The Process To Get Your Team Creating & Publishing Content | #33

Your team have a big role to play in the content created and distributed for your B2B Technology company.

B2B Buyers may not always be in market but they are forming opinions through what they see online. 

For B2B Tech Marketing teams who are still waiting on the Founder or CTO to create a blog post every few months, this episode lays out the process you can implement to ensure quality and consistent content goes out from team members.

I walk through my process on:

• Common pitfalls to avoid
• How to capture the content
• Formatting the content
• Sending the content for approval & making changes from feedback
• Distributing the content 

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The 1% Insight is brought to you by Trend 7 Media! 

B2B Marketing, B2B Technology, Content Marketing, B2B Content Marketing, B2B Tech Marketing, Trend 7 Media, B2B Content 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

You already know the importance of having your team posting content on LinkedIn, especially when you're in B2B technology. The problem is it rarely ever goes to plan. In today's episode of the 1% insight, I'm going to be looking through the common pitfalls of how B2B technology companies can't get their team to post, the common stumbling blocks that you might run into, and how to navigate that through a content system that will work for your team and more importantly, your marketing team or the agency, freelancer, whoever you have working alongside you. The main problem that I found from working with clients at Trend 7 is that no one has the time. So either it's your executive team, could be CEO, could be a co-founder, whoever it might be. There might be a few people that you have on your list that your B2B tech marketing team is reaching out to saying, we need this blog by next week, and you have it all laid out in the calendar, you have everyone's names listed out, and ultimately uh nothing comes from it. Uh it gets pushed down the to-do list from that person and it never really materializes. So what happens is that you know the importance of it, you know that you should be implementing it into your content marketing strategy for obvious reasons. Uh, firstly, it's obviously fantastic to humanize the brand, and you know, you can get so caught up in posting feature-heavy technology-focused posts that it doesn't really speak to your ICP uh and your target audience group of who you're trying to reach and how you're trying to build that memorability and trust with them by creating value for them. Uh speaking about product features all day won't work. It's an important part to the content, but we know that we need to have the people behind the company to build that brand, to build that memorability. And people buy from people, they trust people, so we need to start getting our team involved as well as our company accounts, obviously, with the content that we're posting. So, specifically today, we're looking at all right, how can we get the team-led content strategy working? Because even in last week's episode of the 1% insight, we spoke about the latest research from Meltwater and LinkedIn, showcasing that LinkedIn is becoming a top-top source of AI citations across many AI models. So, when your B2B buyers are conducting research as part of their buying journey, and a lot of this is invisible to you, they are using AI to basically diagnose their problems, they're looking for solutions, and AI is giving them solutions based on content that they're matching to the problem and was the most trusted source. And from their research of I think it was over 9.5 million AI citations across models in 2026, with an emphasis on B2B categories. What they found was that LinkedIn was, if not top for certain set for certain B2B queries, it was second only to YouTube uh in terms of impact on AI citations, and most of those were being favored towards personal LinkedIn posts, expert-led content from personal pages. Over three quarters of the citations uh were from uh people's accounts, so therefore, you can't just depend on the company count. Yes, you need to be posting from the LinkedIn company account, but you need to be actively getting your team members on on board, and it's not a a kind of a employee reshare type of strategy where you know you tick the box exercise and you're getting people to reshare the company updates. That's not how it really works. Um, that won't cut it because you actually have to be creating something unique, uh specific, answering a question that you have uh a story behind it, that you have data behind it, something that is actually worthy of, firstly, uh engaging your target audience group, but secondly, being picked up by AI in terms of something that is specific enough to answer a question that your buyer is asking within the AI model and a reshare won't do that. So we have to rethink how you're doing uh your team content strategy, and it has to come from the individual uh with their own unique insights and expert opinions. So, yeah, so yeah, when we're looking at I guess the model that's broken now is that you you know you should be doing it, but it's you're depending on people uh who are very busy, who don't have the time and might not view it as a priority. So we need to find out right, how can we make it as easy as possible for them, but also convey the importance of this to not just the marketing but to the overall business success. Because as we mentioned, a lot of your buyers aren't in market right now, they're prospects, they're forming buying opinions, they may be in market in three months or six months or twelve months, but they're always forming opinions. And when they do get to the research stage, we need to make sure that your brand is becoming, you know, at least