It may sound simpler to hand off your whole marketing plan to a third-party service or to your marketing department, but will it work?
With the internet being hyper-saturated with generic content, only cursory summaries of Google SERP results, where do we draw the line of how little your team should be involved?
Today, I’m speaking to Joe Sullivan, founder of Gorilla 76, an Industrial Marketing Agency, about how and why to involve your C-levles and subject matter experts in your marketing strategy.
This is especially important when you have a technical product. A generic marketer, no matter how good they are at marketing, just can’t create content that resonates with a technical audience.
Well, they can…but they need help.
We talk about:
Why content done by marketers alone won’t cut it
How to plan a content strategy that works for your customers
How and why to extract knowledge from your technical subject-matter experts
Internal and 3rd-party processes for most effectively creating technical and effective content
What content marketing is really about
People have funny ideas about marketing.
Especially in Joe’s space (manufacturing), where he works with second- or third-generation family-owned businesses that are focused only on sales.
They haven’t talked to their customers.
To them, marketing means trade shows. Print ads. Blasting megaphones in your prospects ears about how great you are and all the things they should buy from you.
According to Joe (and me!), companies need to start making this shift from talking about themselves to talking about their customers’ pain points.
They need to focusin on the things that your buyer actually cares about because nobody wants nobody cares who you are, what you do.
They care about what they need to accomplish in their jobs.
And then maybe they’ll listen to who you are and what you do if they believe that you understand their situation. If they believe you’ve solved those types of problems before.
That’s what content marketing is about.
It’s trying to solve problems – to be a resource service to guide in the buying process of your potential customer.
In that vein, everything G76 writes about is how midsized manufacturing businesses can grow through marketing and sales. But in turn, we help our clients do the same.
Who is their audience?
What do those people care about?
And how do we take what’s in their brains to create content?
“They’re the experts. Not us. Nobody else knows what they do. We need to sort of extrapolate in their brains and translate it into content that will resonate with their audience, help them get discovered by those people, help earn trust and attention” Joe continued.
We wrote a guide for how to interview your customers to create content that actually helps them
Your subject matter experts will always be the experts
It’s hard to do marketing without high level buy-in at the company.
You need to get the CEO on board with this idea that some of their team’s time has got to be spent.
Marketing needs your experts’ brains to get in front of the right people and deliver that message.
It’s as simple as that.
Your engineers, your salespeople, your account managers, the people who know your customers best need to be involved.
Their knowledge is critical to marketing. You can have the best writers and marketers in the world. But they can’t do that on their own.
“They can’t just say, okay, we’re working for this mid-sized manufacturer who makes this complex part. We’re going to write a bunch of stuff about that complex part. It’s never gonna happen. It would be garbage content,” they just don’t have the complex knowledge.
It’s all the years of experience, the collective expertise your subject matter experts that is going to be valuable to their audience.
Marketers should act as the facilitators of this knowledge extraction process, as they call it at Gorilla 76, taking what’s in their brains and translating it into content.
Marketers are knowledge extraction facilitators
So what does it look like for marketers to extract brain stuff into content?
You need to get the right person in a room, who’s done their due diligence.
You’ve done your homework on the subject. You’re not coming in blind and asking questions about something you know nothing about.
You’ve done some research to set up a really productive interview and you start pulling real insights out of that.
A thirty or forty-minute interview can produce a handful of articles.
You can get a piece of video content that could then be chopped up into small video clips that could be transcribed.
You can publish bits and pieces of that interview.
You can use audio clips and use them on LinkedIn or in sales prospecting emails.
There’s so much power in getting in the room with the expert and putting a camera on them.
All of a sudden you have audio and everything you need to write content.
What the knowledge extraction process looks like
If we’ve convinced you of the value of using subject-matter experts for expert content creation, you might now be wondering how to actually do it.
Here’s the process Joe uses.
Content strategy intensive
At Gorilla 76, they call it a positioning and content strategy workshop.
Theydo it over the course of eight hours with a lunch break. And it’s intense.
They plan ahead of time to get all the right people in one room (or a Zoom meeting).
They go into the meeting already having agreed which audience they’ll be pursuing from a marketing sales standpoint over a given time period (let’s say 6 months).
They do a deep dive on these two different audiences to paint out the customer avatar.
The goal of this is to understand who is going to be involved or who influencers in the buying process. For Joe’s clients, this tends to be a combination of engineers, plant managers, procurement folks, and the C-Suite.
They start the meeting by asking vital questions:
What are all the things that these most important personas care about?
What are the triggers that lead them into the buying process?
What issues are these people experiencing in their jobs?
What are the challenges they’re facing and the things they’re trying to achieve?
What are the questions they ask about all this stuff?
And that becomes the foundation of a content strategy. That’s where your content comes from. You can understand what the individual buying process influencers care about. The content strategy becomes really easy.
The next step is to figure out what content you can create using our expertise that match up with all those things the customer cares about.
Then you pick topics.
“You know, we probably generated 50 ideas during that eight-hour meeting last week. Now we prioritize. And what are the going to be the most effective ones that we can use? And what medium do we want to use to produce some video, audio, written content, white papers, guest articles on third party sources? And who are the subject matter experts inside your company whose expertise we need to sort of tap into to make those?” Joe went on.
Key stakeholders – who needs to be involved?
Who do you need to be a part of this meeting?
Not everyone in your company. But there are some key stakeholders that will have important insights.
The people who always need to be involved are:
- The CEO or president,
- V.P. of sales
- Head of marketing, whoever that person is, marketing director or CMO.
- Key sales people or account managers.
- The people who interface with the customer directly: customer success or customer service
- Then maybe a few key technical professionals like engineers, the people who on the floor and understand the technical things that the customer cares about.
Give them a briefing heading into the session so they understand what exactly you’ll be doing.
Knowledge extraction day
After the strategy day, you should have a list of topics to create content about. Content that the end customer will actually care about. The next step is to extract knowledge from your subject-matter experts.
So you choose a handful of topics and then ask: who are your subject matter experts on this topic?
Then you schedule a knowledge extraction day.
You book out the entire day and schedule the experts for 30 minutes, one after the other. You record the interview.
“We’ve talked to them ahead of time. We know exactly what we’re going to be interviewing them about. They’ve seen the questions ahead of time. So they’ve sort of been able to think through it a little bit. And we’ll probably conduct 10 interviews in that day and have eight hours worth of video footage that we can then use for all these different purposes” Joe went on explaining the process.
Done-For-You marketing isn’t the way to build a brand
Done-for-you, set-and-forget marketing is good for brands that just want to get content out. At Flying Cat Marketing, we call it content for content’s sake, and we don’t think it produces the results that great, on-brand, expert content can offer other brands.
Content should involve everyone – C-levels, subject matter experts, and the end clients themselves.
We wrote a guide for how to interview your customers to create content that actually helps them