When you begin to feel a case of writer burnout coming on, one of the best things that you can do is to crowdsource content from your entire organization. Not only can this help to alleviate some of your stress for having to come up with great content ideas, but it also provides a great opportunity to share the expertise of your team members with the world.
No, this does not necessarily mean that your team members need to write blog posts or social media posts. In fact, you’ll want to be very careful with handing out access to these critical marketing channels.
Instead, crowdsourcing members of your organization can be done to build a knowledge bank for storing and organizing content ideas that would be relevant and useful to your target audience.
If you’re going to give crowdsourcing a try, here are some tips for how to do this most effectively:
Explain to your team why crowdsourcing is important for your organization.
Make it clear that you are not an expert in all aspects of your business. In order for your content to really stand out, enlisting the expertise of your team members can help you to deliver the most well-rounded content strategy to your audience.
Let your team know that they don’t have to write content if they don’t want to.
While a great piece of content could be a more detailed piece written by a specialist in that area within your organization, the thought of sitting down to write a 1,000-word article can be very intimidating. Let your team know that it’s their expertise that you want on a particular subject, not a perfectly written piece of content.
For those that don’t feel comfortable writing content, they could share inspiring articles with you or even allow you to conduct an informal interview with them. You could then come up with compelling topics to write about based on the information learned.
Take advantage of content gathering tools to keep crowdsourcing organized.
For example, a tool called 15Five can be used to help team members block out 15 minutes each week to answer some simple questions about the organization. Managers then take 5 minutes to provide feedback. The ultimate goal of this is to transform these conversations into something meaningful. Specifically in regards to crowdsourcing, this is a great way to identify potential content topics.
Another great tool is Slack, which allows your team members to share any articles with you that they find interesting and that your audience would benefit from hearing about. Encouraging your team to use this tool is an easy and organized way for you to constantly have a great list of potential content ideas to skim through.
So the next time that you’re twiddling your thumbs with writer’s block, give crowdsourcing a try. You’ll quickly see that it’s a powerful way to showcase your team’s expertise and deliver captivating content to your audience.
