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Remember when you were a kid and a letter arrived in the post, addressed to you? It was so exciting! Then you grew up and started getting lots of post and it quickly became less exciting because a) it wasn’t so novel anymore and b) it was mostly bills or flyers for things you didn’t want.

That’s exactly what’s happened in the world of content marketing since it first took off in the early 2000s (and yes, I can remember those days). At first, it was great to be able to read helpful articles and watch cool videos and listen to interesting podcasts. But soon there was just so much content – most of it rubbish – that we switched off, and became increasingly cynical about how valuable it actually was. Today, GenAI is only making this noise and cynicism is only being made worse.

So, does that mean content is dead? Of course not – people like to say it is, periodically, but it really isn’t true. Content can deliver enormous benefits for businesses, especially those looking to establish themselves as experts in their field. It just needs a far more strategic approach these days. And it all starts with understanding three key pillars.

TLDR:

Pillar 01: Resonance – creating content your audience will actually want to read

The most common problem I see with content creation today is an incredibly simple one: brands creating content they want to create, rather than content their audience is actually interested in.

Like the SaaS brands that stuff blog posts full of detail about their features but don’t tie that detail to their customers’ challenges so they feel like adverts rather than valuable, educational articles. Or consultancies churning out dry, dusty white papers when what their audience really wants is ‘ask the expert’ webinars.

Ensuring content resonates with your audience starts with research. Talk to them. Ask what they’re interested in. Customer interviews, focus groups, surveys and polls can all give you valuable primary insights.

There’s also secondary research you can do. What are the trending topics in your industry? Look at industry press and key influencers – what are they talking about? Social media is another place to dig. Pick a number of key personal accounts – current customers or clients, or people you’d like to work with – and see what they’re posting about or engaging with.

This isn’t about jumping on bandwagons, it’s about understanding what people care about. The goal is to take what you’ve learned about your audience’s interests and overlay that with your own knowledge, expertise and strategic business goals – be that “be seen as an authority on wearable healthtech” or “expand our reach into the US market”. In doing so you create a Venn diagram, the centre of which is your sweet spot for content creation.

Pillar 02: Reach – ensuring your content gets in front of the right eyes at the right time

Having established the topic pillars your content should be created around, and the format most likely to resonate, you need to consider how you’re going to get eyes on that content. You can’t just stick it on your website and hope.

What channels are you going to use to find your audience? You could take an inbound approach, creating articles and videos, hosting webinars, sharing posts on social media, and letting your audience come to you. You can also optimise your content and get visits through organic SEO.

Or you could be more proactive, and use advertising, email outreach, industry events. You could work with your sales team to create an ABM campaign that targets a list of individuals and companies that you want to build relationships with and send out relevant content depending on their specific needs.

Again, a combination of both is likely to be most effective, and different channels will suit different stages of the buyer journey. SEO is particularly effective for middle of funnel content where buyers are in research mode, whereas thought leadership is great for social media, webinars, conference speaking or as a way to follow up with a lead.

Whatever you decide, plan to give the strategy enough time to be effective. The majority of content tends to take a minimum of 6 months to start showing results, and often more like 12-18 months in terms of bottomline ROI.

Pillar 03: Results – making a plan that connects your content to a bottom line result

While much of content marketing is about brand building, all marketing should be designed to eventually deliver qualified leads that are more likely to convert into sales. But that doesn’t mean you have to stick a “buy now” or “book a demo” CTA on every piece of content.

Content marketing is a long game, and it’s about building relationships. That means that rather than sell, sell, sell, your goal should be to move people forward, in some way or another, towards a sale at some point in the future.

For example, if someone reads a top of funnel blog post, you might want them to read a middle of funnel post next, or sign up for a newsletter or a webinar. If they’ve downloaded a piece of gated content, you’ll need to have a nurture sequence ready, which might end with a “book a free consultation” CTA.

When I was running RH&Co, my team helped one client in the employee recognition software space to do just this.

First, we created a top of funnel blog about why data insights on workplace culture are useless if managers have no way to act on them.

The CTA and overall narrative led to the middle of funnel content, which was a gated playbook on what strategies HR can take to give managers more power and autonomy in recognising employee contributions, and how tech can help facilitate that.

That last tech section then fed into the bottom of funnel blog on their software and how it’s built to empower managers rather than just give data insights to HR and the C-suite.

Ideally, you want every step in the buyer journey to be mapped out, and to know what the next desired action is for each piece of content you share, so that you can guide them accordingly and set meaningful metrics for success.

Bonus pillar: Repurposing – squeezing every last drop of value from your content

At this stage you should have a pretty good strategy for how to create content that resonates with your target audience, that reaches the right people at the right time, and that ultimately drives bottom line results.

Most likely, you’ll be using several different types of content and different channels at different stages of the buyer journey – which may leave you feeling overwhelmed by how much you need to produce.

But if you’re clever, you can ensure that the bulk of the work happens in one or two areas. After that, it’s about repurposing as much as you possibly can.

For example, you might commission a piece of research and create a white paper with input from your internal subject matter experts. This will take time, effort and budget. But you won’t just be left with one piece of content.

You’ll have core messaging themes on which you can build an entire campaign.

You’ll have quotes, stats and other snippets that you can use on social media, in emails, even in person.

You’ll have themes you can develop in further blog posts, videos or webinars, and tie to your case studies.

And you’ll have findings your subject matter experts can discuss on podcasts, at events, or in the press.

The harder you can make your content work for you, the more chance you’ll have of getting the right eyes on it. They might miss your white paper launch, but they’ll see its insights later in the week in social media snippets. Or perhaps they won’t have time to read a whole download, but will pop on a podcast to hear your SMEs talk it over.

This is why it’s important not to scrimp on content strategy and rush straight to the deliverables. Investing in the thinking up front means saving on wasted efforts down the line and gives you a far better chance of getting the results you want.

If you want to get your content working harder for you, get in touch to find out how I can support you with content strategy or as a fractional content lead.

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If you’re in B2B marketing or sales – and what you’re marketing or selling is complex, expensive or business critical – you’ll know all about long sales cycles. The more important a decision is, the longer it takes to make. Add in the complication of multiple stakeholders and you’ve got yourself a challenge when it comes to keeping people’s attention all the way to the finish line.

