It’s been about four months since we made the decision to throw out the traditional marketing tools and opt instead for a digital & social content marketing strategy to grow our business.
While we’ve seen a marked increase in published output, it hasn’t all been sunshine and roses. The task of transforming our technical leaders into brand ambassadors is big and ambitious and far more involved than we had imagined.
Blogging was key component of our marketing transformation journey. It was important that each blog come from our technical leads for each business unit.
But these guys are not talkers. They’re makers. They’re used to doing stuff. Acting on strategy. Fixing problems. But try to get them to talk about it in a language that makes sense to everyone and they may as well be speaking Latin.
It’s relatively simple to come up with a content strategy; the success or failure is of course in its implementation. Part of that success hinges on my ability to take the team with me on the journey, so they are engaged, involved and participatory.
We’ve hired marketing graduates that live and breathe digital and they play a pivotal role in helping nurture our technical leaders and ensuring they grow alongside our new strategy.
They have the responsibility of carving out time in everyone’s busy schedules, along with myself and Ronnie and working with us each week and customising a content strategy according to everyone’s areas of specialisation.
It’s been wonderful to see the encouragement our new marketing team brings to our technical leaders. They’ve certainly got their work cut-out for them. The team have had to learn a whole new vocabulary depending on the audience they’re targeting in that week.
We want to ensure each of our technical ambassadors has a distinctive voice and tone throughout their content and we are achieving this by having them work with a consulting journalist who can sometimes act as a translator to ensure everything we put online is relevant to our audience and has a strong objective.
It’s important to us that the excitement our brand ambassadors feel for the work they do comes through in their blogs. This is easier said than done, particularly if they’re already feeling intimidated. This is why we decided to hire a consulting journalist who most importantly, gives our guys the confidence they need to succeed as brand ambassadors.
While it was slow going at first, once they realised that everything they put their name to would go through a series of reviews, that we weren’t going to let them fail, that the business was there to support them through this process, I noticed a real change in attitude.
They actually look forward to “blogging hour” now because it’s a chance to brainstorm and ensure everything we write cuts through the bulls#@*.
