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“We’re experts. We’ve been doing this for years. Just look at our case studies.” 

This is something I’ve heard from potential clients time and again at the beginning of a brand discovery workshop. They’ve been in the game forever, get most of their business from referrals and haven’t had to think much about brand positioning or messaging before.

Now though, something has changed – there are disruptors nipping at their heels, a key contract is looking uncertain, or maybe they’ve just got big expansion plans – and suddenly there’s a need to get serious about marketing. Thankfully for them, they’ve realised that starts with brand positioning.

The problem is that “we’re great at what we do and we’ve been doing it for a long time” isn’t a brand strategy or position. Neither is “we have a unique way of offering [insert service here]”. I’ve heard those same lines from countless other businesses. They’re simply not enough to get you noticed, especially in a crowded marketplace.

The power of 3 for memorable brand positioning

When it comes to brand positioning, being good at what you do is table stakes. You might believe you’re better than the competition but they’re going to make the same claims and your audience won’t have a way to distinguish you.

If you really want to stand out, you need to create a more rounded brand that is not only credible but memorable. That means thinking beyond expertise to include other elements that make you harder to imitate. That’s where the Brand Triangulation Framework comes in.

In both geometry and structural engineering, a triangle is the simplest structure that won’t collapse. By anchoring your brand on three key points, we can locate your brand precisely in a crowded landscape, making you a clear choice.

Point 01: Expertise – establishing credibility

When I say expertise isn’t enough, I don’t mean that it isn’t important. If what you sell is knowledge, experience or skill then this should absolutely be a key part of your core brand positioning.

But having expertise is one thing – communicating that in a way which will actually build your brand reputation is quite another. The key is to do three things with your Expertise point…

Find a niche

Firstly, wherever possible, find a niche. Do you develop apps specifically for small, membership-based charities? Run ecology surveys for private estate developers? Deliver career progression workshops for women in the private sector? Niching technically reduces your audience base but it also makes it much easier to get their attention.

Use the right language

Next, you want to articulate what you do and what makes you special in language your audience will actually understand. Don’t use technical terms if they’ll just complicate things. And remember to focus on both features and benefits, rather than just one or the other. You want people to understand what you can help them achieve and how you’re going to be able to do that.

Prove it

Finally, you have to prove it. Anyone can say they’re an expert. But if you want to build authority, you’ll need to be able to back that up. That means using real life anecdotes and case studies to show where you’ve put theory into practice, explaining complex ideas clearly and concisely using helpful analogies and original frameworks, sharing data that only someone with years of experience would have access to.

Point 02: Perspective – starting conversation

Of course, you’re only going to get a chance to establish credibility if you can get your audience’s attention in the first place. If you’re going after a cold or even lukewarm audience – or one that’s not yet in the market to buy but may be in the future – then you’ll need something to use as a hook and make you memorable enough that they’ll come back when they need you.

Having a perspective does just that. It shows not only that you’re capable but how you see the world and who you are within it. In a crowded field where others might be able to match you on experience, perspective creates preference. There are virtually any number of perspectives you can take and yet it is often overlooked, giving it huge potential for differentiation.

So how do you build perspective into your brand positioning? It might look like challenging common industry practices, taking a stance on what matters vs what doesn’t, or demonstrating how your values as a business shape your decision-making. Just make sure your perspective is authentic and shared across the business so you build consistency and trust rather than trying to dupe people, which never works out well in the end.

A mini brand positioning case study

I recently worked with an ecology team in a national development consultancy. Their competitors tend to fall into one of two camps – those pushing the “we’ll help you save the world” line, and those taking a more commercial “we’ll get the job done on time and on budget” approach. 

So we did something different and came down in the middle with a pragmatic stance about how biodiversity is good for business, people and the environment. The team is currently recruiting because they’re bringing in so much new business.

Point 03: Character – building connection

Every brand has a character whether or not it’s deliberate. If it’s not deliberate then at best it’s probably bland and forgettable. At worst, it could be inconsistent, unclear or even off-putting.

In business, character – personality, if you prefer (though I think character goes deeper) is expressed in everything from the imagery you use on your website to the anecdotes you share on LinkedIn, the energy with which your team answers the phone, or whether you have mugs, balloons or golf balls on your conference table. 

Brand archetypes are a good starting point for thinking about character but you’re not limited to just 12. You can have a blend of two, either equally balanced or with one taking the lead. Or go off-piste and create one of your own.