on the short list, and we're aiming to be top of that short list because we know from previous research, depending on the vendor shortlists that your prospects create, usually decisions are already made in terms of who they're gonna go for before they even book a demo. So you're you could have the best sales team, uh, you could have the best product, but if the opinion of your prospects is that your competitor is a better option and they're number one on the short list, you know, four times out of five, they're gonna go for whoever they had on number one in the short list. So that's the challenge, really. So everything depends on it. The future revenue of the business depends on it, uh, expansion, growth, uh, people's jobs, it's it's a big deal. And we need to try and convey that to people that might not appreciate the role that marketing is doing for the company. So that's the the common pitfall is essentially that executives, team members, they're busy, they have their own roles, uh, different departments, they're have a to-do list just as long as you do, and it never seems to end. So therefore, asking them to create a blog or write a blog or create this video or write a post won't necessarily work for them because it's uh the variable is is on them doing it and the chance of them doing it uh to when you want it to be done is is unlikely, and that leaves a lot of problems. So those problems look like inconsistent posting, um, not enough content from them, missing opportunities in terms of relevant content that's happening right now, and not something that happened three months ago. Uh things changed so fast. That was another part of the research from Meltwater was that essentially the AI citations and the answers that they were given to people uh searching within the AI models was mostly from content created in the last three months or less. So therefore, it you can't be, you know, one blog post every quarter. That's just not uh going to work. It's not enough quantity, and you're not giving enough content or quality content to warrant yourself as someone that is uh a trusted, valuable person company to follow. Um it's just not enough. That's four-year uh if you're going on that basis. And um, I don't think that's going to be enough to compete with the competitors who might be rolling out multiple different content formats that are creating much more value, much more insight, relevant content than maybe your one blog every three months. So the question then is how do we solve this problem? How do we get consistent content going out uh in across different formats as well? That's the thing to note is that we don't want to necessarily just have a blog post. We want to have them be building their LinkedIn content. That's the critical part here, is that they need to be building a personal profile on LinkedIn for many reasons that we spoke about. Obviously, it's at the moment in B2B, it's the best platform for getting in front of your target audience on a consistent basis. You can shape that messaging, you can kind of position yourself and your company over time. Uh, you can invite people who fit your ICP to connect. Uh, they can fall into a network, you are constantly posting value, solving their specific problems, you're building that memorability with those people. And then obviously, that we mentioned more recently in terms of the AI models, uh, citing LinkedIn and personal accounts, um, which is now a core part of the B2B buying journey. So it's a no-brainer and it's not just posting a blog on the company website. We need to take a more holistic and a well-rounded approach to the content strategy that we're doing here and get a bit more technical with how we're operating. Today I'm going to run through a very simple process that you can implement. You're not trying to change your whole content strategy. There's plenty other episodes that we can run into in terms of getting high-level in terms of implementing the podcast strategy that will work for the different personas that I usually speak about here in terms of getting customers on your internal team members on industry top leaders and prospects. So, just for today, we're going to focus on the one persona, which is your internal team members, and how they can start to generate content. And there's two ways you can go about it. I have a preference in terms of how you could implement it because I think you'll get a better result out of it, you'll get more content out of it. Um, but there are two ways of doing it. So, first option is through the podcast route, which is what we implement for our clients at Trend7 Media. So, within your episodes, you can invite and schedule in an episode so they can join on online. So, let's just say, for an example, we want your founder to start creating more content, start building their LinkedIn profile, um, start having more of a presence, uh, sharing their ideas, thoughts, opinions, uh stories. You basically mentioned that, okay, we need an hour of your time. They're going to join in on your podcast, whatever online recording tool you're going to use. You might be in different countries, even. So that's why I opt for the online recording. That's in previous episodes in terms of why you should maybe offer that. It's also a time thing. So if they see, okay, I have one hour in the calendar here, great. Now you're not asking them to sit down for hours and write, you know, a blog and they don't have the time to do it and they won't do it. But if you can just pencil into their diary an hour for the video podcast recording, it's now not seen as such a big of a commitment. And you can actually get even better insights because it's much easier to talk through your ideas. You know, if you've said to them, like, what do you prefer to do? Would you prefer to just tell me about it, or would