If you’re assembling a content marketing team and you’re having trouble finding experienced team members (or can’t afford them,) you can still make do with a team that is not well-versed. You just have to let them learn things along the way. What’s difficult is getting them motivated enough to absorb things. The solution is easy: turn it into a game.
Just look at any sport or avid videogamers, or even niche games like trading cards: turning things into a game is a powerful way of motivating people even if the rewards are not really useful or even tangential to a person’s way of life. By turning your content marketing strategy into a game, you stand to bring the best out of your team, and they get to have fun as well. It’s a win-win situation.
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How to Turn Content Marketing Into a Game
If you’re starting out and you have a team consisting of novices, it is best to start out small: choose a single product first and then develop a comprehensive content marketing plan for said product. Afterwards, assign your team into their own specific groups and have them elect a team leader (or choose one yourself.) Follow these steps:
1. Choose a product to market. Make sure that it’s a product that is understood by at least one person on the teams.
2. Have them do the necessary research in order to profile the target audience, which includes knowing the buyer personas, motivators, pain points, etc. This step should allow the team members to develop a strong understanding of the target audience.
3. Start defining goals for the content, whether it’s sales, exposure, leads, or even list building.
4. Outline the engagement cycles, e.g. top, middle, or bottom of sales funnel.
5. Find out what niche the content belongs to. It should fall into an existing one, but it may carve out a new one over time.
6. Develop the mission statement for the content. Ensure that all content that will be developed in this strategy will adhere to said mission statement.
7. Start creating a comprehensive content marketing plan using data gathered on persona, channel, pain points, goal, content type, structure, etc – basically use all the data you have gathered thus far.
8. Build a content calendar that includes 12 different pieces of content, with each one identifying specific topics, pain point, goals, CTAs, steps, etc. – any other data or metric you find appropriate.
9. Develop the strategy needed to market each piece of content. Allow different options such as video, offline, social media, etc.
10. Outline key performance indicators and make sure it ‘s clear how goals will be measured.
With the ten steps in hand, provide each team’s managers/evaluators a powerpoint presentation outlining the steps. Give them at least two weeks to come up with their own comprehensive content marketing plan, with the goal being to produce one that will impress you or any committee you assigned to select the winners.
Now, this is a competition but don’t forget to remind the participants that they are all helping the company, so avoid outright hostilities. Some smack talk is allowed when done in jest and without any insults, but in general don’t allow any aggressive behavior that could lead to conflicts outside of the game.
You need to come up with a reward that the team members would love to work towards. It could be anything from a simple free lunch to even outright prize money. If you do decide to spend some money on the prize, you don’t have to worry because you can consider it as the price of getting an entire group of people motivated to learn new things, which they can use for the betterment of the company. When you turn your content marketing into a game, everybody wins no matter who loses.