This isn’t about being loud, it’s about being memorable. Because people don’t remember neutral, especially in industries like consulting or professional services, where the actual service offering can easily feel interchangeable.

Why many brands fail – and how to get it right 

Like a three legged stool, if you take away just one leg, the whole thing falls apart. Expertise without perspective feels generic – perspective without expertise lacks credibility. Expertise and perspective without character or personality is smart but forgettable.

It’s the triangulation of the three points that creates brand positioning. That’s what makes a brand layered, interesting and distinct. Too many organisations put all their weight on just one point – usually expertise – and then wonder why no one’s paying any attention.

What you need to do is go beyond a list of services or a case study database. Those are important but they’re just a start. Building a defendable brand position requires clarity, honesty and usually an external perspective – as David C Baker wrote in his book The Business of Expertise, “You can’t see the label from inside the jar.”

Most brands don’t struggle because they lack expertise. They struggle because they haven’t triangulated it. With three clearly defined, articulated and consistent points mapped out, you’ll never have to say “we’re the experts” again. Because people will already know.

If you’re rethinking your messaging or position, let’s have a chat so I can help you start off on the right foot.

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To celebrate B Corp month, I spoke to three B Corp communications experts to get their tips on how best to communicate values and impact in the sustainability and ESG space.

TL:DR

The changing face of ESG communications

We’ve come a long way since the days when sticking the word “green” in front of a product name was enough to convince people that buying it was good for the environment. Today the sustainability agenda has a hard won – if tenuous – seat in many boardrooms and governments the world over, as we face the realities of climate change and social injustice.

Few have observed this journey more closely than those tasked with communicating sustainability efforts and impact. Over the last 15 years, Rosalind Holley has worked for brands including UnLtd and JustGiving, and is now Director of Communications & Marketing at B Lab UK. When she started her career, the sustainability space was very different to what it is today.

“In the early days, people considered that you could either be a charity with a social mission or you could be a big bad business making a profit – it was challenging to get across the message that you could be a business and make a positive impact,” she says.

“Today it’s easier to be a business that considers people and the planet – there are a lot more of them, they’re better known. And increasingly people want to hear what brands are doing in this space, so there’s more of an open door for brands to talk about the work they’re doing.

“At the same time, the explosion of businesses trying to communicate impact means that it’s hard sometimes for people to understand what is true, what can be trusted, which does make it more difficult for brands in that space.”

Alessandra Sabellico, Global Corporate Communications & Reputation Director at Davines Group, has been in communications management for over 20 years. She has also seen enormous changes over that time, and believes that the role of sustainability communications is being redefined.

“The role of the sustainability communicator today is to help companies engage stakeholders by telling the whole story of sustainability,” she says. 

“This means talking about the difficulties, setbacks and failures on the path to becoming a better company. This is very different from the traditional mindset of corporate communications and marketing, which has been until now to spin the story to make the company look as favourable as possible.”

Sustainability legislation and compliance

Part of what is driving the need for greater transparency within sustainability and ESG comms is the increase in legislation.

“With a series of new regulations coming from Europe (and in the United States as well), the stakes of communicating sustainability are becoming higher and higher,” says Alessandra.

“Greenwashing, in addition to being a huge risk to a company’s reputation, comes with steep fines and threats of legal action, and effective sustainability communicators must learn to balance compliance with a compelling narrative.”

At Davines, this is driving greater teamwork between communications, marketing, sustainability and legal teams.

“This teamwork allows us to figure out what are the things that we can talk about, what are the ones that we’re not ready to talk about and then what do we need to do to change the substance of our sustainability program so that we can make the claims that engage our stakeholders while telling a truthful story of progress.”

Engaging with cynical, overwhelmed audiences

Of course, legislators are only one of the many stakeholders that ESG communications professionals need to consider. And each audience type needs something different.

“The starting point for any communications strategy is who are your audiences, and why are you trying to communicate this with them?” says Ros. 

“You might have a specific focus of trying to attract future employees, or you might be more focused on your customers or your communities or other stakeholders like investors, or policy makers.

“If you’re really clear on which of those audiences you’re going after, you can then think about whether you need to tell a story on your product or on your website or through social media. There’s not a one size fits all method. People will want different levels of depth.”

At Davines, engagement means communicating with everyone, starting with employees and ending with clients.

“That’s why internal communication and communication aimed at our community of hairdressers and estheticians is increasingly crucial for us,” says Alessandra. 

