by Upasna Kakroo | Featured Contributor
Culture is essential but it becomes especially important when working in a Startup, where limited resources are always up against stringent deadlines. Content is a special case that I discuss today, just because, if not done well in a team, it is the biggest reason why most content marketing initiatives fail. From personal experiences of being a Content Marketing head, to starting up my own Content Marketing and branding company here are some reasons why you need to build a culture of content!
Why Does Your Startup Need A Culture Of Content?
Author Brene Brown nails down culture in her brilliant book, Daring Greatly as: “the way we do things around here”. It’s not something you wrote down in the little black book or shared with your investors. It’s what you and your team experiences on a day to day basis. In reality.
1. Poor Culture Leads To A Cycle Of Failure:
I tried to put together what this means for a Startup, using the cycle of failure framework, described by Schlesinger and Heskett (1991) for service marketing. Here’s how it looks for Content Marketing:
- A poor content culture is filled with people who may not understand what smart goals for content or social media are
- Poor content culture means naming and shaming your employees publicly when they don’t get you the exact ROI you imagined
- Poor content cultures put all the work and the blame of failure on one: one agency, one employee or one team, not realizing that content is a team sport.
- Poor content culture means consequently high turnovers of employees who feel under-appreciated leading to poor client satisfaction and finally a direct impact on revenues.
2. A Strong Culture of Content Will Enable You To Reach Content Goals Sooner!
Content Marketing and social media are long term investments. However, smart goals and implementations thrive in an enthusiastic team. Content marketing implementation is a function of two aspects: competency and capacity. With a culture of content, a Startup is able to work together across departments, so that the capacity is shared. A strong work culture enables you to train and build teams with high competency. In effect, there is no one man army that you need to work with. You develop a culture of creation and sharing throughout your organization.
3. A Culture Of Content Allows You To Build Employee Ambassadors
Plenty of companies look to build communities and niche audiences who are interested in their products and services. In a culture built around content, your first loyal ambassadors are your teams and employees. This allows you to share transparent product/ service insights, build ownership and encourage everyone to contribute. It’s always nicer to solve an issue of “too much content” than struggle with the lack of it. Your employees allow you to build reach in their own personal communities in an organic way, nothing that you wouldn’t want!
What kind of a culture of content are you building in your Startups?
Image credit: Flickr
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Upa
sna Kakroo is the Co-founder of an online branding and content marketing Startup, Brandanew. Her previous experiences include, McKinsey & Co., Rocket Internet among others. Upasna has devoured urban culture, art by traveling in 30 countries, living in three and blogging about these for over 12 years. Upasna sounds overeducated having gone to school for her BS (engineering) in India, MS (telecom) in the UK and MBA (marketing) in Germany. She currently lives in Germany and may soon venture into her 4th land.
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