How To Get Your Team Making Content

Everyone in your business knows something a customer would find useful. Almost none of it ever gets published.

The usual fix is to ask the team to write something. It fails every time, and it fails for good reasons.

Why asking people to write does not work

Writing is a specific skill and most people are slow at it and self-conscious about it.

It also sits outside their actual job, so it goes to the bottom of the list behind everything they are measured on.

And a blank page is intimidating. "Write a blog post about waterproofing" is a request most people will avoid for three weeks and then do badly.

Ask them to talk instead

Everyone can talk about their own work. They do it all day.

Sit down with the person for fifteen minutes and record it. Ask them questions a customer would ask. Let them explain it the way they would explain it on site.

That recording is the content. Someone else turns it into a post, a caption, a video script, an email. The expert never touches a keyboard.

Fifteen minutes of a good tradesperson talking about why a repair keeps failing produces more usable material than a week of them trying to write it.

This is the same mechanic as turning sales calls into content, pointed at delivery instead of sales.

Where the questions come from

Do not invent them. Collect them.

The questions customers actually ask on the phone. The things you find yourself explaining repeatedly. The objections that come up in every quote. The complaints. The things people get wrong before they call you.

Keep a running list somewhere everyone can add to. A shared note is enough. Every time someone answers the same question for the fourth time, it goes on the list.

That list is a content plan that writes itself, and it is grounded in real demand rather than guesses.

Make the ask small and specific

"Send me a photo of anything interesting today" works. "Contribute to our content strategy" does not.

Small, concrete, single-step requests get done:

A photo of a job at the start and the end. A thirty second voice note explaining a problem you hit. One sentence on what went wrong and how you fixed it.

Collecting raw material is the job. Turning it into something publishable is somebody else's.

Give it to one owner

Content dies when it is everyone's responsibility.

One person owns the pipeline: collecting the material, turning it into pieces, getting approval, publishing. Everyone else contributes raw input.

That person does not have to be a writer. They have to be organised and persistent. The chasing is most of the job.

Show people the result

The strongest thing you can do to keep contributions coming is to show someone their post, and then show them what it did.

"That thing you explained got shared forty times and two people rang about it." That makes the next voice note easy to get.

Nobody keeps feeding a process they never see the output of.

Approve fast

Content dies in approval queues.

If a post sits for three weeks waiting on the owner to read it, the team learns that the effort goes nowhere.

Set a rule: drafts are approved or amended within two days, or they go out as written. Slow approval kills more content programmes than lack of ideas.

What good looks like after a month

A list of real customer questions that keeps growing.

One named owner with time allocated.

A habit of recording short conversations rather than requesting documents.

And enough raw material banked that the question is what to publish next, not whether there is anything to publish. That is the point where batching starts to work, and the whole thing gets easier.