“This is because those who work in the Group, those who choose its products and those who buy them are not just earning a salary or buying an effective product but are part of a larger project that affects us all and is aimed at generating well-being and value for the planet and for people.”

The challenge for engagement though, is that people are becoming ever more cynical with the increase in sustainability messaging, making it harder to cut through the noise. And it may be that your ESG credentials aren’t the thing they care about the most anyway.

Kristen Fuller, Marketing and Communications Manager at Toast Brewing, says that in the first instance, you have to remember that you’re a business that is trying to sell a product or a service that people need.

“People want to know that we make great beer,” she says. “We’d love to believe that people think about sustainability first but we’re all human, people want a product that tastes great or that works or whatever the reason is that they’re buying something. They want it to deliver on whatever it’s supposed to deliver on.

“What we’ve learned is that you’ve got to convince people in the first instance that the beer tastes great and then they’re open to hearing the impact message.”

Make it relevant, tangible and easy to understand 

So what else can communications leads with a sustainability message do to engage their audiences without falling foul of regulations and drawing accusations of greenwashing. At Toast, the answer lies in combining factual data with storytelling, to make impact both tangible and relevant to their audience.

“The thing that our sales teams often focus on is the fact that every pint saves one slice of bread from being wasted,” says Kristen. “So when someone’s drinking their pint, they can think, ‘Great, I’ve saved a slice of bread’ – it’s a small but tangible win.”

In a similar vein, the team recently dug into the relative carbon footprints of drinking a pint of Toast beer on draft, from a bottle or from a can. They shared the results using a simple graphic on their social channels, which clearly showed how draft had the least negative environmental impact and bottles had the most. The post had exceptional engagement.

“That’s the kind of comms where people went, ‘Wow, great, when I’m buying my beer, I can choose a can over a bottle now and I know I’m making a good choice.” Again, it’s something tangible and that really got people engaged. It’s about making things easy for people to understand.”

B Lab UK’s Ros agrees that simple, straightforward communication that people can understand is key.

“It’s really easy to blind people with science – and it can be tempting to do that to prove the impact we’re having – but if it’s hard for people to understand, it’s not meaningful, then that can start to slide into greenwashing,” says Ros.

“Try to get specific about what you’re doing without resorting to too much jargon, try to make your language human, try to show what it really means in practice, and acknowledge that you’re on a path rather than finished. Because it’s not like you’re ever done with sustainability so don’t try and say that you’re done. Telling the story of the journey as well as the destination is really important.”

Show the how and build community

One of the easiest ways to help people understand your sustainability journey is to let them experience it for themselves. That means sharing it consistently, giving them behind-the-scenes glimpses that show rather than tell them about the work you’re doing.

“It’s the snippets, like Pizza Pilgrims sharing an Instagram reel of where their ingredients are locally sourced from, or Riverford giving over their newsletters to talking about the seasonal impact of their work,” says Ros. 

“They allow people to get under the hood of what they’re doing. And that consistent, honest ‘working out loud’ is something people respond really well to because they can see that it’s not about using a superlative once every three years and then never talking about it again. It’s about making it part of the ongoing drum beat of how we tell the story of our business.”

But sustainability comms doesn’t start and end with showcasing your own impact. There are many other ways to engage your audience in the wider conversation, to educate people and encourage them to make better choices.

The Toast team recently got involved with the No Mow May campaign, led by PlantlIfe, encouraging their audience on social media to share pictures of their unmowed lawns and linking it to product giveaways.

“At Toast we believe that food is nature and if we waste food, we waste nature, so getting involved in No Mow May felt authentic to the brand and the people behind it,” says Kristen. “It got a lot of really positive engagement and user generated content.

“It’s about building that community and encouraging people that we can make a difference if we work together. You’ve got to try to get people to engage with the message and spread it, but also not guilt trip them.”

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Sustainability communications is an exciting place to be right now, but there’s no doubt it has its challenges. And it’s likely that this space is only going to get more complex as we move ever closer to 2030 and beyond. 

We’ll almost certainly see more businesses entering the arena with sustainability messaging, legislation and regulation will shift and tighten, audiences will grow more knowledgeable and demands on us will increase.

In the face of this, it would be easy to shy away from communicating sustainability and impact at all, retreating into ‘greenhushing’ rather than risk being called out for falling short. But that’s not the way to make progress.

“If you’re the spokesperson or the person leading on a sustainability initiative or issue, you have to be willing to engage with it,” says Ros. “It’s a two-way street. If you’re putting communications out into the world, you can expect your stakeholders to have an opinion on them.

