How to mine for content in an existing business
Recently I have been working with a manufacture that has decided to establish a blog environment.
After several months of discussion as to how the site would function and what the target audience would be, effort was spent in the premises to create new content or re-purpose already existing content.
This program was used for a technical products company. How you would approach a more emotional type product like perfume is up for discussion.
It was decided to repurpose existing content and here is why:
• The business has been active for nearly 30 years. Long before the internet become the go to method of selling its products.
• The customer base for the products is educated engineers
• Education of the customer is very important and closing the deal via phone is still important.
With three decades of already existing content spread out across the facility, it became known that they could feed their blog for over a year with already created content. This content had never been online and was still as fresh and pertinent today as when it was originally created.
The search for content began in the most humble of methods.
First, all the bookshelves in the building were searched. This allowed the team to identify what each employee considered important to the function of their duties and create a master list of content ideas. In this search, old print magazines were also identified and logged.
Next the search went to the file cabinets. The identification of content in this section posed as many questions as it did answers. While lots of great information was found, when the sales order files were search this lead to the discussion of how to incorporate each sales staffs call notebooks into the content creation project. It was decided that while the notebooks might contain great information, the shorthand methods used to track customer calls was not up to spec when it came to identifying already nearly complete content. However, the weekly summary reports that each sales staff had to submit did prove to be better suited to blog content and a program is in the works to train sales staff to submit their weekly reports in a manner that will allow parts of the report to be directly usable as content.
Secondly, the search went to the media and graphic department. The obvious question is why did the search not start in media and graphics? Because most of the files are digital and while master paper copies did exist they were all filed as how media would consider important. In learning this, the team is also working on address the filing methods of media and how it needs to piggyback with the webmaster and digital media group.
What content was found?
Old adverting files – These files both paper and digital are a wealth of content. While they may be a bit short on key words and lots of text, they lay the foundation of how the blog must present information. It is important to note that the ads may not be used as originally printed; but they do act as the foundation for product ads that can be posted as blog content. They also act as ad-spots within the blog navigation section and will save countless hours of design work.
Application notes
Being the company in question sells technical products the necessity to publish application notes and white papers is very important. The website has historically hosted numerous app notes but over time the older paper versions were forgotten about. In re-identifying these old notes and papers it was found that just by doing light edits to bring the content up to date, the blog could be feed with one app note per week for over a year.
Magazine articles
Over the years the company has had numerous technical articles and interviews published in trade journals. Around the year 2000 when so many magazines made the move to a digital platform most all the older articles were not moved to the digital format. This has proved to a gold mine in content. The magazines that have been contacted are glad to allow their old content to be re-introduced to the web as long as certain conditions are met. How this is handled is that the company gets to place the article online first and get it indexed and then the old magazine company uploads it to their site. This gives the company first index position and they provide a tagline backlink back to the magazine. Everybody wins.
Company newsletters
As with most companies, newsletters come and go. But in looking at the many years of newsletters was very surprising. Most all contained a short article about one of the technical products written for a less engineer educated person. This proved to be very valuable in that while the article still had good key words that were industry specific, they also contained key words that purchasing agents and non technical people would use to search for technical products. This discovery helped bridge the gap between an engineer specifying product and having their support staff do product searches.
Sales Training Books
The education of the sales staff is very important and over the years several outstanding versions of the training manual were produced. Each book has allowed direct content to be lifted and repurposed as well as act as a roadmap for developing video and slideshows.
The real difficulty has been the buy-in from all staff members. It can be very disruptive to have people digging through what they consider to be their files. One method to deal with this is to have small contest to see who can remember and identify some hidden stash of content. Prizes can be small; it is the bragging rights that are the real prize.
More ideas of where to look for content from an earlier post
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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson
863-398-2199 JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com
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Phone 863-398-2199