Summary - Turn your business into a media network
To become your industry’s thought leader you need to create and distribute stories that interested consumers can learn from, follow, and emulate. Your job is to provide the information and voice that allows potential consumers to move to the next step in the decision making process.
Every organization has internal wisdom that is of great value to consumers looking to discover, decide to use, or enhance their existing use of a product or service. Don’t keep it bottled up within the four walls of your organization. Take the inward facing information and make it outward facing.
Custom editorial is the net that catches potential customers as they move through the sales cycle. Messaging alone cannot move people from discovery to purchase nor to additional purchase. There needs to be editorial content and discussion.
Marketing, branding, and public relations alert people to a product or a solution. These traditional message-based communications commonly don’t tell a complete story and thereby cause people to ask questions. Those questions are then answered or not answered by people (e.g. employees, customers, analysts) and content (e.g. articles, blog posts, discussion boards, podcasts, videos). The quality of that content, the quality of that conversation, and the quality of the people willing to participate in that conversation is what grows your reputation, your brand, and allows you to “be the voice” in your industry.
