How Do We Create Compelling Content?

Compelling content is useful to the web visitor. They have come to your site with implicit intent and either you have served up something useful, or they are gone to find the answer somewhere else.

Compelling content that works for you serves your strategic purposes. Make sure you have a well thought out strategic purpose to your content before you do much content creation. LINK

So much good content can and should be created from the experiences in the field and on the phone. There is tremendous opportunity to be useful to your online community by sharing the ways you have served your prospects and customers.

Everyday technicians go out and solve issues with heating and air condition systems- for a specific example. Here is just one made up idea for a story. Imagine this experience told in 1st person perspective built from an actual experience from a technician in the field.

Cleaning out the air conditioner whose air intakes have been seriously clogged up with organic seed pods. The compressor was being strained by excessive heat build up, but the problem has been found and cleaned. There are any number of posts- specific in nature that can build on this experience and actually be useful to people ready to learn from other people's experiences and be proactive. This kind of content attracts the thinking customer who is looking for professionalism and quality and value vs. price. This is the client that forward thinking companies want.

Now this content requires input from the technician. This compelling story is more than a drab rendition of the importance to keeping equipment clean for maximum life of the unit. We can move from vacuous prose here to a story, an actual adventure of discovery and solution; illustrated with images or maybe even a video. The staid prose are boring. The actual play by play is compelling.

Now the technician is likely not the person to write the story, but a well-tuned publishing process allows the technician to relay his experiences and encourages him or her to take images and/or video and outlines a series of questions to help build the the story effectively. This process can be iterated with a variety of technology to help share the content and manage the pictures with the story. Whatever is needed can be applied; whatever technology best matches the proclivities of the key players.

Now this process can be repeated on a regular basis around the myriad of solutions that your experts offer.  With this effort, you are creating a broad bandwidth of content that creates vastly superior search engine optimization for the content. LINK Compelling content also provides the perfectl hooks to get attention when shared in social media.

Useful content captures attention. Useful content earns you trust.  People who trust you ask for help and hire you. Useful content gets shared by people because it is seen as possibly helpful to their friends. Useful content earns you trust from people who will refer you as a solution. Blah, blah, blah; we address the high value of great content here. LINK

Every team member can be involved in creating content. People enjoy being helpful to customers and many will enjoy telling stories. There will be those out front and others that follow along behind the early leaders. It always is smart for leadership to share a common vision of every member of the team being an integral part of the business success and make sure people have opportunities to grow and particulate and contribute.

This is a leadership issue, and leaders must understand and nurture their team members intrinsic wishes to be a key contributing member of the group; of being a trusted and important member of the team. Make sure you understand what actually motivates and inspires your key people. We go into detail here. LINK

Useful content revolves around the activities of any team member, we just need to be aware of the possibilities and make sure people understand we appreciate their efforts to help capture intelligence and publish useful information. This is an essential role for leadership.

Anybody who answers the phone, and talks to prospects and customers; hears critical information. What was being asked? What was of chief concern? Are their repeated requests for information that we need to address in content creation. Was a team member complimented? Are we hearing any objections or unrealistic expectations?

The subject of dealing with objections segues right into a conversation about supporting the sales process and sales managers. Content creation can deal with any number of objections with input directly from sales people and the sales manager. What better way to create useful content that help web visitors find perspective and answers and better understand how the work process from estimate to completed project works?

With the right processes  in place and with the vision of leadership compelling content can be created that touches directly on the strategic issues faced by your issues.

We go into great detail about the types of strategic issues which can be dealt with by content creation here. LINK

We talk about how important and valuable content is to profitability and productivity here. LINK

Who has a thought or an objection or a question here.
What has been left out? What issue has not been addressed?
What kinds of experiences have you had relating to creating content?

Would you like to have a conversation about creating content more effectively in your business? Feel free to reach out for a conversation.