But while the downside of long sales cycles is that there’s more time for drop off to happen, there is a positive side – it gives you more chances to make the best impression possible on your audience. If you know how to make good use of that window.

In this, the third in my series of articles about B2B marketing challenges, I’m looking at how you can use content to overcome some of the hurdles you’ll experience at various stages of long sales cycles, and build a more profitable relationship for the future.

TL:DR

Hurdle 01: Building trust early on

Solution: Genuinely useful, value-based content

Everyone’s wary of a sales person. No matter how friendly we appear, how pure our motives, how carefully worded our outreach, the truth is that we’re trying to sell – and people know it.

Which is why the best sales people don’t start selling straight away. They start off by building trust. These pros don’t try to shortcut long sales cycles. Instead, they allow their prospects to move at their own pace, guiding them all the way rather than forcing them across the line.

Content can play a hugely important role in trust building by demonstrating expertise and value. It’s the classic ‘show, don’t tell’ method.

Trust building content might include a research paper digging into key trends in their industry, a series of blog posts laying out the various solutions to their problem, or a webinar on how to achieve a particular goal. Just be sure that your content is as unbiased as possible – remember, it’s not designed to close the deal, it’s designed to build trust by providing value.

Hurdle 02: Keeping a contact’s attention

Solution: Engaging content that speaks to a specific issue

You’ve just got back from a conference. While you were there, you had several really promising conversations. No one is ready to book a demo or receive a proposal yet but you want to build these fledgling relationships and stay in touch.

Think back to what you were talking about. Did your new contact mention a specific challenge they were facing? Is there a subject they seemed interested in exploring further? Whatever the case, if you have a relevant piece of content you can send them, you’ve got a ready made way to follow up without it feeling like a hard sell.

Thought leadership works well here, as do guides and ‘how to’ content. Again, we’re far from selling at this stage – this is all about adding value and proving that your and your company are genuinely helpful and knowledgeable. Long sales cycles mean playing the long relationship game.

Hurdle 03: Getting buy-in from other stakeholders

Solution: ‘Leave behind’ content that sells on your behalf

It’s so frustrating. You’ve had a few great conversations with your primary contact. You’ve walked them through a demo or given them a great pitch – and they’re bought in. But now they have to get sign-off.

All too often in a B2B setting, we’re marketing or selling to more than one stakeholder. That requires us to adjust and adapt our messaging to different audiences with different priorities. And it often requires us to rely on someone else doing an internal sales pitch on our behalf.

Rather than leaving them to their own devices (are they really going to do it justice?), use ‘leave behind’ content to help them make your case as well as you would. This might be a pitch deck – one designed to be read, rather than viewed as part of a live presentation – a brochure, or any other piece of content that captures your core messaging and value proposition for that audience.

Hurdle 04: Following up a proposal without nagging

Solution: Content that facilitates easy decision-making

You’ve done all you can – now it’s time to wait for the go ahead or the “Sorry, we’ve gone in a different direction” email. Naturally, you’ll have tried to book in a follow up meeting but that isn’t always possible. Sometimes you just have to be patient.

Except, how long do you leave it? At some point, you’ll want to give your prospect a little nudge to see how things are going. But no one’s opening an email with the subject “Just following up…”, right?

To avoid that slightly desperate sense of nagging, think about how you can use follow up content to continue adding value. That might be a breakdown of how your costing works, a customer case study, or a “here’s what to expect if you go ahead” pre-onboarding guide. Anything that speaks to any doubts, queries or concerns they might be having in the decision-making process.

Hurdle 05: Your lead has raised an objection

Solution: Objection busting content that works throughout sales cycles

At some point during a long sales process, someone is going to raise an objection. If you’ve been in the game for a while, you’ll probably be able to list several common objections off the top of your head.

If these objections are raised in a face-to-face meeting, you should be prepared with a suitable answer. But why not preempt objections and use content to get ahead of your audience and provide even more value by helping them move past these blocks without having to voice them?

This type of content is especially important when the objection is coming from someone you don’t have access to yet, as in the case of getting buy-in from internal stakeholders, above. Here, the particular type of leave behind content you want is objective busting content.

Bonus tip: Remember that B2B buyer research starts before they even get in touch

While your prospect’s first touchpoint with your organisation might be a proactive cold outreach over email or via social media, or a meeting at an event like a conference or exhibition, it may also be via a referral, a Google search, a media appearance or a post on social media.

According to research from Showpad, B2B customers spend an average of 20 hours researching a company, product or solution before they get in touch with a sales rep – and up to 40 hours if they’re planning on spending more than $100k. Which means you need to make sure there’s great content available to them wherever they look.

We’re talking everything from top of funnel content like white papers and infographics to more bottom of funnel content like technical specs and case studies.

Now you might be thinking, “That’s a job for the marketing department” – and you’re right, to a point. But why leave them in a silo? I find that the clients who get the best results from their content are the ones who see the marketing and sales processes as deeply linked, and have departments that work collaboratively on content strategy.

If long sales cycles are normal in your sector and you want a way to make sure your prospects don’t drop off along the way, get in touch to see how I can help or take a look at my content strategy services.

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The benefit of being a B2C marketer is that you’re normally marketing to individual people. OK, in some instances you might need to get your target buyer’s partner – or perhaps parent – to approve, but generally the final purchase decision is pretty much down to one or maybe two people.

In the B2B world, however, it’s much more complex, with all sorts of buyer personas needing to be convinced, each with a different agenda. So how do you go about building a marketing strategy that speaks to the right people at the right time?

That’s what I’m exploring in this, the second in my 3-blog series on B2B marketing challenges. If you missed the first one – How to market an intangible offering – make sure you bookmark it for later. For now, let’s dig into the issue of multiple stakeholders.

TL:DR

Know who comes in at what stage of the buyer journey

The first thing you need to do – before you start creating your marketing plan – is to work out which individuals and departments come into the buyer journey at which stages. This will depend on a host of factors, from the size and complexity of the businesses you’re selling to, to how expensive, complex or business critical the product or service you’re selling is.

