As we now know from Google’s guidelines for creating  helpful reliable, people-first content, writing genuine, honest stories about how you solve problems, and are valuable to your audience, is the most effective content development method to attracting new customers and clients. But where and how do you find these stories, wins, examples of above-and-beyond vignettes to fuel your messaging?

Content Development Begins at Home

The proverb “Charity Begins at Home” translates to “Be generous to your family before helping others.” When we say, content development begins at home we mean that the greatest source(s) of stories comes from your employees, consultants, and close colleagues you work with. Happy employees make fantastic storytellers. So how do you bring those stories forward?

From 1985 until I left corporate life to stake my claim as an entrepreneur in the early 2000s, I worked for companies like Moore Business Forms, Nordstrom, and TransUnion (TU) in sales, sales management, and data. Together with my coworkers we were able to organize and implement some of the following ideas.

The Employee and Partner Voice

Give your employees and partners an open door policy to reach out and connect with their direct reports all the way up to the C-suite. Encourage them to open lines of communication and require your management team to listen and strengthen those relationships.  Give your employees and partners a voice in how your brand’s story is told, what those stories should look like, what types of content development they prefer to see utilized, and how and where the stories should be distributed.

Build a Company Portal to Capture Stories

Encourage employees and partners to contribute their experiences and ideas on what makes a standout story. Give them a place to record their stories and experiences by building an internal facing, employee partner only, portal where everyone can input their stories. A place to gather information that acts as a CRM for your story collection efforts. Assign a committee to monitor, update, and run the portal CRM site. Have your committee submit reports on story submissions and have them make recommendations about possible site upgrades and technology changes.

Organization Brainstorming Sessions

Institute a day on your work calendar where you hold a company wide meeting – in person if possible or Zoom if necessary. Choose stories from your company portal and ask those contributing employees or partners to tell the story themselves.

Assign a videographer to record each session with the idea of searching for clips that can be used on your website About Us page or other outbound channels. These are the stories about the storytellers and people who have contributed to the stories you will use for content development. Emphasize to your workforce that content development is the linchpin to your marketing and sales efforts. Emphasize the importance of how stories can lead to company growth and rewards for everyone in the organization.

Incentivize Content Development

People want to be recognized for their work, for caring about their contributions, for doing a good job. Praise goes a long way but it’s not going to pay the bills. Incentivize your employees and partners by providing bonus monies, perks, travel, or added personal days as reward for their diligent work in creating and finding stories that sell your brand to your prospects.

Leadership

How does leadership affect content development? Some of the most common reasons why employees leave a company include not having a voice in decision making, wanting a challenge, feeling uninspired, and poor management leadership. Find new stories for your content development through employee development. Give your employees and partners the tools to lead and the responsibility to do so. Create departmental teams to begin finding stories internally and on the Internet or other sources.

Poll your employees and partners and ask them what their definition of leadership is, what they believe makes a great leader, and what type of leadership training and development they would like your organization to offer.

Once collected, showcase these stories in a segment of your monthly company wide meeting. These stories could be used as internal stories that motivate and inspire employees and partners as they seek to move ahead in your company.

3 Workplace Content Development Questions

  1. Is your firm ready?
  2. Do you have the infrastructure in place to mine for the past, present, and future stories that make your brand unique and interesting to your prospective clients?
  3. And are you emphasizing the power and importance of uncovering stories for your sales and brand image?

Empower your partners and employees. Give them the opportunity to lead, a true voice in decision making, and incentivize their efforts to find or create those unique stories that attract new customers.

Charity does begin at “home” so remember: Be generous to your family of employees.

Bio
Dean Guadagni 
Principal, Content Strategist


Dean is one of the co-founders of Inner Architect Media (2008) and has 20 years of experience as a content producer. Dean has written professionally since 2007 representing corporate clients to solo entrepreneurs. He was an early adopter of WordPress (2007) and an approved member of  the BlogBurst content syndication service where his articles were published by Reuters.com, Nielsen.com, FoxBusiness.com, Ziff Davis Enterprise’s “Microsoft Watch”, Computer Shopper, and the Chicago Sun-Times. His work has also appeared in the leading California legal print publication Plaintiff and Advocate magazines.