“But don’t immediately feel like, ‘Oh no, we’ve been criticised so that’s it, no more communicating about our sustainability efforts!’ Those opinions might actually be constructive, they may give you some interesting pointers as to where you want to go next. As communications professionals, we have to keep the conversation going.”

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Getting results from content marketing has never been more challenging. Especially if you’re an ESG-focused organisation, dealing with increasing regulation and cynicism in the face of so much green-washing and values-washing. 

Yet with the right strategy, content is still an incredibly powerful marketing tool, especially when it comes to building trust. So how do you ensure that the content you create makes an impact – and showcases yours?

It’s important to understand the challenges that exist within today’s marketing and business landscape, so that you can create a content strategy that takes these challenges into account. Only by doing so can you fully plan to create a brand that stands on genuine value as well as values, and outlasts whatever trend springs up next.

TL:DR

The content marketing challenge

Ever since the phrase content marketing was coined in 2001 there are two issues that have been growing exponentially: noise and cynicism.

In the early 2000s, only the biggest brands had websites. But when WordPress and Squarespace launched in 2003, websites became accessible to all. Then YouTube, Twitter, print-on-demand and all the other platforms and channels arrived and suddenly, the internet was a very noisy place. 

As content marketing has evolved, so has our cynicism. We’re far less ready to believe what we read or see or hear than we once were.

And AI is only making these problems worse. From low quality ChatGPT blog content to generic AI-generated responses on LinkedIn and a host of deep fakes across pretty much every digital channel going, it’s no wonder we don’t know who to trust.

If you want lots of content, AI can help. If you want to build a reputation, you still need humans.

The ESG / purpose marketing challenge

Alongside these broader content marketing challenges, there are a unique set of hurdles facing any organisation that has a set of values, principles or ESG-criteria at its heart.

The first is the language used to describe such brands, which is constantly evolving and never simple. As we entered the 21st century, terms like  ‘ethical’, ‘green’, and ‘eco-friendly’ were popular. Today we’re more likely to talk about a business being purpose-driven or values-led. CSR (corporate social responsibility) has been joined and in some cases replaced by ESG (environment, social, governance). None of these really captures the whole truth – and all have been misused.

Then there’s the fact that purpose is no longer a differentiator in the way it once was. As buyers demand more in the way of values from their suppliers, brands are jumping on the purpose bandwagon. Which means that once again, we’re seeing an increase in noise that makes it harder to stand out.

Likewise, people are becoming more cynical. Claim impact without being able to back that up and you’ll face accusations of green-washing or values-washing. Increasingly, you may also face regulatory compliance issues too.

In the face of these challenges, there are a number of factors to consider within your brand and content marketing strategy…

Positioning on value rather than values

First things first – are your ESG credentials really strong enough to be the foundation on which you build your outward facing brand? Are you a Patagonia, a Who Gives A Crap, or a Davines?

If not, you will need to consider how else to format your value proposition, focusing on the value you can add rather than simply the values you hold. Given the choice between a company with a great product and undefined values, or a company with a solid ESG policy but an average product, most buyers would opt for the former.

If you do have the credentials to build a brand around ESG criteria (and your audience cares about this sufficiently for it to be a differentiator), make sure you can back up your claims. In this, as in all things, you need to show rather than tell – and not in a tokenistic way. Pictures of your team planting trees might look great on LinkedIn but if you’re also using non-recyclable plastics in your product packaging, that’s marketing fluff at best and greenwashing at worst.

Making sure ESG is an operational effort first

Speaking of tokenistic, if ESG efforts are led by the marketing department, they are always going to feel like a layer of makeup – designed to embellish or to hide rather than tell the truth. ESG needs to be operationally driven, informing activity and decision-making throughout the organisation, with impact being tracked as anything else would be.

The job of the marketing department in regards to impact is the same as it is in all things – to provide customers and potential customers with the information they’re looking for. People want to know what brands stand for. They want to understand how they treat people and the planet.

So marketers within ESG-focused organisations need to package up that information and communicate it with the outside world as best as possible. To demonstrate impact across all marketing channels, to ensure that impact reports are engaging as well as accurate, to spread the message as widely as possible.

Being helpful, not just good

That said, it’s not just about communicating impact. Wherever you sit on the scale of values, whether it’s a central part of your value proposition or not, remember that your marketing needs to be more about helping your audience than proving how good you are.

