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How Slack, LearnCore, and 15Five Help Us Create Content

How Slack, LearnCore, and 15Five Help Us Create Content

blog_10Consistently creating content that truly engages your audience can often feel like pulling teeth. But with a little creativity and combined effort, it can actually be enjoyable (and more effective).

Our team has started to create quarterly campaigns for our content, and we’ve seen a lot of success with it. 

Because we published over 86 pieces of content during Q1, however, we needed to get creative with brainstorming more engaging content faster. And when we looked around, our solution was sitting right next to us: other employees. (I outlined the success of our Q1 campaign in a previous article, so feel free to read more about how our guest content boosted ROI by 474 percent in this post.

Since our team uses awesome tools to communicate internally, figuring out how to poll other employees for their insights was fairly easy to accomplish. So to help you brainstorm topics for your next content marketing campaign, we’ve put together a list of the tools our team swears by: 

15Five

15FiveEDIT

Our team uses 15Five for various reasons: to highlight client wins, to put forward Belt nominations (recognizing people who have gone above and beyond), and to ask about challenges among every single person on the team. Each department has its own custom set of questions that are relevant to its team members’ roles, but overall, they’re pretty similar in nature. (Full disclosure, at one point 15Five was also one of our clients). 

These questions tend to change every couple months, but they’re a gold mine when it comes to content inspiration. If I’m feeling stuck, I’ll review past reports for examples or common pain points our salespeople are hearing, and if I’m looking for the answer to something specific, we have a question that allows me to tag someone — or an entire department in the company — for an answer. It’s a great way to stay in touch with other teammates.

Slack

SlackFINAL

I have a confession to make: Our team is kind of — maybe just a little — 100 percent obsessed with Slack. Slack is our team’s internal communication platform, and we embrace it because it really allows us to get creative and fun. We’ve created department-specific channels that, while mostly utilized by that department, allow anyone in the company to hop in and join (or start) a conversation.

To brainstorm topics, I’ve actually created channels that are used to help with headline writing and post various ideas there. I also regularly “pop into” various channels to see what the team’s talking about (I typically visit the account strategy channel to hear about client wins and sales being discussed with clients and prospects). It’s a quick and easy way to poll other employees and see what each department is finding success in or struggling with.

Fun fact: Slack can pull analytics to let you know which member of your team is the most talkative, uses the most emojis, and more! 

LearnCore

LearnCoreEdit

This platform allows you to create “lessons” with exams to better educate and update your employees on various initiatives. While there’s a plethora of ways you can use the platform, our teammates use it to highlight clients, send KPI reports before our monthly meeting to ensure everyone is informed, update the team on new publications, and provide insight into trending topics or issues within our industry. 

My team and I recently sifted through old courses to get inspiration for upcoming articles and determine which topics are most valuable to our clients and prospective leads.  

By tapping into your employees’ perspectives and utilizing their knowledge through tools that already serve many other purposes, you can revitalize your content and start publishing articles that your prospects, partners, and clients want to read. New Call-to-action

Picture of Maya Szydlowski Luke

About Maya Szydlowski Luke

Social media is my happy place. My best days are spent discovering trends about coffee, health, content strategy, and fashion, 140 characters at a time. Let's connect! @MayaSLuke

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