Manufacturers: How to Leverage Employee Experts for Quality Content
If you’re in a manufacturing enterprise that’s particularly technical in terms of the product or service offerings, you’ll need to get some of your information for content from subject matter experts within your organization. Your company probably has a lot of engineers who are experts at what they do and your company does, and some of their ideas could make for informative manufacturing content that your potential clients will love. But engineers aren't writers and they have other stuff to do. So here's how to get that content from them:
Enlist a Technical Writer
Technical writers, the people who write procedures, work instructions, and manuals, have experience both with writing and with technical terminology; it’s part of their skill set to translate technical jargon into words that lay people can understand. Also, they have a lot of experience working with engineers, so they can be helpful in gleaning content from them.
Conduct Interviews
Rather than asking your subject matter expert to write a blog post or white paper or page content for your website, instead, sit down and have a conversation with the expert in question. Ask them for the information you need rather than having them provide you with what they think you need. You might come up with even more questions through the interview process that will be questions that your ideal buyers have, so that you can tailor your content to tell your potential customers what they need and want to know.
Get Source Recommendations
If you don’t understand a particular process or product that your content strategy needs to address, get the experts in your company to tell you where to get the information you need. When they’re in full crisis mode on the plant floor or swamped dealing with a rush order, the people you need info from might not have time to talk to you. But they can point you in the direction of the information you need, saving them time but ensuring you aren’t stalled either.
Use a Review Panel
When you’ve written something without the prior input of a subject matter expert, to glean more information and fill in the gaps in your knowledge and understanding on the subject, get your engineering team or the experts on the topic to look over what you’ve written. They’ll tell you if you got anything wrong and help you add anything you might have missed.
Developing a content strategy for a B2B or industrial business can be a challenge, but it’s one that’s so important to staying on the bleeding edge and remaining competitive in your industry in the digital space. If you’re ready to amp up your content strategy and boost the ROI of your marketing efforts, it’s time that you get in touch with Evenbound.
