Good content marketing often requires cooperation from all sectors of a business, including management, sales, customer service, and production, among others. Breaking through the organizational silos to get that cooperation from other departments can be difficult, so here are a few tips on getting internal buy-in for your content marketing.

First, think about why you would need cooperation from the rest of your company to do content marketing? Well, it’s often best to tap into the experience and expertise other departments are experiencing to make your content richer and more “authentic”.

For example, who  better than customer service to tell you about your customers’ pain points?  PR (the original content marketers!) can help you with your storytelling and sales can give you good insight into what your customers are looking for; production can give you a detailed picture of your products.

The first step in getting your company on board with content marketing is to get management on board. Without management’s approval, it may be difficult to get the various departments to willing to help. Explain how creating content will help the company’s marketing efforts as well as create synergies between silo’ed departments (e.g. content marketing can boost sales as well as marketing).

Next, go the departments you want to work with. Be prepared for some pushback, because asking for help can sound suspiciously like more work for the same pay to many people. Also, your goals are likely not the same as that department’s goals and employees may resist doing anything that they are not being “graded” on by their managers.

To combat this pushback, promote these synergies that collaboration can build and show your colleagues that you do not want to add to their work—rather, you actually want to help them! For Sales, you show them how helping with your content marketing will bring them more leads. Perhaps Operations can get a more streamlined order process based on customer feedback. And so on and so on… When you pitch your ideas to other departments, emphasize synergy and see how that changes people’s minds and inclines them to help you.

Another way to deal with pushback is to allay your colleagues’ fears that your proposed collaboration will take a lot of time away from the project their supervisors give them. Here’s what this collaboration could look like without taking up too much of other people’s time: find a subject matter expert in your company (R&D and Production are great places to get experts on your products!) and sit them down for a half hour interview. Record the interview, edit their answers, and voila, instant ebook!

Getting internal buy-in for content marketing is crucial because Marketing can’t create content alone. Getting that buy-in can be tricky though due to office politics and the “not my job” mentality that infects many employees. These tips can help you break down those barriers and succeed in getting the internal buy-in necessary for your content marketing efforts.