Whatever the case, there are some general principles that apply across most medium to large businesses…

A couple of years ago, when I was running my agency, we created a research report titled ‘What do CxOs read?’, for which I interviewed a number of CFOs, CMOs and CHROs at household name brands. One thing that came out of it very clearly was that C-level execs aren’t really in the market to be sold to. They’re operating at a far higher level than that – interested in the big picture and what’s coming over the horizon rather than which employee benefits platform or renewable energy supplier to choose.

Does that mean you shouldn’t market to them? Absolutely not. But see them for what they are – the agenda setters. They’re the ones that will put employee engagement or carbon neutrality on the radar. In that sense, they’re step one in the marketing long-game.

Later, layers of people below them will be tasked with digging into solution options and selecting potential suppliers or partners. Chances are that the first involved will be those whose department is most closely involved – say, the HR department, if we’re talking employee benefits. 

Once you’ve got their attention, you’ll most likely need some sort of approval from other departments, possibly including Finance, IT or Procurement depending on the size of the organisation. In these final stages, the CxOs may well pop back up to give their seal of approval.

Understand and cater for multiple needs

Knowing which individuals and departments come in at which stage will help you build an appropriate funnel, and pitch the right ideas at the right time. Because each of your stakeholders will need something different from your marketing.

We’ve already talked about how CxOs are the agenda setters, the big picture thinkers, the horizon scanners. As such, they’re interested in learning about upcoming trends and being told what questions they should be asking in the boardroom.

Thought leadership, original research and trend roundups are all going to be useful here – the valuable, relational, educational content that doesn’t have even a whiff of sales about it. 

Further down the line, the people tasked with solving a given problem will be looking to have that problem clarified for them, and the solutions explored. They still want impartiality at this stage, but you can move them towards more sales led content.

If you have to get through Procurement, they’ll be interested in compliance checks and making sure you tick all of their predetermined boxes. If what you’re selling falls outside of a department’s budget, you’ll be dealing with Finance, who will inevitably want numbers – what you charge, what results you’ll generate. IT, meanwhile, will want to understand how much you’ll be involved in technical implementation and how you’ll operationalise deployment. 

Any comms or content at these levels need to be factual, detailed and as devoid of fluff as it is possible to get – while still maintaining your brand message and voice.

Be consistent at every touch point

Having said that you need to cater for each stakeholder’s individual priorities, it’s important that you don’t present a fractured image to your audience. Each touchpoint with your brand needs to have a degree of consistency, so that a) the HR department and the IT team don’t feel like they’re engaging with two different suppliers and b) a LinkedIn post and an outreach email still feel like they’re coming from the same brand.

To get this right, you need two things. First, you need a strong brand in the first place. You need to know your value proposition and your messaging, you need a distinct voice, and you need guidelines that ensure everyone sticks to them – from the team responsible for creating your thought leadership to the sales people sliding into people’s DMs on LinkedIn.

Second, you need a strategy that ties everything together. Your customer journeys and how people and departments fit into them. What your marketing department is creating and sharing and what your sales teams are following up with once they have a lead. All of these elements need to be tied together so that there’s a plan rather than a scattergun approach.

Give your advocates a way to sell you in

One of the biggest problems with having multiple stakeholders is that you don’t always have access to all of them directly or at least not at the same time. That means even if you gain one person’s attention, you might have to rely on them to accurately sell you in to someone else within the business before you have a chance to reach them yourself.

In a marketing setting, you can counter this with dedicated content that supports cross-stakeholder communications. Our employee benefits platform provider, to go back to that example, might put together an article on ‘5 things your CFO wants to know about our employee benefits platform’.

In a face-to-face setting, you’ll need to think about the ‘leave behind’. If you’ve done a great job of pitching your product or service – or even a higher level idea, if you’re chatting to a C-level exec – you want to make sure what you’ve said doesn’t get lost in translation. This is where brochures, pitch decks, and other forms on content can be very powerful.

If you need support creating a content strategy that takes into account multiple stakeholders, get in touch or visit my content and thought leadership strategy page to find out more about what we offer.

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Do you ever wish you sold shoes? Or that you were responsible for marketing a 5 star hotel? Something nice and tangible, with a consumer audience and a pretty well defined value hierarchy. 

Inevitably it gets much harder when you’re selling a B2B service with as many permutations as leadership development, or as hard to define as ESG consulting. Or maybe you sell something that’s concrete at face value – like offshore wind engineering – but it’s hard to define what makes you different to that other engineering company with a more established reputation.

For the marketers and sales people tasked with generating and closing leads in these sorts of businesses, there are so many more hurdles to jump through. In this 3-blog series, I’ll be exploring three of those challenges and how best to tackle them. Today we’re starting with one that is literally the most difficult to describe: intangibility.

TL:DR

Levels of intangibility in B2B businesses

The dictionary definition of intangible is “impossible to touch, to describe exactly, or to give an exact value.” For B2B businesses it’s the latter two points that cause the biggest challenge. And there are nuances to intangibility too.

For some businesses, their service itself is intangible. This applies to many consultants where what they’re really offering is expert thinking, stakeholder facilitation, probing conversation and experienced recommendations. In many cases their offering will be entirely bespoke and therefore hard to describe or give a value to.

For others, the intangible element of their offering is the very thing that they hope will differentiate them. When I ran my agency, one of our clients was a contract cleaning company. They had built their business around a unique set of processes that meant their service was genuinely far superior to their competitors. But making that differentiation clear so companies would choose this company over cheaper suppliers was a constant challenge.

And then there are intangible outcomes. If you can demonstrate how you’ll be able to save a business £x each month, you have a relatively tangible benefit to offer. But where proof of success can’t be boiled down to a simple metric, it’s far harder.

In essence, the challenge of intangibility is one of assigning and communicating value. Your client values the tangible, you want to communicate the value of the intangible.

The real reason intangibility is a problem

So why is having an intangible service, USP or outcome such a challenge? Because people want to know what they’re getting for their money. And if you can’t give them a tangible answer, they’ll start trying to anchor your offering to something that feels more tangible to them, something they can justify to procurement or the CFO.

