Is Your Content as Smart as Your Company?
3 Steps for Harvesting and Showcasing In-House Expertise
How wide is the gap between the knowledge stored in your company experts’ heads and what’s on your website or app? Your team has valuable expertise, and your website and/or application should reflect that. Pretty obvious concept, right? But surprisingly few websites or applications practice it.
Now try to put yourself in the place of someone who might be interested in what your company or organization offers. Imagine that they stumbled across your website or app. Would they see the credible, focused information that only your team can provide? Or would they see content so bland that it could apply to dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies or organizations?
If you find that scenario disheartening, I’ve got good news coming: you can fill the void by looking inwards at your company. You probably take your internal expertise for granted. And you’re not alone. From experience, I know that many companies do.
It may require a shift in perspective to play reporter within your organization and think of marketing and content generation not as a question of inventing, but rather researching, listening, and harvesting. You’ll strike gold when you can answer this question: what stuff do we do and/or know that our potential clients would find helpful, interesting, or reassuring? Build a content strategy on the information you can gather within your organization, not what you think people want to hear.
Creating clear content that showcases your team’s in-house expertise is one of the most effective and honest ways to promote yourself. No spin, no platitudes, no trickery. It’s a matter of collecting information and putting it into a format that’s optimized for consumption.
This approach is essentially a business-y version of Austin Kleon’s “show your work” strategy for independent creatives. As Kleon writes, “the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them.” You need to give customers a window into what you do and how well you do it.
Let me tell you about one of my clients, a large travel company with a network of experienced travel agents.
When I started talking to the client’s travel agents, I was blown away by their encyclopedic knowledge of various vacation specialties. Disney experts could rattle off facts about theme park attractions, typical line wait times, different pass levels, and online registration schedules. Cruise advisors knew all the details about which cabins to book, how to get the best deals, what variables made one ship or cabin better than another, what children’s activities were available by age grouping, and much more.
But the travel company’s website showed comparatively little of those crucial perspectives outside of specific agent profiles. Much of the company’s content was either generic or copied from third-party partner vendor websites. People searching for, say, advice on the best months to book Disney vacations or comparisons between cruise lines would be unlikely to land on the client’s pages. The travel company’s website wasn’t showcasing their primary asset: the meticulous guidance from agents that travelers could count on.
So here are 3 steps to follow if you want to showcase your company or organization’s internal expertise.
1. Identify (and don’t underestimate) your in-house experts.
Your organization’s knowledge base can take many forms. If you’re promoting the services of doctors, lawyers, or financial advisors, you probably already think of them as experts.
But what if you think, “we don’t have experts like that”? There are other kinds of authorities whose contributions and input are often ignored or undervalued.
Here are a few experts who might not immediately come to mind:
- Customer service agents and help desk workers who answer customer questions and resolve tricky issues. Their input is vital to developing strong self-service resources for customers.
- Sales representatives who can tell you which benefits and features mean the most to customers and what motivations they have to tap into in order to sell.
- Developers, UX researchers, and designers who can explain precisely what makes your product or service different from others and highlight features and benefits that users might overlook.
2. Use lightweight methods to gather information from your experts.
Just because someone is an expert doesn’t mean they feel comfortable writing about what they know. I work with a company of brilliant metalworkers and woodworkers, but their job is mostly hands-on or verbal. They’re either building amazing things or telling others how to do so. But they’re usually not putting it into writing.
One of the main ways I provide value to that client consists of simply listening to them explain concepts, writing up what they say, and “translating” any technical terms. It may not sound like much, but shouldering the boring, patient work of capturing and documenting others’ knowledge can yield terrific results. One article I wrote after a conversation with the metalworking sales reps is now ranking in the first page of Google search results for a few keywords that are highly relevant to that company.
How can you gather information without burdening your experts?
- Conduct quick interviews. If you prepare questions, you can gather enough information for a whole article in 15 to 20 minutes, maybe even as little as 5 minutes, depending on the topic. See if your company’s experts can spare a quarter of an hour to give you a “download” on a topic that you want to showcase.
- Collect information in a short survey form. Create a quick survey with a few questions. Make it clear that you don’t even need complete sentences if you’re on a simple fact-finding mission. If you are consulting a fairly large pool of experts, you might be able do some fun quantitative analysis, especially if the results are surprising. “By the numbers” posts are often popular content.
- Sit in on meetings and calls, if possible. Be a fly on the wall. Take notes. Write up content based on what you hear. (With permission, of course. Don’t publish any classified intel.)
- Create some kind of idea bank where people can drop thoughts when an idea occurs to them.
3. Write up and organize that information in a format that would be most useful to its intended audience.
Once you’ve gathered information, it’s time to present it in a way that will help ensure that it gets found and used by your target consumers. Depending on the context, appropriate formats might include:
- Homepage and evergreen core page content that introduces your business to customers
- Product or service descriptions
- Case studies
- Whitepapers and reports
- Blog posts and articles
- FAQs
- Entries in an intranet-style guide
- Staff bios/profiles (I have yet to meet anybody who likes writing their own website bio. Why not write up bios for others and take something of their plates?)
Taking the time to connect with experts in your business may seem intimidating, but it makes writing good content far less daunting. You have plenty of material instead of pulling it from thin air. It only takes curiosity and cooperation to obtain the information you need to create content that will showcase your organization’s strengths.
