Bringing in new customers is a full-time job. To be successful you must constantly be creating value for them.

The problem is you have an entire business to run.

If you’re a small business owner, you probably have several jobs: marketing, sales, accounting and administrative duties and that’s all before lunch!

Then marketers like me tell you that you need to create content and share it through social media in your spare time.

Yet there’s a handful of small business owners who create content that actually frees up their time instead of bogging them down.

In this post I’m going to show you how they do it.

Use Your Front Lines

Your sales team is one of the best resources your company has for content. They’re the only thing that sits between your prospect and the sale.

Any department that comes in contact with your customers or prospects, you can use for content. In this post I’ll focus primarily on sales and customer service: Two content goldmines.
Give your marketing department permission to eavesdrop on your sales and customer service departments a.k.a. the front lines of your business.
Have your sales and customer service departments record the top questions and conversations they get daily. Things like…

• Objections
• Product or service complaints
• Compliments
• Questions
• Points of confusion
• Giving demos

Turn your recurring phone conversations into content! All it takes is a pen and pad by the phone and clear communication between your marketing and sales department. For example, if your sales department notices they continually answer questions about what kind of support your service includes, it’s probably not a lack of intelligence on your consumers behalf, it might be a brand messaging problem.
Use recurring conversations to identify situations in your business systems you can continually improve.

If you have a problem in your brand messaging, you could be losing prospects before they get to your sales team. According to Google, over 83% of consumers to research online before making direct contact with a company. That means you probably have a drop-off of prospects who gave up and went to your competition before reaching your sales team in their research phase.

If you’re not addressing the pain points of your customers online, you’re creating unnecessary work for your sales and customer service departments by making them answer the same questions over and over again. That’s a job that one piece of content can take care of.

The Secret of Hard Working Content

The secret of content that works as hard as your best employee is that your customers feel the same way when they’re reading your content as they do in a conversation.  It’s clear, relevant and wins prospects over by educating, not selling them. It’s also interesting. Their content has the personality that gets prospects through the boring parts and keeps their attention through the sales process.

And just like your best employees, great content doesn’t stop once it sells a prospect. It continues to find ways to add value.

So put a pen and pad by every phone in your office.
Write down the recurring questions.
Turn them into insights and online content that free up your time.
Use that time to work ON your business!

 Photo Credit: Grant Hutchinson via Compfight