Deloitte’s report this week on Millennials reconfirmed an important priority of our largest generation: Mentors. Millennials want mentors and understand that good mentoring can be crucial to their career development and long-term success. This reinforces results from a recent survey of young managers published in the Harvard Business Review that found that mentorship was one of the highest-ranking items "important" to them. 
Millennials’ desire to be mentored impacts every functional group in your business, but seems an especially important trend to keep in mind for those of us trying to meet the challenge of creating ever more high quality, sophisticated content to reach and engage audiences that already have too much choice and too many distractions.

One solution we have been developing is Content Team Mentoring, a strategy that can increase both your content creation bandwidth and quality, while forging new connections inside your organization. The goal is simple: You need to try to ensure that expertise and experience are shared among members of your content team to develop talent and skills in all the functional specialties that touch content and communications across your organization.  This is particularly important because your content team is often an amalgamation of internal staff groups who have never before worked together closely—from media relations to digital marketing to customer service and human resources. A content mentoring team pulls them together, enables them to collaborate to solve problems and integrate solutions while they share knowledge and skills needed to excel in their jobs, even as the communications landscape morphs at lightening speed before us. 
Mentoring members of your content team has important, practical benefits.

• First, mentoring generally builds expertise and broadens competencies, increasing your overall capabilities to create the sophisticated content your audience increasingly demands. The generally positive ROI for mentoring programs is well known. 
• Second, mentoring increases retention rates among the content experts on the team. According to the just-released Deloitte report, millennials intending to stay with their organizations for more than five years are twice as likely to have a mentor (68 percent) than not (32 percent). Among those intending to leave within two years, the ratio of those with (56 percent) and those without (44 percent) a mentor is much lower.
• Third, mentoring helps create all sorts of cross-functional synergies at a time when the traditional marketing and PR silos are disappearing; groups who rarely worked together in the past are now routinely required to collaborate closely in order to meet intense demand for high quality content for all the diverse audiences an organization needs to engage; mentoring programs can help optimize collaborations and help manage change.
• And finally, mentoring helps cross-pollinate diverse skill sets on your content team, which gives you a fighting chance to keep up with external content trends led by new technologies and social platforms you need to identify and master at the speed of light (or so it seems).

Your content team may be especially well suited to a Reverse Mentoring program which, according to HBR “shifts the responsibility for organizing mentoring junior employees, who learn from senior executives by mentoring them. A Millennial is matched to an executive and assigned to teach him or her how to, say, use social media to connect with customers. It’s an effective way to give junior employees a window into the higher levels of the organization, so that when the mentees retire, the younger generation has a better understanding of the business.”
Content creation is consuming more and more of our resources even as we face dire predictions of "saturation." Content Team Mentoring programs may be an important tool to nurture and keep the talent you will need to produce the high quality content that captures your audience's imagination in the era of the (well-documented) eight-second attention span. 

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Here’s the question: Where do we begin as we plan our content strategy in 2016?  It just doesn’t seem fair that we’ve spent the past few years evangelizing for a crafty content strategy to supercharge our traditional marketing and communications programs…and now that everyone is finally on board, dire predictions of “content saturation” darken the horizon. 

But fear not. Even though others may clutter the digital landscape with bits of inauthentic junk, you can still distinguish yourself as a source of highly relevant content your customers will welcome as they meander across platforms during the course of their complicated, converged, multi-channel days.  Your goal should be to follow them wherever they go –on the Web, on email, on social media—and provide highly authentic content they’ll find delightful, useful, and memorable—and always relevant enough to rise about the noise. Here’s how:

A GOOD EDITORIAL CALENDAR: Start by taking an aerial view of the year ahead. What newsmaker events are on the horizon for you—product rollouts and updates, sales events, company announcements, anticipated reorganizations, major industry conferences, market announcements, editorial calendars in the trade press, and customer programs.  Then add in the events that will matter to your clients—supply chain events, major industry conferences and trends, customer programs.  And finally add seasonal calendar items that are likely to make news—weather, holidays, consumer behavior, etc.  You need to make sure that your announcements aren’t drowned out by other news that can be reasonably expected—everything from Super Bowl Sunday to Black Friday.  You need to get a composite picture of the events that are going to shape your business—and your customers’ business—throughout the year.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP:  A QUESTION THAT NEEDS ANSWERED.Armed with the editorial calendar, you can estimate what’s likely to be relevant to your customers and when it’s going to matter the most during the course of the year. Decide which question intrigues your customers the most, which client conversations you want to join, and which ones you want to instigate. Then settle on your content; the best way to get attention is to create something original. Think about the questions associated with the biggest trends, technologies, and market forces your customers care about most.  Then figure out a way to study those questions with a piece of original research or content that will add to the body of industry knowledge.

