first of these engagements I took on was for the productivity software platform Redbooth HQ. While doing some client prospecting, I came across their job listing for a part-time marketing manager. Even though their post was for a part-time employee and not for a freelancer, I made my pitch in my cover letter and scored an interview with their marketing director.

Unlike the full-time candidates for the position, I came to my interview with a slide deck that outlined the opportunities I saw for the team from a content marketing standpoint, and why I, despite intending to remain a consultant, was the right pick.

For more than a year, I worked as an essential yet external member of their marketing team. I wrote content under my byline, ghostwrote for executives, managed freelancers, and collaborated with their SEO agency. I was a one-woman content marketing team—and we both loved it. That’s when I decided I never wanted to go back as a full-time content marketing leader in-house.

How are fractional content marketing leaders a benefit to the marketing organization?

At the point in my career when I took on my first fractional content marketing role, I’d led content and communications teams in-house for many years. While I loved many aspects of being an integral part of an organization’s marketing leadership team, I also saw a few recurring drawbacks:

Marketing organizations can become very set in their ways when it comes to how the budget is distributed. This can make it difficult to get a budget for content marketing innovation and experiments, especially in risk-averse cultures.
In smaller organizations, the content marketing role can necessarily be very production-focused. There often isn’t enough strategic, leadership-level work for a full-time, senior content marketer.
I love mentoring and growing the talent on my teams. But if the day-to-day work isn’t evolving and there isn’t room for trying new things, I get bored. And who wants to spend 8 hours or more per day feeling bored? Not this gal.

These were my top reasons for going out on my own to found Erika Heald Marketing Consulting. I wanted to be able to pursue interesting new digital marketing, social media, and content marketing opportunities. And I wanted to be able to share my expertise and learnings with a growing marketing team, to help them create processes and frameworks that would help them scale their marketing efforts quickly.

Taking on fractional marketing assignments proved to be the key for me to having the endless cross-pollination that comes from working with multiple clients in different markets while still having an ongoing impact on a team. For the growing marketing teams I’ve supported over the past 10 years in these fractional roles, I provided the support and guidance of an experienced marketing professional without a senior leader’s compensation package being on their books.

Is a fractional content marketing leader right for your marketing team?

While I’m a champion of fractional Chief Content Officer roles, it doesn’t work for every company culture or stage of marketing maturity. To assess how well this type of arrangement would work for your marketing team, ask yourself these questions—and answer them with brutal honesty:

Do we expect our marketing leadership team members to be in the office for a specific amount of days, or during specific times?
Is there budget and internal design resources allocated to content creation and distribution?
Is much of our content creation reactionary or in response to specific internal requests?
Does our senior management team value content marketing as a business driver?
Is our content strategy focused exclusively on SEO and organic search?
Do we have a culture that allows room for trying new things without being assured of a set ROI?
Are meetings frequently held on nights, weekends, and in the spur of the moment?

If you answered mostly yes to the odd-numbered questions and mostly no to the even-numbered questions, your culture would likely benefit more from a full-time employee in this role. But if the opposite is true, you should consider hiring a fractional content leader to help scale your content marketing program.

Where to find a fractional marketer for hire

OK, now comes the (somewhat) hard part: finding the right person for the job. While it can’t hurt to use your traditional recruiting channels to find applicants for this role, you’ll also want to consider doing some outreach on marketing Slack communities, specialty marketers for hire collectives, your leadership team’s LinkedIn feed, and content marketing email newsletters (like the Content Chat Bulletin) that include freelance and contract opportunities.

I regularly take on roles like these too, so get in touch if you’d like to schedule a call to learn more about my capabilities and how our consultancy can support your content marketing efforts.

How Virtual Events and Webinars Strengthen Your Thought Leadership Platform

May 4, 2022 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

Thought leadership programs present an incredible opportunity for brands to earn their community’s trust, strengthen relationships, and ultimately drive sales. However, the rise in thought leadership content has made it harder to break through to buyers, and brands must decide which thought leadership activities are most worth the results.

