Produce, Post, Reuse: The Content Lifecycle

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I’m sure you’ve heard the advice promoting the use of blogging to boost your company’s online presence and increase SEO and brand authority. And yes, blogging is great for all of these purposes. There’s one problem, though. Businesses invariably offer this excuse when they consider blogging: “We don’t have the time.”

It’s true, producing consistent, high quality content is time intensive. You’ve got to come up with a topic, do your research, generate a catchy title, optimize it for SEO, and actually write the thing. It can take up to three hours to get to a finished blog. So why is it worth your time?

Because creating and sharing content shows your audience how you think, what you think about, and gives them a glimpse into what type of business you are. They get an idea of the type of ideas and advice you’d bring to them as a client. Buyers don’t want to talk with a new company until they get the chance to know them a little bit. And there’s no better way for someone to get to know your company than by letting them inside your head!

To find success in blogging, it’s important to step into it with a realistic idea of how it works. Blogging isn’t just about publishing one piece of content, hoping it brings in some leads, and then forgetting about it. At the center of a blog’s value is the content and the capacity for the content to be reworked into a variety of different formats.

The power of repurposing content

Every time you write a blog, you’re compiling a number of things including researched information, useful tips or guidance, and good copy. Putting all of them together in a blog is just one form that those components can take. If your excuse for marketing falls into the “no time” category, then the importance of maximizing energy, work, and resources should be at the top of your mind. Recycling content is the best way to maximize the time and effort you take when creating a blog.

The lifecycle of a blog doesn’t have to stop at the publish date. In fact, it shouldn’t. After your blog has been published, read, shared, and liked, you can begin to use it for other pieces of content.

Say you wrote a successful blog that generated a good amount of traffic. You can then turn that same information in to an infographic, highlighting the main points you made, or even elaborating on one section. You might then share that infographic on social media. And because it’s visual content, it will likely garner more and different attention than your blog post. By using the same information in a variety of formats, you’re expanding the audience who sees it and the way it’s consumed.

Here’s what a full life cycle might look like:

  1. Blog post
  2. Infographic
  3. Downloadable checklist
  4. Short video
  5. Webinar
  6. eBook

You may stumble upon a whole category of blogs that you find really interests your audience. You can then use all those related blogs you’ve created and combine them to create a piece of educational content like an eBook or even a webinar. There is no shortage to what you can do with the research and time you put into creating a post! 

Recycling content

Using your blog post to create new content is a great way to maximize your time and effort, but you don’t have to stop at posting a blog just once. Don’t be afraid to repost your articles on social media platforms–just because you’ve read it doesn’t mean your audience has. You should be reposting an old piece of content every week, as long as it’s relevant.

Another great way companies keep up with high demand for new content is to go back and update old blogs to be republished.

In terms of time spent, recycling old blogs doesn’t take that much time. However, when you’re recycling an old blog post, you can’t just give it a new title and be done.

In order for your blog to be recycled successfully, you need to do a few important things:

  • Come up with a new, catchy title (Keep your keywords)
  • Update old links and statistics
  • Make sure all the information you provide is still relevant and up-to-date
  • Update your headlines 
  • Update any bulleted or numbered lists
  • Update your conclusion
  • Replace the photo

Quit finding excuses

So, if you’re still wondering if it’s worth making the time to write blogs, think about the amount of content you can get from just one blog post. Think about your audience members who will begin to rely on you for useful information, and trust you to be their advisor.

Remember, blogging isn’t a one-and-done deal. You can transform your content over and over again to help you build relationships with your audience and reach more people in different ways. It’s worth the time and effort, you’ll see.

 

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners
Photo by
Dean Drobot

How Coaching Can Save Your Team

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Employee engagement and retention are (or should be) top of mind for company leadership and HR teams. Having an engaged workforce means a stronger, more productive company. Unfortunately, only 34% of employees report being fully engaged in their workplace. That said, companies have been spending a lot on this problem. In fact, an estimated three-quarters of a billion dollars, each year.

Obviously, this is a huge issue with many components. Employee development and education, benefits, and company culture all play into the employee experience, which directly impacts retention and engagement.

It’s all about the culture

This issue poses too many factors for business (especially small ones) to address from every vantage point. Most medium and small sized companies have a tight budget set aside for employee experience. But you don’t necessarily have to spend a ton of money on perks to create a culture of productivity and engagement. Not surprisingly, 76% of employees cite their manager as the leading influencer of workplace culture.

With that in mind, you’d assume companies are taking advantage of this knowledge and setting up their managers and leaders to be trailblazers for building a happy workforce, right? Sorry, not so much.

A shocking 71% of companies do not feel their leaders are able to actually lead their organization. And we can assume that leaders who are unable to lead are negatively impacting the people they’re supposed to lead.

So, if managers are the major influencing factor in creating company culture, and companies don’t feel they’re doing their job well, it’s time to think about the tools they’re given to accomplish company goals.

How are your managers trained to manage? Do they even get training? Or does your company just promote highly functioning employees into manager roles and let them figure it out on their own?