This leads to a skewed focus. For example, they might focus on deliverables when it’s the thought process behind those deliverables that actually adds the most value. Or they might focus on tangible results, which aren’t always easy to define or can be misleading, as is the case with vanity metrics.

Another wrong focus is time input, where clients want to understand the number of days being dedicated to a given project, which is a crude way of measuring value, especially in knowledge-based and creative sectors.

That client discomfort with the intangible might lead them to want to engage with you on a test project first. But in some cases this isn’t really practical. You can’t offer a company just a bit of data science, or a single element of a cultural transformation – and any alternative services you offer as an on-ramp are rarely representative of your core offering. 

As I’ve already said, the challenge of intangibility is one of assigning and communicating value. Your client values the tangible, you want to communicate the value of the intangible. So how can you overcome this?

Solution 01: Make intangible elements more tangible

The first option is to ease their discomfort by making your intangible offering feel more tangible. This can be as simple as turning your unique process into a framework, or at least giving it clearly defined – and cleverly named, if you can stretch to it – steps.

For instance, at RH&Co we had a client who offered IT transformation projects. Large, bespoke, hard to define. So they dug into the steps that made these projects so successful – pain point analysis, business operations integration and so on – and suddenly it was a little easier to picture what they were offering.

Likewise, when I create a proposal for a content strategy project, I divide it into components including Expert Gold Mining, Sales Enablement and Embedded Research, which helped my clients to understand what their strategy package could entail.

By focusing on the ‘how’ of what you do – in other words, the features of your service – you sidestep the risk of being ‘fluffy’, which can sometimes happen when you focus purely on benefits, such as ‘empower your people to do more’.

But there is a danger too. Go too far down the features route and you risk productising your offering to the point where it becomes a commodity. From there it’s just a race to the bottom in terms of price.

Solution 02: Focus on measurable benefits and outcomes

So if too heavy a focus on features is problematic, then we need to make sure that’s balanced with good old benefits. The challenge is that here again intangibility rears its hard-to-define head.

You may think that the benefits you offer are tangible – saving your client time or money, for example, or boosting business performance. But if you leave it at that, you’re going to come across as fluffy. For your benefits to really feel tangible, you need to focus on measurability.

I once worked with a client who could demonstrate how they helped small restaurant owners save an average of two days of invoicing admin each month, which is incredibly powerful.

But it’s not always that clear. For example, an employee engagement consultancy, you might be able to measure employee engagement to some degree or another. But it’s far harder to link that relatively intangible benefit directly to a tangible bottom line result. 

Or what about where there are multiple partners contributing to a project? This might be the case with a new website launch, where the client engages a branding agency, a content agency, a development agency, even a UX or user testing agency. Which of these can claim to have offered the most value, since the final result is down to the combination of their skills?

A side note on subjective vs objective value

As I’ve already said, the problem of intangibility is really a problem of defining and communicating value. So part of overcoming the communications challenge around marketing or selling an intangible offering is about really understanding what your audience values.

In their HBR article, The B2B Elements of Value, authors Eric Almquist, Jamie Cleghorn and Lori Sherer, of global management consulting firm Bain & Company, describe the Elements of Value Pyramid. The pyramid encompasses 40 different types of value perceived by B2B buyers, organising them into five levels.

What’s interesting about the pyramid is the way that the more intangible or subjective value elements are closer to the top, while the foundation is made up of more tangible or objective ones.

This shows us several things about communicating the value of B2B offerings. First, we need to be able to tick the tangible, objective value boxes in order to be in the game. But we also need to be able to communicate value higher up the pyramid in order to differentiate ourselves. 

Solution 03: Build trust in your brand

There is one final solution that, if you can achieve it, will outperform all the others, and that’s building trust in your brand. Because once a client trusts a brand, they’re far less likely to quibble over how many hours a consultant dedicates to a given programme or whether they’ll be able to measure the impact of a digital transformation programme.

After all, you don’t see clients asking McKinsey or Accenture to justify their prices or explain their consulting process in minute detail. Businesses just assume that they will gain value because there is such deep trust in those brands.

Although building trust is far too big a topic to dive into in much detail here, there are two elements to consider: demonstrating (rather than describing) your worth, and having others validate that worth. 

To demonstrate your worth, you need to put all that intangible knowledge into a tangible format that your audience can consume. From research reports to thought leadership article, webinars to podcast interviews, expertise-based content gives your audience a way to ‘test’ your expertise without committing to engaging your services.

To have others validate your worth, call on the people who have already been convinced of your value. Get testimonials or, better yet, create case studies. Use NPS scoring or online review tools. PR is another important part of the puzzle here – a mention in a respected industry publication may be exactly what you need to get an introduction to the right person.

If you have an intangible offering and need support to create a value proposition and brand that your audience will buy into, get in touch to find out how I can help.

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If you’re a marketer responsible for executing an expertise-based positioning strategy, you’ll know how important it is to collaborate with the subject matter experts in your business to create expertise-based content. But how exactly do you go about doing that?

Before you start, you might want to take a look at the first two articles in my series on communicating expertise:

Now you’re all caught up, it’s time to focus on the particular challenges you’re likely to face as you go about creating expertise-based content to support your brand position.

While you may be well versed in your industry – even a specialist – you’re not the subject matter expert. The person or people with the deepest insights might be the founder or CEO, the CTO or Chief Science Officer, the product team or the consultants out in the field.

As I mentioned in the second article, content produced by marketers in isolation from subject matter experts is likely to feel insubstantial, no different from that created by businesses with no expertise full stop. To set your content apart and make your brand’s reputation shine, you’re going to need to work with your experts.

Easier said than done, I know. Here are some of the challenges that you’re likely to face, along with solutions you can use to ensure you get the most out of them.

TL:DR

Challenge 01: Your subject matter experts aren’t marketers

Every content marketer dreams of finding a subject matter expert who is also a brilliant content creator. Few realise that dream. It’s rare that a leading data scientist or pioneering microbiologist or highly qualified leadership consultant is also a talented and experienced marketer.

Chances are, if left to their own devices, your subject matter experts will pitch their writing at the wrong level for your audience. They will almost certainly use the wrong tone of voice – especially if they come from an academic background. And it probably won’t be strategically informed.

