You did it! You landed a new job as marketing manager at company XYZ! Now it’s time to get down to work and write some marketing materials for your new company, but you don’t know where to start. Although you know marketing, you don’t particularly know the ins and outs of your new company’s products and services. As a project manager for a marketing agency, we often take on new clients where we are initially unfamiliar with their products and services and need to on-board ourselves quickly. So how do we do it? Here’s some ideas and resources from our own experience that might help you in producing quality marketing and technical content for your company.
Plan for your Writing Content
First and foremost, you want to provide articles and web pages that people actually want to read, so it is key to write clear, understandable, and engaging information. Readability matters, so try to stay away from jargon and acronyms unless you are writing a product specification page where that information is crucial. Focus on the benefits provided to the customer or problems that can be resolved rather than arcane technical details of how the service or product works. If you are unfamiliar with the service or product, be sure to ask an expert, either within your own company, or elsewhere in the industry, to review your facts before you publish.
Planning your timeline for article and web page content is the next important step. Determine what kinds of information you need to prepare, such as landing pages, blog articles, e-books, emails, white papers, checklists, and so on. Then put the list onto a calendar so you can clearly see your goals, schedule, and deadlines. Identifying who has the expertise to write these content pieces is the next step. There are several sources of help — you and your marketing team’s experience, your other company employees, secondary research, and outside services. Using some combination of all of these can get you started quickly producing articles and pages that will speak to your audience. Let’s look at each of these:
1: Using Your Marketing Experience
You and your team have a lot of marketing expertise that you can put to good use for almost any industry without getting into technical details. With a little bit of research and conversation with your fellow employees, you should be able to pull together a few articles to get the content rolling. Some ideas to get you started might be:
- Focus on the company culture
- Identify the skills, experience or training of your company employees
- Highlight a customer testimonial or company review
- Rewrite an existing web page or article that could use a refresher
- “Tell the story” of how your brand or product helps change lives
2: Relying on Company Employees
Another key resource is your company employees. Everyone knows something about the company and its products and services that is worth sharing with your potential buyers. Usually it’s just a matter of getting company employees to commit their time to share their insights with you or better yet, write an article themselves to be used for marketing content. So talk to management to see if they are willing to support your efforts of assigning writing tasks to various departments on a rotating schedule, or offer financial incentives or office perks for people willing to contribute marketing content. You should be in partnership with your sales team, so ask them for their own insights on what their customers want to hear about, or common questions that arise during the sales process. Remember to be appreciative and supportive of anyone that offers their time and energy to write articles for you — being appreciated can be a great motivator for many people.
3: Secondary Research
Once you have a few general articles, as well as key information from your company’s employees ready in your arsenal, you can spend a little time doing research to learn more about your company’s specific products and services. A few places to check out include:
- Your company blog, web pages, and comments from social media posts (learn all you can)
- Your competitor’s blog, webpages and social media posts (but don’t plagiarize)
- Searching the internet for graphics and summary posts that give you the big picture about the industry
- Search google to find articles about your company, products, or services
- Read articles from industry magazines about industry-specific topics you need to understand
- Investigate discussion forums like Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange and others for industry topics
4: Hiring Outside Services
Another useful resource is outside writing and content services. There are many companies available, so be sure to do a little research before you experiment with a service. One of the many available writing services has published statistics and reviews of the top 10 content writing services but take it with a grain of salt since they wrote the article. Research the available services and look for the ability to filter writers by subject matter and check their rating. Then order a few small articles to test their expertise until you find a company and writer you like.
Another method for finding outside services is to ask your fellow marketing gurus or experienced copywriters you have used in the past if they have any recommendations for copywriters in your new industry area. Contact subject matter experts through industry organizations, trade magazines, and industry blogs to see if they might be willing to write website pages or blog content for your company for a fee. Or if hiring individual copywriters is taking up too much management and hand-holding time on your end, hiring an inbound marketing agency, with a team of project managers, strategists and designers in addition to copywriters, might be a better alternative.
Get Started Now
There is no time like the present to get started on your next piece of content. You’ll be amazed at how a little bit of research and conversation with fellow employees can jog your creativity for content ideas. No matter which source you use for your content — you and your team’s own experience, other company employees, secondary research, or outside services, it is important that you review and edit the work before publishing. Remember to spend time developing catchy titles, editing for spelling and grammar errors, reviewing it to remove irrelevant words and sentences, and finally sending it to a few people to review before the final draft is published. Have faith in your skills, do your research, and good luck marketing in your new industry!