Training your managers to take a different approach to supervising their teams might just be what your company needs. But how, you ask? By training them to coach instead of manage.

Coaching vs. managing 

The difference between coaching and managing is fairly simple. Where managers:

  • solve problems
  • answer questions
  • delegate tasks
  • evaluate performance

Coaches take a different approach. Instead, they:

  • empower their team to solve their own problems
  • ask questions
  • encourage employee input into how tasks get accomplished
  • urge employees to think critically about their own progress

Coaching also involves continuous conversations back and forth between team members, individuals, and managers. It is a highly effective way to engage your workforce.

Empowering your employees is at the core of why coaching is so effective. By empowering your employees to solve for their own problems, you are showing that you value their opinion and trust their ability to address and overcome challenges. Employees who are given the lead to solve problems become more self-reliant and feel a greater sense of accountability and responsibility, which leads to increased engagement and satisfaction.

Demonstrating trust in your employees to effectively address challenges is a very direct way to help them build on their own self confidence as well. Helping employees grow by creating a culture that nurtures self-confidence and independence is a sure-fire way to make people feel valued. Not to mention a sense of personal growth. 

Building an ongoing dialog between your employees and managers, as well as within their own team, is also a significant part of coaching. Where managers might only speak with individuals before or after a large project or when it comes time for their yearly assessment, coaching encourages a much more fluid form of communication.

Think increased employee recognition and opportunities for development. When there is an ongoing conversation between manager and employee, there is increased opportunity for managers to discover previously unknown strengths and skills that the employee may have. This can lead to employees getting assigned projects that play into their personal strengths and allow them to develop skills they are highly interested in.

Increased communication is also an effective way to suss out employees who are struggling and may need some extra support or direction. Showing that you are paying attention and willing to help guide and support an employee through a difficult time generates loyalty and a sense of safety that people value.

Value for you and them

Coaching is a much more people-focused way of managing your company. There are many different ways to implement coaching within your team and many different types of coaching to consider. By training your managers to coach, you’re not only giving them better tools to nurture a happier, more engaged workforce, but you’re investing in the future of your employees by offering more opportunities for personal development and creativity.

So before you consider spending capital on unnecessary toys for the employee rec room, think about whether or not your managers could use training in how to coach their teams to success. Remember, employee experience and culture comes directly from leadership. So give your leaders the tools they need to win, and watch your company win.

 

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners
 
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rawpixel

HR’s Secret Weapon: Marketing Communications

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If you were asked what HR’s job is, I’m sure you’d come up with a list of answers. Keeping the company in compliance, managing workplace risk, providing resources and support to employees, payroll, hiring top talent, maintaining a positive company culture… the list goes on and on. But what ties this all together? 

Communication. 

HR has the responsibility to communicate all this and more to company employees, but all too often the tactics fail to actually get enough attention to be noticed. This is where HR can take some pointers from marketing. Because when it comes down to it, marketing is communication. And HR needs high quality communication to do their job well.  

Think about it. How difficult is it to get an employee to read (and understand) their benefits package, or the employee handbook, or any other important information HR needs them to have? Difficult enough to be causing HR professionals some frustrating headaches for sure.  

So how do you approach this problem? Following are some marketing tips HR can apply to their communication tactics to get, and hold, the attention they need. 

Send out a weekly or monthly email/ newsletter  

Highlights: Use this to highlight work events that are coming up, give a shout-out to a team or employee who has gone above and beyond or completed a big project, and talk about things you want the entire company to know about. This could be an upcoming employee survey, a deadline for enrollment for benefits, or a reminder about checking tax withholdings to help employees prepare for tax season.  

Perks: Overview the perks you offer to employees such as opportunities for personal development and career coaching, company retreats, and PTO. Keep the resources you make available to employees top of mind.  

Goals: Review company goals and how specific teams and departments can help reach them. This is a great opportunity to highlight what different teams are doing to reach the same overarching goal. This can help align departments and keep everyone focused and feeling the team spirit. Plus, if you give a shout-out to a team or an individual, you’re creating a culture of appreciation and recognition! Talk about a good employee retention strategy!  

Teamwork: This also encourages different departments to see how they support each other, further bringing the community together. The more clarity there is about how teams work together and support each other, the higher functioning the company. And the less time HR spends on mitigating interdepartmental disputes.  

Attract the talent your company is looking for  

Marketing works to help guide people from being prospects to customers by meeting them at all the various points of contact they might have with your company. It’s marketing’s job to draw customers in with useful information, content offers, and guidance specifically targeted to where they are in their journey to becoming a customer.  

HR can take the same approach with attracting the type of employees they want working for the company, sometimes even hitting two birds with one stone.  

For instance, you can create a video highlighting your company values, perhaps interviewing an employee about their experience or covering a recent charitable event your company hosted or participated in. This type of content is not only one of the more successful types of content marketing, but it could also help promote you to prospective employees. People tend to want to buy from (and work for) a company that shares their values and makes them feel good.  