Solution:

This is where you bring together their expertise and yours. Even if you’re lucky and your experts are fairly decent writers, you’ll still need to create the content strategy, set the topic areas, write decent briefs, make sure there are thorough brand voice guidelines available, and probably do a lot of editing.

But that may not be enough. If your experts aren’t likely to be able to craft great content even with guidance, you’ll need to think of them as gold mines. Your job is to dig until you find a rich seam and then extract as much gold as possible and use it to craft the content yourself.

Challenge 02: Your experts are very busy people

Even if you’ve landed yourself an expert who is adept at creating content, there’s a good chance they’ll be too busy to put pen to paper. At least not with the frequency and consistency you need to support a decent content strategy. 

It could also be that they simply aren’t all that interested, especially if they can’t see the benefit of creating expert content. Which means even if they say yes, they’ll find some reason why they couldn’t deliver this month – sorry, too much going on with the latest sprint or patent application or fundraising round.

Solution:

Let’s address the latter issue first. If your expert isn’t convinced that content is important, you’re going to need to sell the benefits and make your case. Remember, they’re not the marketing expert, you are. It might be obvious to you that expertise-based content can have a significant impact on the business but it isn’t to them. So find out what it is they care most about – whether it’s generating leads or getting speaking engagements – and appeal to that.

Then, once they’re convinced, make it easy for them. Rather than bugging them every week, arrange a longer session once a month or even once a quarter to get the information you need for a content series.

And make sure that you do your research so that rather than asking them the basic questions – the stuff you could find out with a bit of help from Google or AI – you can ask them for those insights that only they as experts can bring: the anecdotes, the opinions, the nuance.

Challenge 03: They just have too much expertise and knowledge

Experts, by their very nature, hold a lot of information in their heads. They may be good at accessing that information but they’re probably less adept at sifting through it and working out which bits are relevant to the given piece of content you’re creating. Being passionately interested in their subjects, they may well go into far too much detail.

Solution: 

Imagine that information is a tangle of yarn. In that state, it isn’t inherently useful (unless you’re a passionate collector of yarn). In order for it to be useful, it needs to be untangled, and the right strands knitted together according to a pattern to form a jumper, or a scarf or a hat. Ditto information. 

As a marketer responsible for creating content based around subject matter expertise, you need to get good at extracting the right information from your experts – the untangling and selecting process – as well as using it to create the content itself. So you’ll need to learn to ask the right questions and guide the conversation so it stays on the right track, pushing back when your expert veers off track. 

It might also be helpful to create a brief for your experts to consider in advance so they feel prepared. This is especially important if your expert is prone to rambling or if they’re the kind of person who likes to ponder a question for a few minutes – or hours – before giving their answer.

You’ll know – or get to know – your own experts and what you need to do to get the best out of them.

Challenge 04: They don’t know how expert they are

If challenge 03 is about your expert sharing too much detail, this one is the opposite. Experts often sit at the last of the four stages of competence – unconscious competence. That’s when you’re so good at something, or so knowledgeable about something, that you don’t realise how much others don’t know. 

This can lead to two different problems. In the context of creating content, your expert may not drill down into a subject in enough detail because they assume you – or your brand’s audience – understand their jumping in point. Or they might completely miss the most interesting and relevant points full stop because again, to them it’s ordinary even though you know that your audience would be fascinated.

Solution:

Again, your job here is to help your experts to a) identify what’s interesting to their audience and b) pitch it at the right level.

When my team ran briefing sessions at RH&Co they would often help experts to come up with analogies to make whatever it was they were talking about more understandable to the brand’s audience. As an example, one expert at a company in the embedded finance space was talking about the difficulty of performing KYC (Know Your Customer) checks to protect against financial crime. The analogy my team helped them come up with was:

“It’s the equivalent of taking a utility bill to the bank to prove identification. Except in this case, the bills aren’t yours and you might not know how to find the people who have them.”

You can see how that instantly makes the subject a lot more tangible and relatable.

Challenge 05: They just don’t respect your position

This one might sound a little harsh but I’ve heard it from enough marketers to know that it’s true, even if it’s not meant as badly as it sounds when you write it down in black and white. It’s just so much easier to cancel an internal meeting than an external one, or push team-based tasks down the to-do list because a request related to a client project feels more urgent.

Solution:

In the same way that kids will often ignore their parents but listen as soon as a visitor has something to say, I’ve found that experts usually pay better attention to me as an outsider than they do to their own people.

Another benefit of being an outsider is that I can push back without fear of internal politics. I’ve often stayed on a discovery call with a marketer after the subject matter experts have left and heard them marvel at how much I’ve managed to extract. They may have been asking the same questions for weeks and not getting anywhere. It’s annoying but it’s just the way it is with some experts.

If you’re struggling to get your subject matter experts engaging, talk to me about my fractional content leadership services.

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“Our multidisciplinary team is made up of skilled experts with many years of experience.” Easy enough to say – but not especially convincing, right? Being an expert is one thing – proving it is quite another.

In the first blog in my 3-part series on communicating expertise, I looked at a deceptively simple question: what is an expert? But if you want to build your brand authority, it’s not enough to have expertise in your organisation – you need to prove you have it. Again and again. 

One of the surest ways to do this is to create and consistently publish content that draws upon the expertise in your organisation. But where do you start?

TL:DR

First, you have to define your expertise

Before you can convince others of your expertise – and that might be yours personally or that which is contained within others in your business – you really need to thoroughly understand what that expertise is and be able to clearly define and articulate it.

In part this is a deliberate decision around positioning. The more you (as an individual or brand) specialise – horizontally or vertically – the more concentrated your experience and therefore your expertise becomes. So an app development agency specialising in React Native or working purely with telco brands is going to be better able to serve clients in this area than a generalist agency – and perceived as more expert by their chosen audience.

But your value proposition may be more nuanced than this and so communicating may not be straightforward. This is why, before you can create a content strategy designed to build your reputation as an expert brand, you need to create your value proposition, brand message and voice.

What experts need to know about their audience

Of course, communication is as much about who is listening as who is speaking, whether we’re talking about foundational messaging or the content you build upon it. That means you need to have a deep understanding of your audience. 

