Your product marketing, engineering, and every other department in your company includes at least one expert on an industry matter who can speak to your audience and offer information acquired from years of experience. This collective knowledge is what sets your particular company apart. If you can capture some of this intelligence from your rock stars — the people in the trenches driving your business forward — and share it with others in your industry, you can showcase your market leadership in a helpful way.
Just ask
Your internal experts know what information is relevant to your clients. Not long ago, with a previous company, I was managing a team of digital marketers as well as facing several upgrades and changes in the department all at once, including our billing system, web platform, and new email and marketing automation system. Our business was growing by 30% each quarter. The digital marketing division was doing well, but the company was not, so we were short on resources. Somehow, we successfully got through the pains of change and growth with our lack of resources and had relatively few scars to show.
I would give anything now to have captured what we learned along the way so we could’ve shared it with our clients. Our lead automation software marketer could’ve shared “The Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Implementing a Marketing Automation Platform,” the lead digital content marketer could’ve shared “Things to Watch Out for When Moving Your Content to a New Web Platform,” and our client services lead could’ve shared “5 Questions You Need to Ask Before Integrating a CRM with Your Invoicing System.” If only I could’ve captured that information at the time and put it in a blog …
Opinions matter
Your internal resources can offer informed opinions on what they think would help sell more products. It might be a specific product addition, tweaks in services, or a new technology tool. The point is that these opinions are not only valuable to you in terms of understanding your business challenges and opportunities from within the trenches but they are also great resources for content.
Let’s say your marketing coordinator noticed in her reporting that your sales team is getting a ton of leads from certain types of clients. Her insight could mean a particular market is hot, a marketing campaign is performing well, or a salesperson is successfully cold calling because of a unique approach to narrowing down the prospect list. All of those things, if true, could not only help your business because you could take that information and use it to expand success in other areas but it could also be great market information to share with your customers.
It’s easy to get started
- Host a peer group or steering committee to brainstorm content ideas,
- identify your experts for each topic,
- interview them,
- write the content, and
- post and promote it.
Don’t forget that you need someone with writing skills to author the content. It’s pointless to gather content if the end product isn’t professional and well-done. You should also have a separate person in the queue to edit the content and minimize mistakes.
If you aren’t taking these steps, you’re missing a huge opportunity to elevate your company brand and customer loyalty just by producing helpful content from your internal experts.
You don’t have to miss out
If you like the idea but don’t have the internal resources or bandwidth, consider hiring us! You might be surprised at how cost-effective it is to have the Active Blogs team produce this content for you and set up a simple system to track leads and return on investment.