When I ran RH& Co, a certified B Corporation, values were naturally a central part of who we were. And they definitely resonated with our clients, especially fellow B Corps and those in ESG-focused or third sector organisations. But what they really cared about is that we were an exceptional bunch of writers and strategists who could help them communicate their expertise effectively.

Yes, we had an impact report and yes, we sometimes shared our views about important topics like equality and the environment. But the majority of our marketing focused on content strategy, getting the best out of subject matter experts or creating content for each stage of the customer journey. In other words, how our creative team helps clients to build their brand reputation. 

Naturally, our values were what drove the business – but being helpful and valuable is what drove our content.

Investing in the longterm

To truly have an impact in this world, we need to balance short term results with long term impact. Carrying out activities today that have little positive effect on tomorrow just isn’t enough. It’s the ‘feed a person / teach a person to fish’ principle.

We need to take the same approach to building ESG-focused brands. Short term activations may be necessary but if you want to be seen as a values-led organisation then, as well as actually being a genuinely values-led organisation, you need to look at brand building as a longterm exercise.

A lot of the content you create won’t generate exciting results this week or this month or maybe even this quarter. But over time it will all build together to create something much bigger than itself. The somewhat nebulous, often fragile and utterly essential asset every ESG-focused organisation needs: a trusted reputation.

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This article is based on a talk given by Rin at brightonSEO in April 2024. You can watch the recording below.

Sex therapy. Embedded finance. And buying land. At first, these subjects don’t appear to have anything in common. But actually they do – they’re all subjects the RH&Co team have helped our clients rank for on Google. 

Is that because our writers are experts in the subject? No – though they know a lot more about them now than they did before! Instead, we leveraged our clients’ subject matter experts and combined their knowledge and insights with our own expertise in communicating complex information in a way that is engaging, valuable and generates results.

Over the last two decades – since the advent of content marketing in the early noughties – expertise has, if anything, become more important. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but this article is about SEO and that means we need to look at EEAT.

TLDR:

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What is EEAT and why does it matter for SEO?

It was around 10 years ago that Google introduced EAT, very quickly adding another E to form EEAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Here’s how they define these attributes:

Strictly speaking EEAT isn’t a ranking factor. However, it is used to guide Google’s Page Quality Raters – the people who assess content and judge how useful it is. These individuals judge individual pages, websites as a whole, and content creators, and they’re looking at literally everything from whether there are SSL certificates to whether the content is actually any good. 

This information helps Google to understand whether its algorithms are doing their job. So feedback from Page Quality Raters is likely to have gone into the August 2022 Helpful Content update, which was all about penalising pages that are designed for clicks rather than to inform readers. And the March 2024 Improved Quality Ranking update, which was all about reducing unoriginal content.

Ultimately, Google’s mission is to “organise the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s what EEAT is about and that’s why it’s important for SEOs. So how do subject matter experts fit in?

What is expertise and how does it relate to EEAT?

We’ve written a lot about what expertise is, why its important and how buyers perceive it. If you really want to dive into the subject, we’d also recommend reading two fantastic books (and giving them to your subject matter experts while you’re at it):

For SEO purposes, it’s worth looking at what expertise is as Google would, based on the EEAT definitions in the previous section. In this case, an expert is someone who has real life experience, knows more than the average person, and can demonstrate why we should listen to them and why we should trust them.

Expertise as a positioning strategy

It’s worth stressing that expertise is not a quick fix – it’s a positioning strategy. It takes planning and effort and commitment to get it right and to get results. You can’t simply stick a subject matter expert’s byline on a piece of content and hope that works. Remember, this isn’t about fooling an algorithm, it’s about providing genuine value to your audience and building a reputation over the long term.

Internal vs external experts 

Another thing to remember is that expertise exists in many places. Hopefully you will have subject matter experts within your business – your consultants, your CTO, your product leads, even your head chef, if you run a restaurant. Internal experts allow you to own that knowledge, experience, authority and trust as a brand.

But there are external experts that can be worth tapping into as well. These could be your partners, industry influencers, even your own users. Drawing on their knowledge and experience for your content makes you an expert by association.

How to work with subject matter experts on SEO content

So if you’re a marketer tasked with building a reputation for your brand, where do you start with EEAT? How do you actually work with your subject matter experts to create content that works for both your readers and for Google? Broadly speaking, there are three approaches.

