I like to give my clients a gift of unroasted coffee beans. You might think that green coffee is a strange gift. But I do it for two reasons.
- We can learn how to create great content by thinking about what it takes to make a cup of spectacular coffee.
- Roasting your own coffee is fun and tastes great if you know how to do it correctly! Content creation can also be fun if you know how to do it.
A great coffee starts long before your barista hands you a cup. It starts with the people closest to the raw material – the farmers.
If you take the farmer out of the equation, you end up with a mass produced commodity.
Mass produced coffee stimulates, but does it delight? It imparts nervous energy and a sense that something is happening, but no one falls in love with a common cup.
Similarly, great content about your products starts long before pen touches paper. It begins with the people closest to your science, technology and products — your team.
If you take your team out of the equation and outsource your content to an agency, you will see activity. Something will happen. Your content will be bland, lack soul, and miss the mark. You won’t love it and neither will anyone else.
This is why outsourcing your expert technical media to an agency often produces soulless content, that doesn’t excite you or stimulate your audience.
You say, “Write about what I love.” to someone who has never done what you love, and may not even know that it exists.
Of course, it is tempting to outsource content creation, especially when your team has limited skill or experience writing. Don’t forget though, your employees are smart and capable of learning new skills. You hired them because they proved they could learn and apply chemistry, physics, biology, calculus, big data, and a host of other technologies.
Your team can learn other technologies and skills – language, communication, psychology, etc.
Have you set the expectation that your team master these skills?
How can you empower them with the right learning experiences to meet your company’s content marketing objectives?
To find out, read our next article: The second element of great content – Coach your team.