Owning Your Story

While there is, and likely will always be, a place for media relations and traditional news delivery, the audience for this type of information is shrinking.  According to Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media Report, 2015 circulation numbers in the newspaper industry alone were down 7 percent from the prior year.  Compounding that, advertising – in both print and digital – was down 8 percent.

The implications for individual publications is staggering with staff being slashed, the elimination of entire sections, and in dire cases, the long tradition of print is being replaced by digital-only dailies.  It’s an uphill battle for media relations practitioners, who in 2013 outnumbered reporters 5:1.

But in our digital world, where everyone is a publisher, there are tactics to supplement media relations valleys.  Organizations can continue their cadence of storytelling on the platforms they own, and in doing so, build their perceived expertise and make their organization easier to find through search.  But how do you know what story to tell?  And where?  In this post, we’ll explore the process for building your content machine.

Understanding your goal

Building the machine starts with understanding your goals, both as an organization, within your marketing department and with key stakeholders.  What do you want your website to do for your business?  Is it there primarily for awareness?  Is it there as a vehicle to meaningfully engage with and build community among prospects and customers? Is it a lead generation tool?  Is it a mix of these?  Once you answer that question and understand how the various stakeholders view the role of your digital presence, then you’ll begin to have a roadmap for what success could look like.

What to say

This is where many organizations miss the mark, and instead of speaking to their audiences’ needs, they’d rather talk about how great they are. Your message should be at the intersection of where your expertise meets the needs of your audience. And without understanding the needs of your audience, it’s nearly impossible to create ongoing, relevant content.

Finding this sweet spot is not an elusive task, but it does take some quality time with both your internal stakeholders who interact with your clients and then the clients themselves. Start with your internal team – the account managers who interact with them on a daily basis, the product managers creating solutions to their problems and the sales people courting their attention. These internal conversations will help bring your customers’ needs and interests into focus, which is the basis to your content strategy.

Do not stop there, though. You have to talk to a sample of your target audience as well. It’s tempting to skip over this for time’s sake, but this extra step frequently highlights minor – and sometimes major – inconsistencies between how your organization perceives your customers and how they perceive themselves. This extra step is critical in making sure your customers feel like you are there to help them and not sell to them.

Where to say it

So you know what to say, now you need to know where to say it. While your website should be the place where your content resides, your audience won’t just show up – you’ve gotta drive them there, which means you have to know where to find them.  And in today’s digital environment, most everyone is using search, on social or both.

Look at the media consumption behaviors from your audience – the publications they like to read, the sites they visit to solve their problems, the social platforms they belong to for personal and professional purposes – to determine where your organization should be sharing its content.

As you determine where to share content – your platform mix – internal resources and team bandwidth will be a major factor. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.  If your audience is in four places but you only have the staff and budget to be in two places, then manage two profiles well and build a case for greater investment to expand your presence and reach additional audiences.

Keeping the train going

Keeping a content strategy going involves a sort of ping-pong between the audience and the organization. We ask ourselves, what does the audience need, how do they behave, and then we go back to the organization and ask ourselves, how we can address those tendencies?  Who are the internal subject-matter experts (SMEs) that understand our business and industry?  Who are the people within our organization who have an existing voice (or audience)? Which internal thought leaders would we like to have a louder voice?  Looking internally and asking those questions will help you better understand the pillars of your content strategy – the topic categories that you can come back to time and time again that will help your audience solve its problems while serving the needs of your organization.

To avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of your company’s expertise and messaging, start with a 30,000-ft. view of the types of content your audience cares about – industry trends, company news, tips, product updates and applications, even curated news from other sources. Trust us, identifying a month’s worth of content for an organization’s social media platforms and its website can be overwhelming. Segmenting the content in these areas helps make that process much more manageable.

Tapping into your organization’s experts

The best content is insightful, authentic and relevant. While you may be best equipped to wordsmith a piece, your SMEs are the ones who should be providing the meat of your content. Not to say they have to write it, but tapping into these people on an ongoing basis to understand what other people are talking about will help your organization be a relevant contributor to the conversation. Ultimately, humans relate to other humans, so personalizing your story and putting faces to the facts and information will make your content more interesting and ultimately more relevant.

You may be thinking, “Great, but how do I take this from 30,000-ft. to ground level?” Rest assured, we have a follow-up post coming next next week that addresses some of the specifics like how often to talk to SMEs, determining the best format for your content and how to make your content plan come to life.