Get your experts to create content for you

Advantages: 

The advantage of this approach is that it takes less of your time – in theory, at least (see disadvantages). As a result, it’s scalable: lots of experts = lots of content. And it’s pretty low cost because you’re not having to bring in any professionals to create that content for you.

Disadvantages:

Unfortunately, the reality is that coordinating experts whose main role (and skill) is not content creation is a lot like herding cats. Your experts – whether internal or external – are busy people with their own agendas, so content is likely to slip down the ‘to do’ list.

They’re also not marketers. They aren’t trained to look at what an audience will engage with, they don’t understand tone of voice, they’re not used to seamlessly weaving in appropriate keywords. As a result, you could end up with copy that needs so much rewriting you may as well have done it yourself.

How to do it:

If you are going to get experts creating content for you, the first thing you’ll need to do is to sell the benefits of them getting involved, or even incentivise them, especially if they’re external. 

You’ll also need to create some sort of editorial guidelines – tone of voice, content length and so on. And you’ll need decent briefs that explain exactly what you want each piece of content to contain, to achieve etc.

And you’ll still need that internal content champion – whether it’s you or someone else – who can do the “cat herding” and can also look after edits and amends to ensure that the content is consistent, that it’s on brief, and that it achieves its objectives.

Create content and get experts to sign it off

Advantages:

At the other end of the scale, this method involves writing the content yourself and simply getting your experts to approve it, which has some very attractive benefits.

First, you have full control of content. You can make sure it’s on brief, on brand, that it ticks the right keyword boxes and so on. You’re also not reliant on anyone, except in the final approval stages, which can be tricky still but not nearly as tricky as getting a busy subject matter expert to write something for you.

Disadvantages:

The downside is that unless you’re also a subject matter expert, any content you create is likely to contain little genuine and unique expertise – things like real life anecdotes or analogies that only someone deeply rooted in the subject would come up with. That means the content will probably be easily replicable. And if you want to increase the volume of content, you’ll need more writing resource.

How to do it:

Despite its limitations, this method of creating EEAT content for SEO purposes can be very effective. It’s how we helped our client Blueheart, a health tech scale up, increase their site visits by 300% within 6 months.

If you do go down this route, you’ll need to develop really good research skills. You’ll need to be able to sift the wheat from the chaff, especially when it comes to credible sources and authoritative citations – no linking to a Wikipedia page as the source of your knowledge. 

And ideally, draw on case studies so at least you’ve got some unique brand stories in there, even if you haven’t got personalised insights directly from your experts.

Work collaboratively with your experts

Advantages:

This is how we most often work with our clients – from global consultancies like TPC Leadership to fintech scaleups like Weavr. It allows us to get the best blend of our client’s expertise in whatever it is that they do, and our expertise as content creators.

Speaking directly to subject matter experts not only allows you to get factual insights but the juicy nuggets that make the best content uniquely appealing and valuable – experiences, anecdotes and analogies that bring those facts to life.

Disadvantages:

On the downside, it does take more time. You will need more writing resource, you’ll still need to convince your experts to prioritise time to give you their insights, and it may well be that the approval process is challenging, especially with internal experts. 

How to do it: 

As with getting them to do it themselves, you’ll need to sell the benefits and potentially incentivise your experts. You’ll also still need to create some sort of ‘prebrief’ so that they’re prepared and bring the right information to the interview process.

Speaking of which, you’ll need to develop your interview skills because, just as not all experts are great content creators, they’re not all great communicators either. Some will give too much detail, some not enough. Some go down rabbit holes and need constant pulling back to the subject at hand.

This is often why our clients call us in – it’s not just because we write well, it’s because we know how to wrangle subject matter experts and get the best out of them.

Beyond EEAT – maximising the ROI of expertise

So we’ve looked at three different ways to involve experts in creating content for SEO and you can see that what we said at the beginning is true – expertise is a positioning strategy. It’s not an easy-fix to all of your SEO problems. The good news is that there are so many added benefits to leveraging subject matter experts beyond SEO, especially if you’re using internal ones.

By helping them to clarify their thinking, you prepare them to do all sorts of things – take part in webinars, speak to the press, give talks at conferences. And you can repurpose that content on social media, in emails, in ABM campaigns.

Whether it’s sex therapy, embedded finance, buying land or any other subject that’s relevant to your brand and your audience, by leveraging subject matter experts you can create not only EEAT-boosting super content but an awful lot more besides.

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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.

The Authority Project.

Join Rin as she goes on a quest to land a book deal and take the leap from expert to authority

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