How To Get Your Co-Workers To Do Your Marketing Job For You

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Hey. Tim here. Happy Monday.

I'm calling it now.

Employee-led content is about to eat B2B marketing alive.

Not next year. Not next quarter. It's happening right now while most companies are still fiddling with their corporate LinkedIn posts that nobody reads.

Why am I so confident?

Trust in corporate messaging is in the toilet. LinkedIn's algorithm practically hates brand pages now. And buyers? They want to hear from the actual humans who'll do the work, not some marketing person who memorized the positioning statement.

I've watched this pattern with my own eyeballs. The slick corporate stuff gets crickets. Meanwhile, Dave from engineering posts a badly-lit video explaining a technical concept and suddenly there's actual conversations happening.

It’s one of the biggest reasons I wanted to write this newsletter. So that you know there is an actually person behind all this.

How To Do This Without Your Team Plotting Your Murder

Your employees weren't hired to be content creators. They're busy doing actual work. Here's how to extract their brilliance without making them despise you:

1. Create a Content Extraction System

Don't ask busy people to write. That's madness.

Have short, focused conversations instead. One 20-minute chat = content for weeks.

My favorite hack? Record a Zoom call, dump the transcript into ChatGPT, and ask it to pull out the gold. Send it back to the employee for a quick thumbs up. Done.

2. Capture Insights When They Happen

People have brilliant thoughts while doing their actual jobs.

Set up a stupidly simple way to capture them in the moment. Voice notes. Slack channel. Whatever. But it needs to take less than 2 minutes or it won't happen.

3. Mining Existing Meetings

Meetings are happening anyway. They're filled with expertise that's evaporating into the ether.

I've started helping clients extract content from meetings that would happen regardless. No extra time needed. And you get stuff that sounds like it came from actual humans because—shocker—it did!

4. Let People Choose Their Involvement Level

Some people secretly want to be thought leaders. Others would rather die than see their name on LinkedIn.

Create options from "just review this" to "full collaboration." Respect both.

5. Make Recognition Actually Matter

Don't just exploit their brains. Show them how their expertise is building their professional reputation.

Share metrics. Give proper credit. Set up a Slack channel just for wins. Did they get quoted somewhere? Media mention? Make sure they know about it.

The Companies Already Killing It With Employee Content

I keep hearing "employee content is the future" and rolling my eyes.

Then I started digging.

Holy sh*t — the receipts don't lie. Real companies. Real results. No PR fluff.

Sumo Logic (tech) turned their actual engineers into content creators.

Not marketing folks pretending to be engineers.

Actual engineers talking about what they're building.

Engagement went through the roof. Of course it did! People can smell authenticity from a mile away.

BeachFleischmann (freaking accountants!) got their calculator jockeys posting tax advice.

LinkedIn traffic? Exploded.

Turns out people would rather learn about depreciation from an actual human than some faceless corporate logo. Who knew?

DailyPay (fintech) operates in an industry where one wrong word gets the lawyers twitching. Yet they found a way.

Behind-the-scenes content. Culture stuff. Real people showing what they actually do.

No stock photos. No corporate speak. Just humans being humans.

Meller (selling eyewear) took a different path.

They send employees to festivals with products and say "have fun, take some pics."

No staged nonsense. No "hold the product and smile." Just people actually using stuff they make in places they'd actually be.

I also love Meller. I have a few pairs of their sunglasses and they slap.

The pattern is undeniable. B2B, B2C, regulated, unregulated — doesn't matter.

When you let your actual humans be actual humans, you connect in ways that corporate accounts simply can't.

We've Been Quietly Testing This

Inge has been absolutely crushing it with our brand mentions for backlinks.

But that's not the interesting part.

It's our individual "employee" mentions that are going bananas.

How? We did a few internal interviews. I built questions designed to extract our core beliefs and processes. Then we fed everything into a system we built.

Inge works her backlink magic, and suddenly our expert quotes are plastered all over the internet.

It's working so well it feels like we're cheating. But we're not. We're just the first to the party.

Want the details? Hit reply and I'll send them over.

Have a great Monday. See you tomorrow.

✌️Tim “I just wanna be in Fast Company” Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai