Research – Your Key to Leveraging SMEs to Create More Content

After you’ve completed a project plan that details the audience for your content, the messages you want to deliver, and the action you want readers to take, you’re ready to start creating your content.

You’ll want to take advantage of the expertise from your subject matter experts to learn more about your target audience and their challenges that your solution addresses. But SMEs are notorious for being crazy busy.

Research helps you make the most of your time with SMEs. Research gives you background on the topic so you can ask better questions up front. After your interview with the SMEs, it helps you fill in gaps in your knowledge while minimizing the need for additional time.  

Here are some tips for conducting research:

Find the Right Materials

Research starts by knowing where to look. Research materials for content marketing projects should include:

• Trade publications, analyst reports, and external “expert” blogs. These resources provide background on issues, trends, and the solution category. Be on the lookout for qualitative and quantitative research that you can use to back up your points. Data makes your piece credible.   
• Customer success stories provide insight into how customers are impacted by industry trends, what triggers push them to look for a solution, why they select your product, and how your solution helps them. Since some customers have their own quirky reasons for purchasing a solution, look at as many success stories as you can to gain broader insight.
• Internal presentations, webinars, blog posts, white papers, collateral, competitive matrixes, and messaging documents help the writer get up to speed quickly on issues, trends and product messaging.
• Materials from your competitors, such as white papers, articles, blog posts, posts on other social media and case studies can offer insight into industry trends — not to mention your competitors’ positioning.

Sift Through the Research

Start by using your research to simply learn as much as possible about a topic. No one is an expert in everything. And even if you know a lot about a particular area, the industry is moving so quickly that it’s impossible to know all the latest trends. I read every article I can find on the topic. Often one piece will explain one concept in more depth than another or provide just the right color to make the topic understandable or will contain slightly different points. By reading five to ten articles on the same topic, you’ll get a more complete picture.

By looking at competitors’ materials you can also see their different “takes” on industry challenges and trends. How do your positions compare and contrast with those of your competitors? Are there any gaps that you can fill? Do you have any unanswered questions? This can be an opportunity to highlight your company’s unique perspective.

Write an Outline and Look for Holes

Create a preliminary outline based on your research. I often do multiple iterations of these outlines to tinker with the logic and the flow. This process also helps identify gaps that I’ll need to fill with interviews with subject matter experts. Coming to interviews prepared will minimize your impact on their time.

By doing thorough research, writers can get themselves up to speed on a topic without having to take more time from subject matter experts than necessary. This research can also target gaps that the company has an opportunity to fill with a fresh perspective.