5 Ways You Can Leverage Your Company’s Expertise to Create Great Content
Great content is one of the most important keys to success, but creating it is a process that doesn’t come easily or naturally. It takes time and effort to reach the point that you understand how to grow and cultivate a loyal audience. Thankfully, there are ways to capitalize on your company’s preexisting talent in order to make the process easier.
1. Create How-To Articles
Odds are there are people who work for you that know things most people don’t. Whether you’re a construction contractor or a retirement planning firm, your employees should have some specialized knowledge that makes them an expert at something.
Take advantage of this insider knowledge. Encourage some of your employees to write about what they know. Have them offer advice to somebody who doesn’t know how to do what they do. How-to articles are immensely popular and one of the most common reasons people turn to the internet for information. Be sure to keep it simple and easy to understand so that you avoid preaching to the choir.
The ideal how-to article accomplishes a few things. It takes a little bit of time to let your audience know why they would want to know how to do this in the first place. It then breaks the process down into a series of easy to follow steps.
You may want to give your articles a “difficulty level” rating. This way you can write three how-to articles for the same subject, each targeted for a different skill level.
2. Build Insider Connections
Your company’s internal expertise allows you to develop relationships that most people can’t. Because your experts speak the same language as other influential people in your industry, it’s easier to reach out to these people and ask them for something.
Industry insider relationships are a key part of content generation. This is because these relationships will give you access to information that most people don’t have. And this brings us to our next point.
3. Offer Proprietary Information
This one can be a bit unnerving, especially in some industries, and there’s good reason for that. You don’t want to blow the lid off of a secret project or give away your competitive advantage. At the same time, the only reason people seek content online is because it’s something they don’t already know or haven’t already seen.
If you have access to information that isn’t publicly available, you may want to consider making it public. This is a powerful way to grab attention. You’ll need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this, of course.
Unfortunately, most businesses err on the side of keeping too much information to themselves. You build tremendous amounts of reputation and trust by offering information that wasn’t publicly available before. The most important part of the process is having some control over how the information is released so that your company receives the majority of the credit for the information.
4. Get Behind the Paywall
Simply by being subscribed to industry magazines and newsletters, you should already have access to information that most people don’t. You have already gotten past the paywall. Very few people are willing to pay to see information on the web.
Your expertise also allows you to sift through all of the industry information and present it in a way that is accessible to the public. If you start with data, rather than starting with an article or a post already in existence, you’ll be able to offer your audience something new. The ability of your experts to perform genuine, novel research is one of your greatest assets.
5. Give them a Reason to Listen
One of the greatest things that your company’s experts have to offer is the fact that they are experts. Almost anybody can set up a website and rant on the internet, and most people are already well aware of this fact. Just by taking the time to point out that your employees are experts, and why, gives you credibility that other online presences don’t have.
Make sure your audience understands who your author’s are, and why they are worth listening to. If you’ve hired talented people, you shouldn’t have any trouble pulling this off.
Tom Demers is an avid blogger and frequent contributor to a number of publications on topics ranging from general news and business information to digital photo printing.
