Want your content to reach more people? Employee engagement may be key to your success.

Content marketing strategy is 50% content and 50% delivery. This means that excellent content can fall flat if the distribution is mismanaged. Far too often, we see law firms create good content but fail to distribute it. These firms struggle with content marketing because they do not leverage their team—or their team’s networks—to bolster their reach.

The truth is that employees are perfectly poised to create and distribute your content. Now is the time to rethink your content marketing strategy with employee engagement at the core—and reap the benefits.

This article explains why employee engagement is so powerful with regard to content marketing and offers five strategies for getting employees engaged.

Can employee engagement really impact content marketing?

Your law firm may be trying to reach people via ads, newsletters, and social media with varying degrees of success. But in marketing, a message is only as valuable as the messenger.

We see this principle at play in influencer marketing, where 60% of marketers report that a trusted influencer exerts far more sway over someone’s purchasing decisions than an impersonal advertisement.

Once you understand that content is only as trustworthy as its source, it’s easy to see why your employees should be participating in content marketing. Your employees’ authority and trustworthiness make them perfect ambassadors for generating and sharing your firm’s content.

Five ways to get employees engaged with content marketing

Be aware that employee engagement can be a sensitive topic. No one wants to feel like they’re doing someone else’s job on top of their own, and no one wants to spam their network with mediocre content.

You have to make it easy, exciting, and rewarding for employees to get engaged with content marketing.

1. Bring them into the content strategy.

Make content development a team activity. Invite employees to contribute topics, serve as subject matter experts, or even write a post. Create content that highlights employee stories, for instance. When an employee feels invested and involved in content creation, they’re more likely to share the final product.

2. Make sure they know how to share content online.

Don’t assume that everyone understands how to share content on LinkedIn (or even email). The major platforms change so frequently that it’s worth offering a refresher. This can be a short group session that happens once or twice a year—with treats provided, of course.

3. Let them know when new content is published

Inform your team when new content is published. There are a number of tools that can be used to automate this process, such as LinkedIn pages. Firms can also add a step to their publishing workflow, sending out a short email to the team with a link whenever new content goes live.

4. Share successes with the team.

Received a great comment from a follower? Did an article go viral? Share positive feedback with your team to build morale and momentum. A weekly or monthly team-wide roundup is always helpful.

5. Emphasize the benefits of content sharing.

Attorneys have a lot to gain by sharing content and becoming more engaged on social media. By increasing their own visibility online, they remain top of mind for referrals.

Bear in mind that employee engagement is a long game. You won’t find success by activating your team when you need them and ignoring them the rest of the time. That being said, high employee engagement can help with more than just content marketing. Engaged employees are correlated with lower turnover, higher productivity, and increased revenue.

Review and next steps

You don’t need to hire a social media personality to succeed with content marketing for your law firm. You have access to trusted influencers in-house: your employees!

Tap into the power of your people for content marketing by making it easy, exciting, and rewarding to participate:

• Include your team in content strategy development.
• Teach them how to share content online.
• Inform them when new content is available.
• Celebrate successes with positive feedback.
• Highlight the benefits of sharing content.

Don’t waste your time on creating great content that goes nowhere. Instead, include employees in your content marketing strategy and wait for the phone to ring.

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