HR can also take a page from marketing’s book by streamlining the process to apply. Just like you want to make it as easy as possible for customers to interact with your company (i.e., providing social icons for sharing and having easy options for answering questions and contacting support) you want to make it as easy as possible for job seekers to apply to work for you. You can: 

  • Keep the process down to five minutes or less  
  • Offer useful information at different points of the application process to help applicants discover more about you and what to expect throughout the application process 
  • Convey your company values and culture through the job description 
  • Highlight the perks and benefits your company offers 
  • Showcase the employee development and training services you offer 

Great communication = trust 

When it comes down to it, HR has a lot on its plate. So make it easier by learning to communicate often, clearly, and with the employee (or prospective employee) in mind. The better you communicate, the more people feel they can trust you, and the easier it is to do your job. It also means you get your message across in a way that sticks. 

As an HR professional, you work so hard to make other people’s jobs easier and to help provide useful information that will support and inform employees. We know how challenging it can be to find successful channels for communicating. So next time you’re looking for an effective way to provide that helpful information, think about how marketing would approach it and try using some of these tactics to help you. It’ll maximize the work you’ve done to provide support, and it’ll help them receive it.  

 

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners
 
Photo by

alesmunt

How (NOT) to Deal With Workplace Conflict

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Interpersonal conflict is something every workplace has to deal with at some point. When people work in close quarters, there is bound to be some type of friction that comes to the surface and needs to be dealt with. 

Sometimes the people in the conflict are able to work it out themselves. This usually happens if both people are willing and able to sit down with each other and hash things out. However, there are many people who are uncomfortable with directly addressing issues and conflicts and who will do anything to avoid uncomfortable conversations.  

This results in passive aggression, negativity, decreased productivity, and team dysfunction which can spread and begin to negatively affect other employees. Conflicts like these are best solved quickly, and strategically, and often guided by management. 

Unfortunately, if leadership isn’t prepared to handle conflicts correctly, they can have a much greater negative effect on the situation and will end up making it worse for everyone. Here are a couple leadership practices that are guaranteed NOT to succeed in solving a conflict. 

Avoidance 

We know you’re busy. You’ve got a million things on your plate and goals and quotas to meet. So that argument between Tim and Kathy on the production team just doesn’t seem important enough for you to prioritize today. Oh sure, you’ll get to it, but it not today. Maybe tomorrow. Or next week? You’re hoping that maybe by then, it’ll just go away. Spoiler alert: it won’t.  

Avoidance can come in many different forms. For instance, say you’ve talked to Kathy and Tim separately and heard their different sides of the story, but you haven’t yet set up a meeting with both of them together. It might feel like you’ve made some progress after hearing them both initially. People often feel better after they’ve had a chance to get their story out and feel heard. This might have even deflated their frustration for the time being. But it won’t last.  

No one likes to have uncomfortable conversations, and you’re no exception. Being in leadership doesn’t mean you’re automatically exempt from having the same reservations about confrontation as the rest of humanity. You may be a good problem solver and a good listener, but if you just stop at having individual conversations and don’t move forward to confronting the issue together, you’ve halted the healing process.  

Separation 

Keeping people apart when they are fighting might work with children, but it isn’t a sustainable solution for dealing with conflict at the office. Employees must be able to work together and rely on each other as a team. Just trying to give them different projects and hoping they won’t run into something that requires them to work together isn’t going to help you or them in the long run.  

Just listening to their individual stories and sending them in different directions is setting your team up for failure. Plus, it’s setting an unhealthy standard for how your company handles interpersonal conflict.  

It’s better this way 

Unless you take the step to get them talking face-to-face, you’ve just put the problem on hold, not dealt with it. Having a functional, healthy team should be a top priority for any leader. The chances of meeting your goals with a robust team working together are much greater than working with a dysfunctional team and their infighting.  

Taking an hour out of your day today to solve a conflict will save you hours of cleanup work later down the road. It’ll also ensure that the conflict doesn’t expand and begin to affect other team members.  

Constructive confrontation = solution 

If you’re uncomfortable with confrontation, or not sure how to go about mitigating the conflict, it helps to go in with a plan.  

  • Structure the conversation so that both parties have their chance to speak and respond to each other  
  • Encourage them to each take accountability  
  • Set the expectation that they will come to a resolution, creating a clear, actionable plan for how they will move forward 
  • Set a follow-up meeting a week or two down the road to help keep everyone accountable  

You may never be comfortable with confrontation, but fortunately, with practice you can get better at successfully dealing with it. The more you set the expectation that conflict will be dealt with in this way, the easier it is to do it. Hopefully, it becomes so ingrained in your company culture that co-workers will begin to do it themselves without the need to bring in leadership to help mitigate the discussion.  

So next time there’s a conflict at the office, don’t hesitate to deal with it then and there. Don’t put it off, don’t avoid the uncomfortable conversation. Show them you believe in their ability to solve the problem themselves by bringing them together to do so. You’ve got this and so do they.

 

Content provided by Q4iNetwork and partners

Photo by Andrey Popov