Want Strong, Original Content? Interview Your People.

We’ve all seen it. You search for information on, a topic — say, sales enablement — and Google turns up several pieces of content from the blogs of competing B2B companies, all of which cite the same sources, and say the exact same thing.

Even worse? One or two of those posts cite each other.

Repetitive content is a cringeworthy problem, but it is an understandable one: research is  time-consuming, and overworked creators need to get content out quickly. They search the Internet for information about an assigned topic or keyword, often quoting the first article they see in their search results. (And who can blame them? A lot of those creators are also underpaid.)

It might be understandable, but it’s not okay. Shoddy research can spread misinformation, and that can damage a company’s credibility.

Luckily, your business has access to the strongest, most unique-to-you primary sources of information available: your own people.

Put your employees (and clients) in the spotlight

First-person interviews with you, your team and your happy clients are the best way to showcase the strengths of your company and your product.

What better way to talk about the strength of your product than by interviewing someone who’s used it and loved it? What better way to explain your tech then to have one of your engineers interviewed?

I started my career as a print journalist. Interviews have always been my favorite part of the job. I love talking to people and finding out why they do the things they do. Here’s one thing I’ve learned from 17 years of that work: you can tell the story of any organization, initiative, policy, or product if you tell the story of the people behind it.

Think about it: everyone associated with a business tells part of its story:

• Developers tell the story of your tech; how it was built, and how it works
• Your team members tell the story of the day-to-day operations of your business (you might not think that’s interesting, but prospects who want to buy from a company that shares their values will)
• Happy clients tell a story about your product and your customer service
• And of course, as the business owner, your story is your business’s story

All of these people have first-hand experience with your company and product, so put them in your content. Blog posts, web copy, case studies, white papers, ebooks all can be improved by interviews with your people.

From transcript to content

Interviews might seem like they’d write themselves, but sadly they don’t. Someone has to write good questions, conduct the interview, then take that interview and integrate it into your existing content strategy.  (Former reporters — and there are a lot of us in content now — are pros at this.)

Your people are a goldmine; you just need to know how to extract the wealth of their expertise, and refine it.

Want to learn more about strong interviews? I’ll be writing more about how to prep and put together a simple interview in an upcoming post.

Want strong and original content for your own business?
Contact me and get interviewed today!