Pay your employees to blog. Better yet, pay them to generate leads.
How much are you willing to pay for each net-new form-filled-out-and-white-paper-downloaded attendee to the next webinar -$50? $100?
What are you spending on acquisition right now? Per lead? If you don’t know, how much is your product selling for, what is the LTV of a new customer – $50k? $150k? $500k? What would your close rate look like on that roomful of prospects? What about across 100 prospects? Could you afford to pay your employees $25/post, plus $200 per net-new webinar attendance? Maybe it’s $10/lead, maybe it’s $50/post. The point, is incent them to grow personally, in the same direction that your company and marketing needs to grow.
Some hospitals pay their doctors $5k+ to have an article published in an academic journal. They do this because it encourages the doctors to become thought leaders. In addition to encouraging thought leadership, this strongly incents employees to become thought leaders / high quality content generators in the specific subject matter of your lead pool – as the best focus of their efforts would be to write / generate content towards an audience most likely to attend.
-Sean
#1 Massive liability for the company to have blogging sanctioned and not regulated.
#2 Sales and Marketing should be targeting clients, if they are failing… fire them.
#3 I agree it is important to have your employees ‘buy in’ aka ‘drink the kool-aid’, however, if they are blogging the direction of the organization has the potential to move in random non-coordinated directions simultaneously. Own your direction and message, focus on distributing it top-down.
#4 Doctors publish research in order to get more million dollars grants from the NIH.
#5 Your idea would work brilliantly in a MLM type scenario that is 180 degree from norm.
Hi Jack –
1. You bring up a good point – perhaps there is an internal editorial board, brand standards and guideliness
2. It’s 2010, everyone is a marketer.
3. See #1
4. Sure, and perhaps one employees killer blog post will fill 5 webinars, result in 30 prospects and 2 sales. Give them a piece of the action and let them work towards it.
5. Normal doesn’t exist, and if it does, it certainly isn’t profitable. Empowering and incenting employees to produce lead-generating content is a synergy for the employee and the employer. Call it MLM if you want, in the end, I see it as a well-placed carrot that catalyzes latent resources an organization already has.