One cold morning in early 2015, I found myself driving past our Nation’s Capitol in Washington, D.C., looking for a parking spot. I finally found one in an underground garage, deep beneath the headquarters of the National Mining Association (NMA).
Seems apropos, right? Why park on the street when you can go deep underground just like the miners do? This was my first meeting with the CORESafety Team at NMA, and it turned out to be a great one.
They were looking for help with creating original content for their members, and I was highly interested in the subject matter – safety and mining. We’ve been working together for more than a year now, and the content we’ve jointly created has turned out to be quite powerful.
TIP #1:
Try to find a content creator who’s already knowledgeable or at least interested in your association or business. You’ll discover that their overall energy level will be much higher and you’ll be much happier with their results. Of course, you may sometimes have to settle for someone who knows next to nothing about what you do, but if you can at least see a spark of interest in their eyes at the beginning, then you’ll have a much easier time working together. And your content will flow in ways you never imagined.
TIP #2:
Give your content creator as much help from Day One as possible. Allow them to ask as many questions as they like. Share your previous content with them – web copy, print articles, videos, interviews, infographics, etc. Whatever you’ve developed in the past. will help them get a better picture of where you’ve been, and may spark new ideas in them that you haven’t yet thought about. Also, offer to put them in touch with your subject matter experts (SME), so that they can begin talking to as many people as possible who work in your industry. All of this will lead to content that is richer and more relevant than you might have expected. The CORESafety Team has been great about providing us with earlier-developed content.
TIP #3:
Dig a little deeper. That’s what Smart Content Marketing is doing with the National Mining Association. It’s one thing to conduct a short interview with SMEs and to share a few salient comments via social media. But if you really want content that can be repurposed in as many ways as possible, encourage your content creator to do longer, deeper interviews. You don’t have to publish the entire interview if you choose not to, but at least have it available for your audience. We started out by asking 2 or 3 questions when interviewing some CEOS of mining companies, but soon realized there was more to learn. The interviews grew longer and we created a “Dig a Little Deeper” umbrella theme that we use when sharing an entire interview, usually in both print and audio. We still pull out a few quotes to include in the CORESafety E-Comms, which go out twice a month, but we include a link to the full interview as well.
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