Producing Easy To Understand Content For Complicated Industries

By Ben Allen, Guest Contributor

For some companies, it’s very easy to understand what they do. Many have a simple explanation or can be understood simply off of the job title. A plumber fixes the waterworks in a building. An actor pretends to be somebody else to entertain an audience. A farmer grows crops to provide food for others.

□ Tips to produce effective, and easy to digest, content for complex businesses via @DigMedGhost http://buff.ly/2n7KJhF □

​While every job has nuances and necessary skills people don’t understand, the purpose of these types of industries are easy to grasp. Yet, there are businesses in the world that do important work, but are much harder to explain. This might be because it’s highly technical or because of the role they fill in the world is unknown.
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These complicated businesses still need marketing to survive. If you market for a complicated business, you’ll be trying to explain what your business does to people who have little understanding of it.

Being able to produce content that can easily explain what your business/product does in a way they can understand isn’t simple. As a marketer, it requires a high level of knowledge of the product, and the ability to squeeze the essence out of it for everybody else to understand. Here are some tips to produce effective, and easy to digest, content for complex businesses.

Interview The Experts
Before you start making content, you need a strong knowledge base to pull from. Nothing could be more dangerous than uneducated content, especially when it comes to top of the funnel content.

Now, you don’t have to become a 100 percent expert. That would be unrealistic and too much work for the benefits you would receive. You at least need to have the same level of understanding as the people you target, but ideally you should know just a bit more.

A great way to gain this information is to interview an expert at your business. This should be somebody who is doing the work day-to-day, understands the benefits your business brings to clients, and can translate industry jargon for you to understand.

If this expert is a manager or owner, then that’s great, but don’t just assume they are the best people to talk to. Often, they are more familiar with running a business or managing employees than the industry itself. Try to talk to multiple experts to get a well rounded understanding.

As you produce content, you can even run your ideas and work past your experts to make sure you are on track. While they might not be great for marketing tactics, they can make sure what you are saying is sensical.

Know How Smart Your Target Market Is
Effective marketing requires well-built buyer personas. If you want to sell to a person, you need to know who they are, what they like, their personality and how intelligent they are. Since you can’t target your marketing to each person individually, you have to create buyer personas.

How knowledgable your target market is needs to be well researched. That way, you can produce content that they can follow while teaching them what’s needed to make an informed decision.

Find the right balance between being simple enough to understand, yet smart enough that they don’t feel patronized. Spend time interviewing current customers to find trends in their education, careers, lifestyles, and even economic status. You can learn a lot from your customers about what direction your marketing, and company in general, needs to go. These clues can help guide what type of terminology you use and the complexity of your content.

As you produce content, compile the data you receive from the analytics and use it to inform both business and marketing decisions. This can act as a warning system if something changes in your target market, or if you are doing something wrong.

Tone, Approach and Vocabulary
As you plan out each piece of content, think about how a consumer might come across it. What question did they search in Google to find it? Are they coming from another piece higher up in your funnel? Was this an article you sent as part of a weekly newsletter they are subscribed too.

All of these considerations will affect the tone and approach of each piece of content you create. If somebody knows next to nothing and found your site by Googling a basic question, you need to explain nearly everything. But, as people move down the funnel, you can start to use more technical terms and adapt your writing to a more educated reader. As your reader grows, your style needs to grow with them.  

Provide Resources That Explain The Industry
If your business is hard to understand, that probably means the industry it resides in is also confusing. You can gain a lot of attention and loyalty with potential customers by providing resources that easily and thoroughly explain it. Think Moz and their beginner guide to SEO.

These resources need to delve into individual aspects, explain how they work, and then connect everything together. It should have both concept explanations and technical information people can refer back anytime they need it.

Not only will this extremely helpful information bring your target market to your site, it will also set you up as the authority in the industry. Other companies can spew complicated vocabulary to seem smart, but if you take the time to explain everything, you’ll come across as the better choice.

Maintain that authority by explaining relevant advances in your industry to your consumers. Identify which ones to talk about by looking through your analytics, keeping an eye on trends, and then predicting which ones your consumers will care about.

It isn’t easy to do content marketing for complicated industries, but it is worth it, especially if competitors aren’t doing it. People are searching for answers that you can provide, and you need to talk to their level. Just keep consulting your expert as the industry changes, watch your analytics for guidance on where to grow, and keep providing easy to understand content consistently.

IMAGE CREDIT: Firm Bee
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