Virtual events and webinars offer a unique and incredibly cost-effective way to reach new audiences, fueled by advanced event technology that makes presentations and engagement effortless⁠—but you can’t expect to drive meaningful results simply by logging into the online event platform and passively consuming content.

Let’s explore why virtual events and webinars are a smart thought leadership avenue and how to achieve your goals as either an attendee or speaker.

Thought Leadership Benefits of B2B Virtual Events and Webinars

Virtual events and webinars connect your thought leaders with a larger potential audience than most in-person events can provide. Further, the online environment can significantly boost the attendee and speaker diversity, helping you reach people you previously were unable to.

The following are a few reasons that virtual events or webinars are great thought leadership opportunities as both a speaker and an attendee:

Break through the digital noise. Executives are creating more thought leadership content than ever before, and 55% of buyers say that they will move on from a piece of thought leadership if it does not pique their interest within the first minute (according to the B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report). Virtual event audiences provide a stronger opportunity to capture your audience’s attention and engage them on your topic.
Social media engagement. Virtual events and webinars are a perfect opportunity to engage online with other attendees, boosting your follower count and connecting you with engaged industry professionals in your niche.
Content creation. Events provide multiple content creation opportunities. For example, you can promote your session or highlight the sessions you are most excited about through blog posts, customized video messages for social media, an email newsletter, and more. You can (and should!) recap your experience and learnings on social media or through a blog post during the event. After the event, you can summarize your session details or provide a recording, share an event debrief blog post or podcast episode, or expand on topics from the conference in your ongoing content.

Caroline “Cazi” James, a principal at technology public relations agency Aircover Communications, reinforces that virtual events can significantly boost your reach, and potentially benefit your public relations programs. “Organizers will use marketing or PR resources and industry channels to promote their events,” she said. “This can help build brand awareness, and position participating executives as thought leaders. Likewise, the thought leader can participate in event promotions and share them with their networks and communities, building credibility and standing. If the virtual event or webinar has some newsworthy aspects – such as a big announcement or product launch – the media may show some interest in reporting on it. This opens up even more avenues for the thought leader to have their voice heard.”

7 Tips To Drive Virtual Event and Webinar Value

To actually unlock the benefits of B2B virtual events and webinars, you need to engage with the event community and actively build connections. It doesn’t matter if you attend or speak at the event—you can only build thought leadership if you join conversations, trade tips, and provide genuine value to your connections (not just try to sell to them).

Drive the most value from your virtual event attendance or speaking slot by following these tips.

Complete Your Virtual Event Profile

Most virtual event platforms include attendee and speaker profiles. Complete your profile as early as possible, linking to your website and active social media channels. A thorough profile will help other attendees connect with you outside the event space and know how to best approach you with questions.

Engage and Connect with Attendees on Social Media

Social media is a vital tool throughout the event experience. Join any relevant event social media communities and confirm the event hashtag and social accounts that you can tag. Before the event, try to schedule meetups with other attendees, discuss sessions you’re excited about, or encourage people to join your session. At the event, tweet real-time takeaways from your sessions, tagging or @ mentioning the speaker, and engage with other attendee posts. After the event, share your learnings and feedback and connect with anyone you met at the event.

Use In-Platform Messaging Features

In every session you attend, try to engage with the speaker and audience through the in-platform messaging feature. Do not message simply to message. Ask insightful questions, express support, share examples, and meaningfully engage with the session material and your fellow session attendees. As a speaker, share additional tips with your attendees, answer their questions, and reinforce that you are an expert on your topic and excited to chat with your peers.

Attend Networking Sessions and Events

The best virtual event experiences have dedicated spaces and scheduled event times for attendees to mix and mingle. Seek out these opportunities and purposefully cycle through rooms or lobbies to meet new people and briefly share details. The purpose is to establish a light connection that you solidify in post-event follow-up.

Share Session Replays

If you speak at the event, ask the organizers if you can share your session recording and embed it within content on your website. In addition, create derivative content to expand on your session material and answer questions that came up during the event.