​A FEAST OF CONTENT. Design a survey, commission an article, convene an expert panel—think of an exercise that will yield original, valuable intelligence that will matter to your audience.  Whatever you decide, plan in advance to capture as much information as possible—perhaps not just aggregate survey data, but also individual customer testimonials, case studies, reviews, digital assets, survey methodology, and industry history.  Once you have the results, you have a feast of information you carve up in a dozen different ways for months to come.  Here’s how:

DIGITAL STRATEGY.  You should invest in building a library of material around your central research question to live in a special area on your site, or perhaps a microsite.  For one thing, we've heard long-form, high quality content will be rewarded by Google.  And creating a sophisticated digital home for your original research will offer dozens of opportunities to integrate with your email marketing programs for both acquisition and retention. Make sure you include graphics, infographics, photos, videos, customer feedback and case studies wherever possible. You will be rewarded with both SEO and leads.

WHITE PAPERS AND WEBINARS DRIVE REGISTRATIONS.   The centerpiece of your thought leadership program can be presented as a white paper for exclusive distribution to key customers and influencers, with a second wave of distribution linked to your digital marketing so you can capture leads with every download. Remember, think about how your new piece of intel fits into the industry’s news cycle during the year. With the 40k-foot view from your editorial calendar, you should be able to pitch your White Paper as a keynote or even a premium at a leading industry conference. If you can build a high-visibility industry panel around your findings, you’ll create even more original content that can then begin paying dividends when it lives on your site and becomes a new element of your digital marketing program.
 
A PROACTIVE MEDIA RELATIONS STRATEGY:  When you don’t fully integrate media relations into your content strategy, you’re missing an important element.  Ensure that you identify your customers’ most influential media outlets—particularly influential trade reporters—and create a release strategy that will build buzz around your thought leadership.  Frequently, with sufficient planning (which is why the full-year view at the very start), you can pitch your story to an influential reporter, set the release for a prime-time industry conference, and then use the resulting media coverage as another wave of valuable content for your site and digital and social channels.

DEPLOY ON SOCIAL: By now you have a truly breathtaking inventory of great content that can be carved into highly engaging and shareable little bites on all the social channels your key audiences visit regularly.  Remember that if you can tell the story with video, your aggregate leads, and your lead quality, will go through the roof. Indeed, video content is predicted to overtake written content in ROI for many industries this year. Remember too that the press you create gives you credibility—and even more digital marketing opportunities--as you share your clips. For B2B brands, LinkedIn and Twitter can be particularly effective for brand-building—and new live event features on Twitter and Facebook offer more opportunities than ever to promote your leadership. And this will be an important year for your social networking: Social content will be more readily indexed thanks to deals between Google and Facebook and Twitter—and more platforms will follow---further blurring the separation between the Web and social content from an SEO perspective.  

YOU’RE NOT DONE: CONTEXTUALIZE. Remember, you started all this to become a leading voice in the industry, or least to join high level industry conversations where you could add value and interact with key business targets and opinion makers.  Armed with your original content, make sure you bring it up at every opportunity. Every time your customers are hit with a piece of relevant news—market shifts, consumption or investment trends, technology shifts, whatever—be sure to blog about how this latest piece of the puzzle can be interpreted through the lens of your branded findings.  This will keep you in the game even when you aren’t releasing new findings. 

BUILD A FRANCHISE.  You should set goals for conversion (however you choose to define it) at the start of your content strategy so you can measure relative effectiveness of whatever you do.  If a certain piece of research or original content performs well, consider building a franchise around it—an annual survey, maybe combined with annual commentary from industry influentials, with the infrastructure to repeat the whole process outlined here.
Relevance is the key to opting out of the digital gridlock we call “content saturation” on the horizon.  A strategic thought leadership program may be the ticket to relevance you need.