How to Build a Content Lane for a Technical Product or Regulated Industry

Hey. What's going on, folks? It's Daniel Litwin, voice of b two b. I've got some tips for you here on how you can, get your technical teams. Right? And by this, I mean folks internally who are more technically minded, but might not be the first that come to mind for content contributions, how to actually get them creating content consistently. Right? Or alternatively, how to get regulated teams. So these might be folks who have great stories internally or expertise to offer, but their contributions carry a lot of risk. Right? Or you might work in an industry with a lot of risk around sharing your perspective. Right, or or just getting out in front of the camera. I've got some tips and tricks here on how you can build content lanes for those types of teams so that you get them creating, so that they can participate in practical ways in content, and everyone wins. So let me share some tips again here on how to build content lanes for technical or regulated teams. So first things first, right? Technical contributors and regulated teams, you know, folks that, again, their their role at the company and contribution and content inherently carries some risk, folks freeze at the ask of participating in content, not because it's impossible for these people to create content. Right? And remember, everyone already creates content right here on our mobile phones daily. We're taking pictures. We're taking videos. We snap a selfie with the family. So it's not that foreign. Really, what's freezing people is that no one has told people what's actually safe to say. There's ambiguity, and, you know, you're almost allowing the potential risk, the vague notion of risk to be a blocker when it could be clearly defined and turned into red lanes, gray lanes, or green lanes of, you know, no approval needed, some approval needed, yes approval needed, right, which would give people the confidence to start to contribute to content. So this is what's really critical here. You want to clarify for people what is safe to say and when. This is gonna help you activate more people, and it's gonna help those technical and regulated teams feel more confident contributing without worrying that they're gonna get in trouble or get you in trouble. So map potential content into three main lanes before asking anyone to record content. There's the green lane, which means no review needed. This is stuff like product explainers. You already have it on a brochure. Does it really need to go through three lanes of approval again just to do it on video? Probably not. The gray lane. This needs a look, but it's not a blocker. Right? There's some collaborative approval going on here, and it's gonna be case by case. And then there's the red lane. This is stuff we shouldn't be saying or is very off limits or maybe just isn't worth the time of approval. Right? And there's lower hanging content fruit that we could tap with these technical or regulated teams. So when a lane is clear, that hesitation disappears and everything becomes more feasible for you and this technical or regulated expert or team that you're looking to tap. Now what I've noticed here is that content that tends to stall in compliance, stuff that always gets kind of choked, right, or or blocked is stuff that is promotional. Right? It's thought leadership that makes a claim or that references certain, you know, dynamics in the industry, maybe sometimes direct pricing. This is very clear in fintech, financial industries, health care industries. Right? Promotional content may or may not be right for your technical team or regulated team, and it may not be where you want to start. Right? You want to understand the nuances of your team and industry before you start having them participate in content. If promotional content around your products, right, or services is a bit tricky to get these people participating on, maybe don't have them do that kind of content. Instead, have them lean on educational content, explaining how something works. That rarely has to trigger review. If it's very matter of fact breaking down how a product works or breaking down a workflow or offering useful education that your customers or internal teams will benefit from. So starting from the sort of reasoning behind even getting people involved in content, clarifying that and making sure that it matches with the technical or regulated team you wanna activate is a really good way to save you and them some time. Some safe lanes that I've found over the years for technical teams and regulated teams are explainers, FAQs, and people content. If you need somewhere to start, start here. Explainer content. How something works. This is pretty safe. Right? FAQ content. What do customers always ask that you already have to answer? These are basics about your products, your services, your operations and workflows. Get your technical or regulated teams involved here. Because there are already right and wrong answers. Very easy to lay out the green lane here of what to say or the red lane of what not to say. And then people showing off who are the faces and voices behind this service, behind this product. Maybe instead of getting the technical person to make a claim on camera, spotlight them and their work. That is safe. That, you know, is about the contributor themselves, and less about them having to sort of make a a hot take or claim that could get you or them in hot water. So, again, explainer content, FAQ content, or people forward content are good places to start to try to activate these folks. Now make sure as you're activating folks that you make things simple and easy for them. One way to do this is to sort of standardize how you want people contributing by, for example, mapping out a question, right, or a prompt that is consistent and that they can engage with weekly or every other week. That doesn't change much, and that lets them, with confidence, contribute content and not have to think about a ton of nuance that might, again, introduce risk into the picture. This is where you can use the request tool in MarketScale Studio to build some question prompts for people and then templatize them, right? So you can build out templates based on requests in the platform, and then build requests off these templates. And they'll always have the same question, but you can obviously tweak as needed. If I wanted to create something from scratch, I could, you know, build a module here, choose how I want people to respond, and make this the sort of foundational way of engaging these teams. If this is given the green, gray, red treatment for lanes of what is and isn't, you know, on the docket for content or what is or isn't safe or risky, And if you templatize this, now producing this content consistently becomes easy, contributing becomes safe, and all responses to requests live within the request first. You have to manually choose them as the creator of the request. You have to to curate them and send them to the channel media feed to even use them. So it introduces a filtering mechanism baked into the platform that helps introduce more safety so that content isn't just going out into the ether without you knowing if, you know, it's safe to do so. So leverage these requests because they're gonna help you. And my final bit of advice here is that technical teams can tend to go quiet. Right? Regulated teams can tend to sort of put up the risk blocker as an excuse when it feels like they're just doing content for you as a marketing favor. Try reframing the ask here from the jump to find a win win content contribution lane that is as useful to you as it is to this technical team or regulated team or technical pro that you want featured in content. It could be a recurring customer question. It could be something related to their expertise, their customers, their credibility, their own internal pressures for their team or quarterly goals. Identify those motivators because usually, those motivators need content. There's messaging they need to solidify. There's, training or education that they need to surface. There's brand building they need to do. There's awareness they need to build. Video can be a useful tool here. So tap those teams, especially, you know, technical contributors who might be more camera shy or regulated teams who might have industry pressures motivating them to say no. Find the win win lanes, the low hanging fruit. Start there and slowly build momentum using the other strategies that I've laid out here today. So there you go, folks. Those are my tips for why building content lanes for technical or regulated teams is the right way to get these folks activated, and these are the basics. So I'm looking forward to seeing how you put those tips and tricks to work to get more technical teams, more regulated teams involved in your content creation.