Creating Content: 5 areas of your business to mine content

In my previous post I outlined the marketing strategy that has proven to be the most successful for capturing your customer’s attention. The main point of this strategy is to create content, consistently. “Creating” something can seem daunting or like it requires a tremendous amount of effort. I picture an artist alone in a villa working tirelessly on a piece of art. Not really a business leader “creating” between collection calls and forecasting reports.

El Artista, Oscar Hevia

The truth is that we are creating content all the time. It is just a matter of recognizing it and mining it to be presented to your customers. I have been thinking about what parts of the business would be easiest to mine content from and wanted to share the first 5 that I came up with.

Training

When I worked at Baker Oil Tools (now Baker Hughes) they had a whole location, complete with a rig and fully staffed cafeteria, for training their employees. Since then, they have built an even bigger training center. There are hundreds of classes worth of curriculum from leadership to sand control screens. Each of these classes has at least 100 slides worth of information, along with quizzes and other worksheets. This is a huge bank of content. And, since the easiest way to bring value to your customers is to educate them, the content is already designed to provide the right value.

Most people do not have this amount of training material at their disposal. Baker Hughes created this over decades. I do know that all companies will have some training materials, no matter how elementary, to update internal employees on products, applications, and services. All this educational material should be used to generate external facing content.

Remember that the intent of this content is to bring value to your customers. Just training them on your awesome product brings you value and not them. But if you use the overall nature of the material to educate them on an application in their field it becomes valuable to them.

Manufacturing/Production

How Its Made has 416 episodes that have been produced over 32 seasons. This video has over 1 million views on YouTube. From skateboard wheels to berry baskets you can watch a video on, wait for it, how it is made. Clearly people enjoy watching how things are made from an educational standpoint, but it is also entertaining. If your business manufactures or produces a product, sharing how this product is made is an easy way to create content. Video would be great, but if you do not have the resources a short write up with pictures would be just as effective.

My experience with oilfield services and most recently Composite Frac Plugs, a lot of customers did not really know how the plugs were made or even how they operated. Sharing this information helped them to understand what was going into their well and what to look out for when selecting a frac plug.

The biggest excuse I hear for this type of content is that companies do not want to share their “secret sauce” during production. If this is the case, avoid those parts. You could even blur out this area in the video or article to create some mystery.

Customer Meetings/CRM Tools

Customer meetings and meeting reports recorded in CRM tools are a huge source of educational content. Every customer meeting I have been in; they have had questions about something or have shared something that has benefited them in the past.  Without breaking confidence or sharing proprietary information, other customers could learn from the discussion.

Mining these questions or discussions from your CRM tool to put together a “8 Questions every SaaS Software Salesmen gets” post or “An Interesting Approach to Across Time Zone Communication” post would be valuable to your customers and easy to put together.  Especially if all the details have already been typed into your CRM.

Operational Best Practices

Whether your company installs oil tools, software, or provides a service there are always new things that we learn during the day to day operations. This would include short cuts, efficiency gains, or anything that has made your work more productive or efficient. If it has benefited you it most definitely benefit your customers.  Recognizing when you learn something or when you realize that you have developed a new method that makes your work easier, and then documenting it provides another source of educational content.

Internal Updates

As a product manager, a lot of what I create are internal updates to the company. This includes sales updates, run histories, market changes, lessons learned, and changes in strategy. Many of the items discussed above would show up in an internal update as well. Most of these updates come in the form of an email and therefore are already documented and easy to pull from.

With the current state of business, done over Zoom calls, there is also an opportunity to record video of one of these updates for sharing. This would take a little more skill than just cut/paste from an email, but the video would garner more attention from your customer. Again, you would not want to publicly share proprietary information, but these updates are another area where you can look for content to share with your customers.

Whether taken from these areas or from others, keeping an open mind and recognizing that valuable information your customers could use in their job can come from anywhere will increase the amount of content you can deliver. The goal with marketing is to be consistently delivering value and if you can find more places to mine content, it will make it easier for your to achieve your goal. If you need help with content strategy, creation, or marketing in general I can help.