How does my business start creating good content

Grant Leboff: Businesses sitting out there now, listening to this and saying, okay, we need to up our game on content, produce better content.. and I think you made an excellent point that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a business to consumer, business to business, really it doesn’t matter – either way you need good content. How does a business even go about that? They’re sitting there and thinking, well, okay, we need some good content, but I’m great at ball bearings. I’m not a creative. I’m not a writer. So where would you suggest a business even starts?

David Taylor: Very good question. In fact, this is a bit of an issue for businesses now, this a bit of a hot topic, because it’s going to be something they’re going to have to pay to do in many cases, and if you’re a ball bearing manufacturer and you want to be coming up with great content, maybe the odd video coming up with some blogs, some posts to go onto Google plus or LinkedIn company profile, etc., they’ve got no in house capability. There are certain ways of doing it. Many will have a PR agency and the good PR agencies are very clever and realising that they’re not just PR agencies, they’re content creation agencies. So if that ball bearing manufacturer… In fact I worked with a fastening company, I did some social media training with them and they had had a PR agency and I said, well you could use that PR agency, just change what they do for you rather than writing press releases and securing coverage in the trade press, which incidentally I still think is important, especially as most of the trade press is on social as well, but also, it’s important that they can actually adapt those skills and actually start writing for the web and start coming up with content. They’re still having to come up with stories. They’re still having to dig around, come up with case studies, come up testimonials, still be able to write wells, dill, understand keywords. So all of those are still very, very important. So one aspect is you could, yes, you could use an existing PR agency. and I think for many companies that is an excellent way forward. You could decide that you’re going to employ a ‘community manager’. And community manager I think is probably going to be the fastest growing segment of the media, because there’ll be so many companies who need these community managers and their job is simply to manage social. That’s all they do. Listen, analyze, come up with content, do it all. So depending on the budget and depending on what the ROI and the objectives of that company, it may well be the only way we can come up with this content is having someone sitting inside, every day, coming up with it for us. What is probably not a good idea, which unfortunately a lot of companies do, is ‘I get that work experience’. They’re on Facebook. They can, they could manage the social, come up with a content. Now, whilst that age group might be very, very conversant with social and very conversant online, they know nothing about marketing. They know nothing about communications and they know nothing about writing. So why would you do that? It’s about… this content pipeline is a very, very important thing because some people just… They love to do social, they want to do it and think, well I don’t know how to do it. What that means is actually they’re not ready or it goes a bit deeper than that. They start looking at their marketing and they start looking at their business. Where are we spending our money, what ROI are we getting from each of the marketing? So it may well be; Oh, well we’re doing a lot of advertising. Okay, monitor; how’s that advertising do? It may well be that advertising is doing nothing for you at all. Well stop it, divert the money and go in…. And so it’s about using your marketing budget and let’s face it, a lot of businesses have very tight marketing budgets at the moment. It’s about channeling the resources into places where it’s going to be most effective. And it may will be a community manager or hiring a PR agency or even, there are some community management agencies now who could actually do it. But an important thing here, it’s not like PR. It’s much more personal and, therefore, the onus is on you as the brand, as the organisation to be giving raw materials to whomever is going to manage your social and you come up with your content. If you shrug your shoulders and say, ‘It’s your job, I’m not coming up with anything’, you’re not being social. It just comes back to my earlier point. If you’re not social, you’re less likely to want to provide content and, therefore, it’s important you are social and, therefore, it might be much more easy to to get that content out there.