you prefer to uh spend hours writing it uh themselves? Chances are it'll come more naturally to them to just speak through their ideas and work through it, and it's easier when there's someone at the other end prompting them with questions. So they join on, and this is part of your podcast setup. As I mentioned, the second version of this is you don't have a podcast and you're just doing interviews essentially with your founder or team members. And this can work with any team member that you want to kind of start building the content strategy for. It could be anyone in the team. But for this example, we're just using a founder scenario. So they join on, just as like any other podcast episode you're recording for your for your podcast, and essentially you have the questions laid out before them, maybe share with them beforehand so they can kind of prepare a bit in terms of maybe looking at you know certain stories or anecdotes that they'd like to share, or maybe shaping their opinions on and what they think about those questions. So I would share it with them beforehand to let them prep, but don't keep it so rigid that you're prompting them what to say. It's really just to give them an idea of what's going to be asked, and then the podcast starts. And ideally, you'll have your host or your co-hosts, usually team members of the person you're interviewing. And what will happen then is that you'll kick off the episode, you'll start recording, the co-host, your host of the podcast will start asking the questions, framing it around the episode uh for the founder. And now you're in a dynamic where someone's asking the founder questions and they're answering and they're giving their insights, they're giving their stories, they're giving their experience, they're giving their advice. And essentially that's really valuable content that we're capturing in both video, audio, and also we can get the transcript, which is going to come in later, which is really important. The other side of that, then if you don't have the podcast, is the interview. So I always consider like video is a core part of the media strategy. So I would implement the same process, just if you don't have the podcast, you're not posting it onto a onto an audio platform, uh, which is fine. But if you're doing it anyway, um it's worth doing. In that case, then you're just going to be taking the content and doing the exact same thing, except you're not posting it onto uh a podcast platform. But the the same structure uh implies really uh it's an interview with the founder. Um, and maybe you don't have to worry too much about the host or anything like that because it won't be a kind of a conversational one. It'll be mainly just focused on extracting the content after from the founder themselves. So at the end of all that, you have maybe half an hour of an episode where the founder has been giving insights, expertise, different opinions, and the recording stops, the founder leaves, and then it's up to your marketing team to take this content, repurpose it, and now you have all the insights and it's extracted. So it's not waiting in someone's head, waiting to be wrote down as a blog post. You now have all the content you need, and it's up to your marketing team or your agency or whoever you have looking after your content or assisting with it to start finding the best parts of value and how you're going to implement that and make it as easy as possible. So we've gathered the value, we've captured it, and now it's time to write how are we going to develop this and make it as easy as possible to start posting it and getting it out there in the right formats. So the next step then would be looking at right, we have the host video content. So you're gonna have video content you can kind of clip up. I would keep it really minimal in terms of the edits. Uh, if we went through a stage of, I suppose during COVID where everyone is editing these mad videos, um, loads of effects, loads of captions, loads of you know, changing chopping scenes. And I don't think uh I think that's kind of gone out of fashion, thankfully. Keep it simple, have your founder who you just recorded on screen, working through ideas. That's really valuable video content. Start clipping that up in terms of relevant content. Don't just pick a random piece, look through the episode, find the key parts of what's valuable. I always like to frame it around a question. So if you've asked a question, then capture the response to that question so it can, you know, your audience kind of understand the context behind the clip rather than just random words. It just helps them uh kind of take in the content better. You're gonna have obviously a transcript. So with every episode, now you have a written transcript of all the words that the founder has said about their experience and the answers to those questions that they've just given, which is really valuable content to your ICP. So get your copywriter, uh, whoever's in charge of creating content. I really recommend that, you know, it's been very easy previously to, and we've we've done it ourselves, we've tested it ourselves. Uh, not like acting we haven't, but we have, you know, where you've taken a transcript and you've fed it into a project on Claude or whatever, and asked it to, you know, summarize it, give you a neatly worked blog. But sure, what we've kind of found is that it's just not quality. Um, and we've actually reverted back now to writing everything just out by hand. Now you can use AI to help you in terms of like distill the information down. So like give it the transcript, create a project that understands your brand, and ask it to pick out the core parts of like what's valuable to it. So like that is really valuable in terms of time saving. But when it comes to actually writing the content, do get