This is the case across all marketing but in particular, for expertise-based content, you need to think about two things:

1) What is their knowledge base?

As an expert brand, you need to be very clear on how knowledgeable your audience already is – or isn’t – about your subject area. This will determine both where you pitch your content and how high a bar you need to meet to establish that expertise.

Let’s say you’re a private chiropractic clinic looking to create content for your patient audience. They might need to be talked through the basics of what chiropractic medicine is and why it’s beneficial but they’ll probably assume that there is a level of expertise within your practice.

Now imagine, however, you’re a chiropractic-led medtech company looking to sell your platform to an audience of orthopaedic surgeons or an NHS trust. That audience is already highly knowledgeable and they’re likely to be much more sceptical about your expertise, so your content will need to work that much harder.

2) How much do they care about?

Another thing you’ll need to know about your audience is which aspects of your expertise they care about. Because there’s a good chance that there’s a very big chunk of it that they literally don’t want to hear about at all.

You (or your subject matter experts, if you’re the marketer in charge of content) might be happy to geek out on spiral dynamics or financial compliance legislation but your audience wants to know how to lead a successful team or get their app processing payments more quickly.

They want to see that you understand how what you do links into their world. How can you make it useful to them? If expertise is high grade cashmere, then expertise-based content is a hand knitted cashmere jumper.

Content strategy for expert-led businesses

Content strategy is too big a subject for us to go into in much detail here. Content pillars, buyer journeys, content categories like ‘how tos’ and ‘roundups’ – that’s content marketing theory 101. If you’re a subject matter expert, these are all things you’re going to need to brush up on, or you’re going to need to hire yourself a marketer.

But marketing knowledge alone isn’t enough to create expertise-based content. The truth is that plenty of brands provide useful content – guidance, education, data, trends, facts – by drawing on the internet and reiterating what other people know. There’s no subject matter expertise present to elevate it.

To imbue your content with that final level of authority, you need one of two things:

Demonstrable experience

The more you can link your content into real life, the more anecdotes and stories and case studies you can thread through your content, the more weight it will have.

For instance, when I ran my agency, we once worked with a highly experienced executive search consultant with decades of experience under his belt. Every one of the blog posts my team worked on with him was been stuffed so full of detailed real life situations that the reader was left in no doubt as to his lived experience and deeply practical knowledge. It also meant his story-filled content stood out when set against the dry explainer content that exists elsewhere in his field.

Original research

This point links back to the first post in this series on communicating expertise and Dr Kneebone’s Master stage, where you’re actually shaping your field.

Another client of ours at the agency, a purpose-led HR consultancy with an ESG employee benefits tech platform, once commissioned a study and worked with us to create a report on how climate conscious employees are, weaving together the data with insights from the subject matter experts within their team.

From then on, whenever they created content about how employees are more climate conscious and how leaders need to think about this when they’re choosing their employee benefits, they weren’t just regurgitating what everyone else is saying. They actually had something unique that they can point to, showcasing themselves as genuine experts.

The importance of collaboration

I’ve already acknowledged that there are plenty of brands creating content based on what’s already out there. Increasingly, you might argue that they don’t even need marketers to do this work – AI can do it far more quickly and cheaply, right? (Actually, let’s not get into that debate here!)

Sadly, even without AI, there are also plenty of brands stuck at the level of this more generic content because their experts are siloed from the marketing department, who are creating content with only a superficial understanding of what they’re writing about.

To create truly rich, effective expertise-based content, you need to involve both subject matter experts and expert marketers from the offset.

Marketers, it’s your job to become a prospector, mining your expert’s brain for the most valuable seams of gold that you can then shape into content that serves your audience and the brand you’re building. You’ll need to set the strategy and push back when your experts stray from it. Remember, they’re not the marketing authority, you are. More on this in the next blog post in this series on communicating expertise.

And subject matter experts, you need to make yourself available and you also need to respect the expertise your marketer has. You’re creating content, not writing an academic paper or presenting to a handful of peers who are as interested as you are in every nuance of your subject. Your marketer is there to extract and shape the right aspects of your expertise so that it hits key marketing and business objectives.

In my experience, this truly collaborative relationship is hard to achieve – be prepared for the Storming stage of Tuckman’s group development model – but if you can achieve it, you will have the potential to create content that allows your brand to shine out as an expert among your peers and competitors.

If you’re looking for support to extract the expertise from your business and turn it into reputation-building content, talk to me about my content strategy and fractional content leadership services.

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There are many ways to position a brand in a marketplace. You can compete on price or personality, values, location or, if you’re lucky, the uniqueness of your product or service offering. Or you can choose an expertise-based positioning strategy. 

Expertise builds trust. It encourages loyalty. It allows you to charge a premium because it shows you’re wiser and sharper than the next brand – and you can prove it. If members of your team have mastered certain disciplines and subjects, why would you try to compete on price?

This strategy is also a strong choice because it’s difficult to emulate. You can’t fake expertise, or not for long anyway. Only a few brands have what it takes to even qualify – and fewer know how to translate the expertise within their business into marketing strategy.

In this mini series on communicating expertise, I’m going to be looking at what it takes to build brand authority. I’m also going to look at the marketing challenges that stand in the path of every expert-led organisation. But before that, I need to clarify what an expert actually is.

TL:DR

What is an expert? The difference between skill, knowledge and language

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines an expert as someone with a special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject.

Already we’ve got two different nuances here – skill vs knowledge. A skill is related to something you can do, so an example of a skilled expert might be a master carpenter or senior software engineer. Then you have the more knowledge-based experts, like university professors or management consultants.

There’s a third type of expertise too: interactional expertise, which surgeon and author Dr Roger Kneebone describes in his book, Expert, as the “ability to speak the language of experts whose work you cannot do.”

An example of a profession that takes interactional expertise to its highest point is journalism, since journalists write expertly about many subjects in which they themselves are not experts. I’d like to suggest that the best copywriters and content marketers fall into this category too.

What does it take to become an expert?

Of course, having some level of knowledge or skill doesn’t automatically make you an expert. You have to work for it. That said, the moment you can call yourself an expert is also not a clearly defined milestone. It’s an ongoing and evolving process. So how do you become an expert?

