But you don’t need to do it all on your own. What you need is to foster a content creating culture at your workplace by getting your whole team involved so the constant flow of creativity and relevant content doesn’t all fall on one person, and so your content has different ‘voices’, drawing on the different backgrounds and knowledge bases that are bound to be already in existence within your organisation.

1. Do an initial content audit — It’s more than likely you’re already sitting on a bunch of great content. This may be stored lurking on your hard drives, sent emails and in marketing materials which is able to be re-purposed as a blog post or social media post. Trawl through business plans, proposals and pitches, grant and tender applications, as well as awards applications and pull out what you already have on file.

2. Create a repository for all the information to be placed – Once you have completed your audit, it’s time to centralise where all the good content is stored for easy future retrieval, and to add to it over time. You could use ‘Dropbox’ which is basically a hard drive in the cloud, where people from throughout your office, even if based at other sites, can add content as they discover it. We’ve also utilised a Facebook group where we created a document in the documents tab where people could write down possible ideas, titles and links to further information when a moment of inspiration came. You could also list your proposed content on an excel sheet

3. Have a brainstorming session – Get your team together. Get a whiteboard and ask the question ‘What could we as an organisation be creating content about’. Now of course this should all fit in with your overall company strategy including vision, business objectives, target market and the desired result. Once you are clear on this, consider what you could write about in line with your vision and mission.

4. Get your content creating radar on — Inspiration for great content can come from a wide range of places. It could be something that someone says to you out and about. It could be an opinion based piece because you want to set some records straight. For instance you may disagree on what has been written elsewhere, and you might like to write a post around that. Writing the answer to a FAQ your customers keep asking is another idea (this is a great way to keep them at bay — write an answer and in future direct them to the link!)

You can of course trawl the internet for inspiration too — perhaps even see what your competitors are writing about so you can strategise whether you go head to head, or take a completely different path in the topics you write about.

The content you write could be based on news within your organisation i.e. a new product or service launch. A special offer. Or even something that just made you and your team laugh.

5. Mix up the marketing messages — If you are going to become a content creating machine, it’s important you mix up the messages going out on a regular basis so it’s not all ‘sell’ and no ‘sizzle’. Our clever Social Media Specialist, Zoe Wyatt, teaches our social media training clients the 30-30-30-10 rule which helps ensure you are writing about a wide variety of topics which I will share with you.

In short, about 30% of the time you need to be self-promoting — so in your brainstorm consider what your business is doing right now or it plans to do in the future that you could write about.

The next 30% is about promoting other people, so have a brainstorm about what other people compliment your business and who you would like to support and may support you in return and write a list of who they are.

The third 30% is – you need to come up with valuable content, so you need to identify what it is you know a lot about and what you want to be positioned as the obvious expert for.

And finally the last 10% is inspiration; this might be images and quotes.

If you are consistently committed to fostering ways to creating culture in … your workplace and are also aware of maintaining a balanced marketing mix, you will ensure that the content you are producing is varied and well received by your audience.

There are other content creating culture mechanisms that I can share with you in future posts but in the meantime I would really like to hear how you create and foster a content creating culture in your workplace and whether you will try any of the ideas outlined above.