your copywriter, do get your agency to actually write down in the founder's tone of voice, personality, the blog, the LinkedIn captions, the LinkedIn text-based posts, and you have all the content there now. It's just about taking time to format it, uh, create it, and then what we do. So you have a whole host of content for your founder now. You have video, you have text-based content for LinkedIn, basing insights from the transcript and uh the episode itself. You have blog content, you have LinkedIn newsletter content, you could have even some uh photo-based content of the podcast episode itself, like maybe screenshots. Um, so you've lots of different angles that you can kind of work with it now. Um, besides just a blog post, you now have a whole host of content um that you can start posting just from doing that one uh hour recording online um in the podcast uh scenario. It's relevant to the time as well, so it you can get it out quicker, it's relevant in terms of what's happening in the last couple of weeks, so your audience will you know appreciate that, understand that you're providing that value to them and you're not waiting for one blog every quarter. Uh you're taking control of the scenario with it and you're crafting the content from there. The last step uh where people sometimes may fall down on is yes, they have all the content, they formatted it and they can't get it approved. So, what we use is just an easy kind of content management system where your founder can look at all the content, make suggestions, make feedback. There's always feedback. It's never personal, but there's always going to be feedback when you're writing on behalf of someone else. They're gonna have a different way of saying things that you haven't taken into account. They might want to change some phrasing 100%. So, you know, we use Notion um as a way of doing that. It's a really interactive calendar. They can kind of go in, they can see when it's due to be posted, what platforms it's going on, they can see the content, they can watch the video, they can read the blog, they can read the uh text-based content, and they can join on and start typing their feedback for the content, and then you can make that feedback as a result, which makes it just a really efficient system. Um, you can kind of a traffic light system in terms of not approved, feedback given or approved. So, you know, if they go in and they see the content and happy days, everything's approved, your team then know, right, this is good to go. We can schedule out on behalf of them. Um, I'd also recommend that as well. That's the second part of this, is that if you're waiting on your founder or team member, whoever is you're running this for, um, to post it, chances are they'll get too busy, they'll forget how to post it, um, they'll forget to post it, what time to post it. It's all it all matters. They're the small details that will make a big difference. Like there's no point posting at 10 o'clock at night on a Friday uh when they get a chance. You know, that should have been out at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, you know. So I would take the control off that as well uh on behalf of them. So connect up a social media scheduler, it could be anything. Um you could log into their LinkedIn, but sometimes it's easier just to use a tool. Like I use Metricool, you could use buffer, you could use any of the social media schedulers that connect with LinkedIn, they do a good job. And you can schedule things out for the right timing, you can see when your audience are most active online, and it just ensures that there's the consistency and that it goes out when it's supposed to go out. So once they have approved it or you've made the feedback from them, I would then say, right, that's perfect, it's all going out, it's all scheduled, and now you have a system where essentially you're not depending on someone else to, you know, take time out of their busy day and spend hours writing one blog post. You've now taken it into your own hands, and in the course of an hour, you've captured all the insights, and your team then has had a lot to work with and shape and format. Um, and now you have a founder. You can replicate this exact same process and playbook across different founders, different members of the executive level team. So it could be, you know, your chief operations officer, your CFO, marketing officer, whoever it might be. And the interesting part is that they all should be posting because they all have different insights. So, like someone speaking from the marketing side versus the operation side versus the technology side, all have different experiences, expertise, opinions, and that is really valuable when you're building your B2B technology brand in the minds of your prospects, but also in terms of getting cited within these AI models. So that's how I would approach getting a team member to uh start posting content consistently, and it really comes down to capturing quality insights, making it easier for them to do that, and making sure that you have a lot of content opportunities on the back of it. So that's a very kind of quick look at how you can do it. If you have any questions of how to implement it, do reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to chat through this in more detail. If you're looking for a content marketing agency partner to do this for your B2B technology brand, uh reach out to us too. We implement this for B2B Tech brands at Trans7 Media. So if you have any questions on that to make it easier for your marketing team to take care of all that kind of content operations, uh send me over a message and I can give more information on that as well. So uh this has been the 1% insight. Make sure you follow wherever you get your podcasts and stay tuned for the next episode.