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It is safe to say that collaborating with your teams is a central part of any good content strategy. Not only is collaboration important to broaden one brand’s appeal and reliability, but it’s also going to dramatically improve the quality of your content output and its effectiveness.
On the one hand, having cohesive teams that can seamlessly collaborate on content creation and other aspects of your business strategy is essential to foster a positive work culture and upskill your team members. On the other hand, your employees’ impact on content creation can stretch far beyond that.
Understanding the importance of content collaboration
Employees, being at the heart of the company, carry unique insights, stories, and perspectives that can add depth and authenticity to the brand’s content. By involving them in the content creation process, companies can tap into a diverse range of voices that reflect the true culture and values of the organization, making the brand more relatable and trustworthy to its audience.
As a brand, you can become quite insular about your content, but when you co-create your content, you start broadening out your thought leadership. Your content goes from kind of surfaced to really impactful stuff because you’re bringing in a far wider point of view that’s bound to enhance its credibility in the eyes of your audience.
Key strategies to collaborate with your employees
User-Generated Content (UGC) — or rather, Employee-Generated Content (EGC) — and employee advocacy are more and more strongly emerging as game-changing strategies for brands aiming to enhance their content strategy. This combination brings authenticity to brand messaging while at the same time amplifying its reach through the most credible voices associated with the brand — the employees’.
Incorporating these elements into a cohesive content strategy can significantly elevate a brand’s engagement and visibility. Let’s dive deeper into how companies can leverage both in their strategies, what benefits they bring, and how platforms like Ambassify and Kontentino can facilitate effective collaborative content creation.
Employee-generated content
Employee-generated content emerges from the simple premise that employees, deeply ingrained in a company’s culture and operations, are perfectly positioned to produce content that resonates with both the brand’s identity and the audience’s expectations.
This means that your Content or Marketing teams are not the only people who can produce relevant and engaging content to further your company’s brand and thought leadership, but the entirety of your teams. They will have the crucial role of validating the content generated by their peers, making sure it conforms to company standards, guidelines, and overall branding. However, the ideation process could potentially belong to the entirety of the employee base.
EGC can range from blog posts and social media updates to videos and podcasts, all created by employees who are enthusiastic about sharing their work experiences, achievements, and the unique aspects of their company’s culture. This content not only showcases the human side of the brand but also demonstrates the company’s values in action, fostering a stronger connection with the audience.
Employee advocacy
When employees share their perspectives, stories, experiences, or other brand-related content on their personal social networks, they act as brand ambassadors, extending the content’s reach far beyond the company’s immediate audience. This plays out mainly outside of your official brand channels (your website, your corporate social media pages, your blog, etc.), but its impact is much broader and does influence your corporate communications and content immensely.
This form of advocacy harnesses the trust and credibility that employees inherently possess among their connections, making the content they share more impactful and engaging. The authentic endorsements and personal stories shared by employees enhance the brand’s credibility, leading to increased audience trust and loyalty.
Combining EGC and employee advocacy in your content strategy
The essence of EGC lies in its ability to showcase genuine experiences, providing prospective customers (and candidates) with relatable and trustworthy insights into the brand’s offerings. In a similar way, employee advocacy harnesses the voices of a company’s workforce, leveraging their personal networks and insights to promote the brand’s culture, values, and products. When these strategies intertwine, they create a powerful narrative that can significantly enhance brand perception and loyalty.
To successfully integrate UGC and employee advocacy into the content strategy, brands must first foster an environment that encourages and values contribution from both employees and customers: this is where employee advocacy comes in.
How to leverage advocacy to collaborate with your employees
Making sure your employees are willing to collaborate with you and create content for and with you involves creating clear channels for content submission and collaboration.
An employee advocacy platform can help you to create an environment where employees are in contact with your brand’s content, with engaging initiatives, and with each other. Building a solid and collaborative relationship with your employees, which is ultimately the cornerstone of any good and long-lasting employee advocacy program.
Fostering an enriching and collaborative environment where you can exchange ideas, thoughts, opinions, and content with your employees is the first step to leveraging the potential of your teams to obtain and work on EGC.
Maximizing collaboration with Kontentino
The second step is to actually provide your teams with a tool to facilitate content collaboration. Kontentino simplifies content planning and collaboration, enabling seamless coordination between marketing teams and employee content creators.
By offering a suite of features designed to streamline the collaborative efforts between brands, their employees, and their audiences, Kontentino provides a solid infrastructure needed to harness the full potential of employee-generated content. It allows the Marketing teams to ensure that content is consistent, on-brand, and, ultimately, effectively distributed.
Using such tools for content planning and approval, brands can maintain a consistent and high-quality content stream that aligns with their marketing objectives: being able to work and collaborate in real-time facilitates seamless interaction between team members and optimization of UGC and advocacy-generated content. This not only elevates the brand’s content strategy but also fosters a more engaged and collaborative corporate culture, driving both internal and external brand growth.
Why UGC and employee advocacy should be on your company’s radar
The integration of employee-generated content and employee advocacy into a brand’s content strategy represents a significant shift toward more authentic and engaging marketing. As a consequence, the role of user- and employee-generated content and employee advocacy in content strategies is set to grow exponentially in the future.
The authenticity and trust these elements bring to brand messaging resonate strongly with today’s consumers, and it will be even more the case with the advent of younger generations on the job and consumer market, who value transparency and genuine interactions.
If you want to enhance your content’s authenticity and reach but also build a stronger, more relatable brand image, then these should become staples in your marketing strategies. Understanding their impact is the first step, and investing in the technological infrastructure to enable the collection of EGC and facilitate advocacy is the natural follow.
Conclusion
As social media is bound to become more and more crucial in the development of business opportunities and attracting a relevant audience, the use of collaborative platforms like Kontentino and advocacy platforms like Ambassify will be instrumental in facilitating these initiatives.
It is by embracing these strategies that brands will be able to enhance their content strategy and build deeper, more meaningful connections with their audience and with their employees. As brands continue to navigate the digital landscape, those that embrace and effectively implement these strategies will find themselves well-positioned to connect with their audience on a deeper level, driving engagement and visibility to new heights.
