By Elizabeth Kollross, VP

Often one of the biggest challenges to our job as communicators is content development. A PR manager for a NASCAR team once told me a story that has always stuck.

The team wasn’t winning, there wasn’t much “new” to talk about, and his driver didn’t like to do interviews.

Sound familiar?

One day he looked at the sponsorship stickers on the car, tallied the amount of funding the team had as a result and put together a short piece on how NASCAR sponsorship worked.

The result?

Just about every major sports and business outlet decided to pick it up and his phone started ringing.

There’s just something daunting about “starting from scratch.”

In today’s media environment, contributed article opportunities are some of the most efficient ways to get your message out.

Often our clients are reluctant to develop a new article or byline, simply because the perception is that it requires a lot of effort.

The good news is that often raw content is available; it just needs a little packaging. Some ideas for unearthing content include:

• Sales/Customer/Training decks—Take a look at what might fit a particular media outlet and then review the PPT in outline form. It will give you a framework for the article and then just a little bit of writing and editing will easily get you to 800 words (average length).

• Speeches/executive presentations—This is great fodder for op-ed pieces, posting blog comments and even developing quotes for releases.

• Technical submissions—These lengthy journal pieces won’t be interesting for mainstream press, but often there is a bigger trend for the company hiding beneath the heavy-duty tech lingo.

• Industry News—If you’re not already tracking the important trends in your market, you should be. Nothing is more interesting to reporters than taking a stance and going against conventional thinking. This can be a quick quote or anecdote taken from any of the above.

There is no substitute for a few really good pieces of coverage that tell your story exactly the way you want it. Take the time to audit some of the materials you already have; you probably have more than you think.