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularised the ‘10,000 hour rule’, which essentially says that to become an expert at something you need to put in 10,000 hours of practice or study. This is actually an over-simplification of the work of psychologist K Anders Ericsson but it makes an important point, which is that there is a degree of time needed to become an expert. You may be born with talent but you won’t be an expert until you’ve put in the time, not to mention effort.

Dr Kneebone describes this evolution as the Apprentice-Journeyman-Master pathway. As an apprentice you’re putting in the time under someone else’s tuition or guidance. Next, you become a journeyman and, archaic term aside, this is where things start to shift. You move from supervised to independent practice, you start to take responsibility, develop your own style, and you learn to improvise. 

Only then, once you’ve spent a significant period of time in this journeyman stage, do you finally step into being a Master. This is where you actually begin redefining your field of expertise, building on it and adding to the knowledge base, pioneering new things, even passing it on – in other words, teaching.

As you can see, there is no way to shortcut expertise. Even those born with extraordinary abilities – from Mozart to Serena Williams, Marie Curie to Bill Gates – all need to put in the time and effort required to claim the title of expert. Likewise, there’s no point building a brand positioning or marketing strategy around expertise unless you or your team has spent years accumulating it.

How do people perceive expertise?

Let’s assume for the moment that there is a genuine level of expertise within your business – it may lie with the founder, the CTO, the product development team or a handful of consultants. Now the question is: can you prove it? Because what is there and what people see are often two vastly different things.

When you’re scoping out a business to see if they’re experts – let’s imagine you’re an SME looking for an ESG consultant, armed with nothing more than a handful of names from Google or LinkedIn – there are a few boxes you’re going to expect them to be able to tick as a baseline…

Understanding

First, you’ll want to know that they understand you – your sector, your challenges, your goals. If you’re a multinational FMCG brand, you’re likely to discount the consultancy that has specialised in SMEs or the hospitality sector.

Clarity

You’ll also want to get some clarity around the problems you’re facing. Some help digging below your surface level symptoms to uncover what’s really going on. A bit of guidance and even empathy goes a long way here and also helps to show they actually understand you.

Insight

You’ll also want your expert to be able to give you insights – to show you what you don’t know. An expert will educate you, give you the data, the trends. What is it you should be focusing your attention on? What questions should you be asking?

Solutions

Where you have a problem, you’ll expect them to be able to show you what solutions are available – not just what they can do for you as a service provider, but all the possibilities. What are the pros and cons of each? What are the cost implications?

Recommendations

And you’ll expect them to be able to give you some recommendations. Again, this is not about them pushing their solution but about them really understanding you and showing that they care about you getting the right outcome, even if that isn’t working with them.

The differentiator… Evidence

And then finally – and this is most crucial – you’ll want them to be able to back up everything they say. You’re about to spend a lot of money and take a big risk. You need to know they can walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

How to establish expertise using content

Now bear in mind that a lot of these points above are going to be part of the service that is ultimately delivered to you. By the end of your engagement with whichever ESG consultancy you choose, they should have hit each of these marks.

But remember, we’re talking about choosing the firm in the first place. You haven’t worked with them yet – you haven’t even booked your free, no obligation consultation – you’ve just got a handful of names. 

So how can they show you that they understand you more than the next brand, that they have deep insights into your problem and can navigate you through the possible solutions? That they have experience and get results and that they actually care?

That’s where content comes in. And that’s what the next blog in this series is all about: How to build your brand authority with expertise-based content.

If you need support to put together a content strategy that will help you build authority, visibility and trust, get in touch to see how I can help.

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It’s been a long time since anyone really needed to sell the benefits of creating content for marketing purposes. In fact, if anything, it’s so popular that there’s far too much content out there these days. Blog posts, whitepapers, social posts, podcasts, videos, reels… The challenge now is not creating content but creating content that gets results.

The problem is that all too often, the focus is on the deliverables. There’s a pressure to create something tangible, to see results as soon as possible. But to rush the thinking in order to accelerate the doing is ultimately to position yourself as the hare in that old children’s tale. 

Winning comes from taking the tortoise’s approach. Here’s what that entails when it comes to content, and why it’s better for business in the long run.

TL:DR

You need to understand what your content is for

This is a really important question and one you need to be able to answer clearly rather than in general terms. The word strategic is bandied about far too much in business circles but in this case it’s appropriate. Strategic means, in a nutshell, instrumental in achieving the aims of a wider, longer-term plan. 

I’m not just talking about a marketing plan here but the broader business aims that take into account your sales team’s goals, your product team’s pipeline, and the ambitions your C-suite have. These go beyond lead generation and closing deals. 

For instance, if you’re a service-based company, one of your wider goals might include:

If you’re a product-based company, one of your wider goals might be to:

When your content strategy is aligned to a specific wider goal like one of these, it enables you to switch gears from the generic good practices of marketing – generate leads, build community, support the sales funnel, etc. 

Instead you can drive the most important priorities of your organisation. And you can do it in every content decision, from the type of content you produce and what topics you cover to where you share it and how often you release it.

What is your audience interested in?

As important as it is to know what you’re trying to achieve with your content, it’s even more important to understand what your audience is trying to achieve. 

Are they stuck on a problem and need help exploring it and discovering what solutions are available? Are they completely unaware that disaster is round the corner and therefore in need of a wake up call? Are they a bit hazy about a trending topic and looking for a well articulated overview so they can sound smart in their next board meeting?

You may already have customer or client personas but the chances are these have not been developed with a view to content creation. So go back to them and think about what your audience might engage with. 

Better still, dig into the data and see what they are already engaging with. What are they commenting on or reacting to on LinkedIn? Which of your blog posts or emails are getting the most views or opens?

How are people going to find your content?

Much as we’d all love to create content that goes viral, spreading by word of mouth because of its sheer brilliance, the reality is that’s highly unlikely to happen in all but a very small handful of cases.

There are three main ways to get your content in front of people. First, you can share it where they are – social media, YouTube, conferences etc. In this case, your content needs to be eye catching and engaging, hooking your audience quickly. It’s likely to be shorter and more visual, enticing them to take the next step, whether that’s clicking through to a longer form piece of content, visiting a website or making a buy decision.

