The phenomenal content in your head – and what to do with it

Great content comes in all kinds of forms. It can be written. It can be recorded. It can be live. Content is the thing that shows people that you know your stuff.

For most small business owners though, all that great information is locked up neatly in their heads.

Let’s imagine for a second that you decide to visit your favourite record store (for our younger readers, records are vinyl disks that store music). While you’re there you wax lyrically with the storeowner about the latest releases, she points out new records you might like based on your last visit and suggests a live gig you might like to check out. In short, she gives you the benefit of her expertise, experience and personality.

Content and Personality Matter

That’s exactly the kind of interaction that’s likely to get you to come back again and again. It’s also likely to prompt more purchases than if you were left to your own uneducated devices. Educated customers feel more confident in making buying decisions.

Now take the record store owner (and her head) out of the equation. What happens?

Without the benefit of the content in her head, an engaged, interested and educated buyer (i.e. you) becomes a disinterested browser – buying on price, brand recognition and existing likes and dislikes. You’ll probably spend less because you don’t know about the new releases. You’ll hesitate to check out new artists because you don’t know enough about them.

Unfortunately the storeowner can’t be there all day everyday – and she can’t go out and meet every prospective buyer in person. In short, she can’t get what’s upstairs out to everyone that needs to hear it.

So she turns to marketing.

Marketing is only ever a proxy for that personal interaction. Marketing is the thing you do when you can’t go out and meet everyone face-to-face. Unfortunately, when we go about creating marketing we tend to forget the things that make that personal interaction so unique and effective.

We leave out the content.

Nearly every business owner I speak to would feel confident in their chances of winning the business or getting the sale if they had the chance to really talk to customers one-on-one. This isn’t coming across in their marketing or their businesses.

So how do we put the content in our heads back into our businesses and our marketing?

1. Put content at the heart. First off we need to build our businesses around the concept of content. If we help customers solve their problems and make them smarter and more successful than they were before, then we’ll create long term, educated and enthusiastic customers. In practice, that means everything from staff training to your website has to be built around delivering useful, informative content.
   
   If our record store owner focuses on content then she’ll train staff to do what she does, she’ll encourage them to learn about music, to make recommendations and to be involved in the scene. In fact, she might decide to hire people based on their knowledge of local bands – not just their willingness to work on minimum wage.
2. Record the knowledge in your head. Secondly, we need to record the knowledge that’s in our collective heads. Recording content makes it easier to share and is not dependent on any one person – it becomes part of the business as a whole and therefore scalable and repeatable (unlike your brain).
   
   Imagine you quizzed every one of your staff on the most common questions they get asked by customers and prospective customers. What could you do with all that info? Better yet, what could your customers do with it?
3. Use it wisely. We also need to use that content intelligently. We need to find ways to deliver relevant and helpful content to prospective buyers at all stages of our sales process. We need to find ways to package that content so that prospective buyers request and seek it out. Informed customers feel more confident in their purchases. Amazon gets this. They use content to great advantage in placing customer reviews, photos and excerpts alongside listings.
4. Improve it – learn – repeat. Finally, we need to create content feedback so that the information gathered is constantly improved and built upon by experience – including the experience of our customers – and fed back into the business (and your head) where it can do the most good.
   
   Imagine one great big wiki that contains the collective knowledge, experience and expertise of your entire business (and customers) – wikis aren’t static, they grow, change and improve the more they are used.

Many small businesses struggle to grow for the simple reason that the expertise, passion and knowledge of the owner cannot be scaled up. Content, in this respect, is much more than marketing – it’s a fundamental growth strategy.

How do you use the content in your head?

Tagged as: content, Live Content, record, service, staff, training