Source: Harvard Business Review

The use of content marketing has grown exponentially in recent years, and in 2015, Content Marketing Institute found that 88% of B2B marketers are now using content marketing. A lot of these efforts have focused on positioning senior executives as thought leaders, but limiting yourself to content by only those in the C-suite also limits your impact.

For one thing, senior executives are extremely busy — they’re often the toughest people to pin down. And focusing on only your C-suite narrows the number and depth of topics you can explore in your content.

To relieve the pressure on your executive team and to improve your marketing efforts, consider recruiting other internal leaders with insights, experiences, and expertise that are valuable to your audience to become content spokespeople for your brand. My team and I have seen our referral traffic more than double and our conversion rate rise nearly 75 percent since expanding our content marketing efforts to include internal leaders outside of just my co-founder and myself.

Here’s how we did it for ourselves and how we approach this process with the organizations we work with:

Step 1: Identify content spokespeople

Traditional spokespeople talk about products or services. Content spokespeople, in contrast, have a wider mandate. They help your marketing team craft content that builds your brand, engages your audience, and nurtures sales leads. To find the team members who can do this:

• Identify your team’s natural leaders and teachers.This doesn’t mean you should look at only those on your team with leadership titles or those who talk the most. You should have an idea of who stands out as a leader among others and who is patient and knowledgeable enough to go out of their way to teach their co-workers. These abilities lend themselves well to content creation, and the team members who possess them tend to be more cooperative and effective in creating thought leadership content.
• Pitch a piece of content that requires a quote or brief story from each person you’ve identified as a natural leader or teacher, and publish that article on your blog. Ask your content marketing team what point or points within the article resonated with readers most and which contributors were the easiest to work with. This feedback will help you refine your list of content spokespeople.

Step 2: Figure out what they know — and document it

We start with a Q&A process that uses in-person interviews and brain-dump exercises to extract the specific expertise and personal stories needed to create the piece of content coming from that spokesperson. We store all of this information in a knowledge bank where it’s saved for future use, sorted by content spokesperson, and tagged by topic so it’s easy to find. The article is then written by our team in-house or by a freelance writer using the answer sets and information in the knowledge bank, before being edited by our team, approved by the necessary parties, published, and distributed.

We’ve found that this process makes content creation easy for everyone on our team, from our marketing department that sets and executes the strategy to the various content spokespeople selected to contribute their ideas and expertise.

As with any strategy, including content spokespeople in your marketing efforts has risks. You might ask yourself, “What if this new content spokesperson says something off-brand?” or “What if his or her message doesn’t align with the company’s?”

But that’s the beauty of contributed content: You control it. With traditional PR, major risks usually include the author of an article misquoting your company rep or a message getting taken out of context. Content marketing gives you more control and substantially limits your risk.

And including multiple content spokespeople in your strategy delivers benefits beyond greater control and reduced risk. By embracing the unique experiences of your employees outside the C-suite and showcasing their diversity through thought leadership content, you’re strengthening your brand’s authentic, human connection to your audience. This connection can fuel your next sale, build your next partnership, and make your next hire feel connected to your team from the beginning.

Your senior executive team might be your first stop when developing your thought leadership plan, but it certainly shouldn’t be your last. The more strongly you embrace a thought leadership culture outside of your C-suite, the more effective your marketing efforts will be.