You can also catch people in search mode. This is where SEO and AI search comes in, which means doing work on SEO / AI search strategy. Yes, more strategy. Because plucking a few keywords out of the air isn’t enough to drive results. You need to understand everything from search volume to search intent – and that’s before you get into the technical side.

Finally, you can send your content to people, having built up your email and contacts database. From the simplest of newsletters to personalised relationship-building emails to nurture sequences designed to convert for a specific product or service, there are many ways to use the contact details you’ve collected to deliver the right content exactly when it’s needed.

What do you want your audience to do next?

It’s totally acceptable to count someone reading, watching or listening to your content as a win. They are now aware of your brand, and have hopefully formed at least an initial impression of it as being helpful or disruptive or fun or whatever it is that you’re trying to establish.

But ideally, you want them to take action after engaging with your content. What that action is will depend on where they are in their buyer journey. If they’re near the top of the funnel, getting them to engage with a second piece of content could be enough. Or you might want them to download or sign up to something so that you have their contact details, or follow your account on social media so you can stay in front of them.

As you move down the funnel you may want to direct them to case studies, product or service pages, or blog posts that hone in on the features and benefits of what you offer. And finally you’ll have sales collateral, which should also form part of your content plan, where the CTAs will focus on starting a free trial, booking a demo, contacting the sales team or making a purchase.

Campaign-thinking

Ultimately what you’ll need to do is to string the different pieces of content you’re creating together to create a campaign that includes the ‘how they get to it’ and ‘what they do afterwards’ bits, linking the whole thing back to those business objectives. Without this, you’re not going to get the results you need.

I remember once, at the agency, when one of our clients asked us to create a case study for them. I pushed back and told them no. Because creating a case study wouldn’t have been enough. To achieve the wider goals they had in mind, we needed to design a campaign that would maximise the number of people reaching the case study by creating an awareness journey – not only a case study but two related blog posts and a series of LinkedIn posts, which would educate and nudge a readership towards a place where they cared to read it all. 

The LinkedIn posts worked their magic, generating click-through rates that were well above industry averages. And as a result, Hotjar analysis of the case study showed that engagement with those that reached it was very high – 61% of visitors read to the halfway point, with 50% staying engaged until the ‘outcomes’ section near the bottom of the page. 

If you need a content strategy that doesn’t rely on churning out more and more but actually gets results, get in touch today.

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Sell the sizzle, not the sausage. It’s a (somewhat) useful shortcut that sums up the importance of focusing on benefits over features. But have marketers become too obsessed with pushing benefits? Are we risking becoming the fluff merchants that the rest of the world often dismisses us as?

The truth is that when you’re buying a sausage, you may well be enticed by visions of summer barbecues and happy families. But actually, you almost certainly do want to know whether it’s 65% pork or 85%. You want to know if it’s Lincolnshire or Cumberland. You may want to know if the ingredients are locally sourced, or organic, or gluten free.

All of these are features, and they’re all important.

The same goes for service-based businesses, or those in the B2B space. It’s all very well to promise that your offering will save people time, money or effort (or all three) but everyone else is promising the same thing. If you want to get people to part with their cash, you need to be able to talk about how you’re going to do this. Otherwise, you’re just churning out that marketing fluff.

TL:DR

Why are features important?

Buyers – of sausages and of software – are increasingly sophisticated. We have access to so much more information today than we ever have. We’ve seen marketing done well. And we’re not going to be fobbed off with vague promises any more (if, indeed, we ever were).

There’s too much marketing out there that tries to engage people in this kind of conversation:

“Hi Mx Prospect, did you know we can help increase your team’s productivity?”

“Sounds great, how?”

“By improving efficiency!”

“Yes, but how?”

“Streamlining processes! Boosting morale!”

“Sigh…”

We’re not saying you need to ditch the benefits messaging. Benefits help your audience understand how the features you’re selling will change their lives for the better. But without features to back them up, they’re too vague to get real results.

When to talk about features vs benefits

When it comes to features vs benefits, it’s important to think about the ‘when’. To keep running with a simple analogy, if your reader isn’t in the market for a sausage, then going on about the quality of your ingredients or the fact that they’re locally sourced isn’t really going to be that helpful. They’re not hungry, they don’t care.

At this early stage of the buyer journey, you do need to focus on the benefits. Paint a picture of a sunny garden, bbq crackling away, music blaring, a couple of beers and the sizzle of sauces on the grill. Better yet, go a step further and hint at the stresses of life slipping away, or key relationships being strengthened at that outdoor gathering (these are the real benefits, after all).

Now your audience is interested. Now you can talk about the features of your particular gluten free, locally sourced, 95% organic hand-reared pork sausage.

This concept is brilliantly summed up in Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas. She talks about the ‘logic sandwich’, which starts and ends with emotion but contains a healthy portion of meaty facts in the middle. (Whether you’re a marketer or founder, if you haven’t read the book, you really must.)

A quick note about the difference between sausages and software

It’s also worth pointing out that there’s a pretty big difference between buying a packet of sausages and a new piece of software for a multinational organisation. Not least the amount the buyer is going to be spending.

In the latter case, the buyer journey is going to be an awful lot longer and more complex, with a far greater need to go beyond the fluff. Shouting about how you bring products to market faster, increase sales efficiency, or save time on back office admin won’t get more than someone’s initial attention.

What are you going to do next? How will you help your audience to become increasingly interested, to evaluate and even trial your offering? You’ll need to dig deep into the features at some point and, if you don’t, you’ll lose their attention.

By all means tie those features back to the benefits they deliver – gluten free sausage ingredients that mean little Susan doesn’t feel left out at the family BBQ, or sustainably sourced pork that’s better for the environment – but don’t focus on the benefits at the expense of the features. Educate people on how one impacts the other. Give them the tools to make a good decision for themselves. 

In short, sell the sizzle but don’t forget to be clear about what makes your particular brand of sausage better than the next manufacturer’s. Tell people how you’re going to deliver the benefits you promise and you’ll take your marketing beyond the fluff.

If you need help teasing out the features and benefits of your products or services and articulating them in a way that your audience will engage with, take a look at my brand strategy services or get in touch.

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