Create Session Recaps

Regardless of if you spoke at the event, write blog posts, film videos, or record podcast episodes that break down your key event learnings and your favorite sessions. Share this content on social media and tag any speakers or attendees as relevant.

Coordinate Ongoing Collaboration Opportunities.

After the event is over, find ways to partner with other event speakers and attendees for new content opportunities. Possibilities are endless here. You can contribute content for each other’s brand sites, host a live-streamed conversation on social media, or even partner on a research project that will uncover new insights for your industry.

When Should You Host Your Own Virtual Event or Webinar?

As you start engaging with more virtual events, you may be tempted to host your own online event. This can be a great opportunity for brands, but there are some challenges you’ll face. If you’re still new to the virtual event scene, we recommend you instead attend virtual events and webinars to understand what can elevate these experiences and where most fall short.

To successfully host a virtual event or webinar, you will need dedicated resources, including a budget and team time to build the agenda, invite attendees, and coordinate the entire experience. Simply put, hosting a virtual event or webinar can be a lot of work.

We recommend you partner with your organization’s partners, advocates, and customers to start your virtual event or webinar journey. Enlist a partner with complementary goals to help plan and execute your event. Organizations like CMSwire, which our Founder Erika Heald frequently collaborates with, can also streamline the process by managing a lot of the upfront work of a webinar or virtual experience.

Looking for some more considerations? Mike Allton, a virtual event strategist and head of strategic partnerships at Agorapulse, has hosted dozens of virtual events and webinars. He and the #ContentChat community shared their advice for designing engaging virtual or hybrid events in a recent conversation.

Thought Leadership Thrives on Consistency

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a reputation as a thought leader in your industry. You build your thought leadership profile over time. This makes it important to continue to provide value in your industry and stay active in your social media and content publishing channels. As you’re getting started, you should focus just on one or two channels so you can drive meaningful results, instead of trying to be in too many places at once.

If you’re interested in enhancing your thought leadership platform, our team has partnered with many B2B brand thought leaders over the past decade to build their profiles through content creation, social media, events, awards, etc. If you’re interested in learning more about how to evolve your profile through strategic content marketing opportunities—send us a message. We’d love to discuss your needs and see how we can help you reach your goals.

How To Empower B2B Marketing Consultants To Deliver On Your Brand Needs

April 21, 2022 by Alek Irvin Leave a Comment

The most successful B2B content marketing teams outsource a portion of their work, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. Some marketers could even argue that outsourcing is an essential part of growth—looking at large enterprises from the research, nearly 75% partner with marketing agencies and consultants.

Outsourcing makes sense because there are clear benefits and many content marketing tasks ripe for outsourcing. But to reap the advantages of outsourcing, you must prioritize onboarding.

Failing to prepare your outsourced marketing support through an effective onboarding approach costs your team time, money, and patience. Here is how you can help your consultants thrive, based on our team’s decades of partnering with B2B brands.

How To Effectively Onboard a B2B Marketing Consultant

No matter what marketing task you’re outsourcing, start your working partnership on the right foot and help your consultant deliver on your brand needs by following these tips, including insights from a few of our friends in the #ContentChat community:

Establish A Marketing Strategy Before Engaging Consultants

Tod Cordill, principal of Moderno Strategies, says “a common problem is that nobody is driving the ship. Companies that don’t have a documented content and digital marketing strategy will not achieve desired results by hiring contractors specializing in content writing, SEO, design, and digital advertising. Be sure that someone on the team, either internal or contracted, can define the overall go-to-market plan and help prioritize the individual tasks.”

Create, Discuss, and Sign a Working Agreement

Before starting any work, meet with your consultant to document an agreed-upon scope of work. Explain everything they need to know about their project, including payment terms, invoicing, and whether their work must remain confidential. Talk through any questions or concerns. Once everyone understands and agrees with the conditions, you can both sign the contract. Rocket Lawyer’s independent contractor agreement template is a solid base to customize for each project.