As the saying goes, “content is king.” Why? Because great content is ideal for SEO and digital marketing efforts because it offers value and establishes your brand expertise.
However, meeting both of those characteristics can be challenging. Often, the person in your organization with the most subject-matter expertise on your industry or a given topic is not the one who’s actually creating the content. How can you ensure that your content establishes your brand’s credibility?
Here’s how subject-matter experts in an organization can best capture their ideas for their team’s content creators and contribute to content marketing efforts.
Get an Interview
Start by having the content creator conduct an interview with the subject-matter expert. A series of questions can get their wheels turning and generate some excellent soundbites, topic ideas, and how-tos. If the interview goes well, it can become a content piece itself!
Great prompts for an interview include:
- Timely questions about current events
- Recommended advice for industry stakeholders
- Insights into the industry’s top trends, software, development, etc.
- Myths and misconceptions about the industry
- Ideas about the industry’s outlook and visions for its future
Go beyond the basic: Encourage the subject-matter expert to go into detail and share their unique insights. Great content is more than a general overview. It shares meaningful ideas and information that make your brand stand out from competitors. Whenever possible, make it practical, with actionable advice.
Create a Guide
Empower your team or thought-leader to generate great content by giving them a guidebook. This can be a series of standard interview questions or prompts for practical advice, quotable statements, etc.
Subject-matter experts may not know which information would be most relevant or enticing for the organization’s target customers. They’re often surprised to learn that a general audience is curious about the knowledge they took for granted.
These guides can extract their greatest insights and compelling details that take your content from “generic” to “impressive!”
Here are some examples of content creation guides:
- Topical overviews: A standard outline in which the subject-matter expert can provide key points about a topic that can be distilled into a video or article.
- Thought leadership prompts: A set of open-ended questions designed to elicit valuable insights and expert opinions about the industry.
- Explainers: A step-by-step outline of a critical process.
The completed guidebook is a simple method to help people get all their subject-matter expertise out of their brains and into our hands. This makes it a treasure trove for the content creator. Rather than having to ask specific questions for each project, they can pull what they need from this knowledge base.
Plus, all content can be easily linked together by the brand’s thought leadership.
Wrapping Up
Your company’s or your client’s subject-matter experts are a wealth of knowledge that can become fantastic content that’s highly valuable to their audiences. If you’re an internal content creator for your organization or are a contractor working with a brand, these practices can help your get all of that expertise out of their brain, onto a page and help contribute to the content marketing efforts you are working on.
Creating content guides will help them stay focused and understand what types of ideas and insights you want. This way, you can get better information and ultimately create better content with less frustration!
This two-step approach helps you establish your brand’s or your client’s thought leadership with high-value content.
Need help with your content marketing strategy or in building your content creation guides? Reach out to us here at Breezy any time!
