What is Expert Content?
Expert content is thorough and detailed information on a topic, typically written by someone with deep and specialized industry knowledge. It establishes thought leadership while demonstrating your expertise in a given subject to partners and customers.
For instance, consider VERO, a visual, commercial, and digital accelerator for real estate in development, which launched a blog to position itself as an expert in the industry. Each blog article was meticulously crafted through a business-oriented content strategy, leveraging interviews with subject matter experts and relevant visuals provided by VERO. Analyzing real estate market trends and digital acceleration strategies, their expert content provided clarity and guidance, helping businesses understand how to navigate the challenges of the real estate industry.
The result was a notable increase in online visibility, with non-branded impressions rising by 127.27% and keywords ranking up by 24.75%!
The challenge many B2B founders face with expert content is ensuring its quality matches their ambition. While you may hire SEO companies and freelancers to improve Google rankings by creating more content, quantity should not come at the expense of quality. Remember that subpar content can do more harm than good!
For B2B founders, investing in expert content means building a repository of authoritative, insightful articles that genuinely enhance your company’s credibility and attract the right audience.
The Value of Expert Content for B2B Founders
Expert content offers several benefits that can transform your approach to market strategies. Let’s explore how it can strengthen the foundational aspects of a B2B business’s online presence.
The Role of Expert Content in B2B Marketing
Expert content connects businesses with their target audiences on a deeper level. It serves to educate and inform potential clients and sets the stage for informed decision-making. For instance, a well-documented case study on the successful implementation of a software can illustrate its real-world efficacy better than any sales pitch. Such content helps attract and also retain customers by providing value and expertise.
Establishing Credibility and Authority
Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is an important set of principles in the SEO world.
For B2B founders, publishing expert content that aligns with these principles is crucial. Quality content showcases your experience and expertise, demonstrating to search engines and users that you possess a profound understanding of your industry. This, in turn, builds credibility for your website and articles while also increasing trust among clients and partners who rely on your business for expert insights and solutions.
Brand Differentiation in a Competitive Market
Brand differentiation refers to creating a unique identity for your brand that distinguishes it from competitors. For B2B companies, publishing expert content plays a pivotal role in achieving this distinction, especially in markets saturated with generic information.
Here’s how publishing expert content differentiates a brand:
- Depth and Precision: By tackling complex issues with thoroughness and accuracy, B2B founders can highlight their companies’ ability to understand industry-specific challenges deeply. This level of insight positions them ahead of competitors who may provide only surface-level information.
- Unique Perspective: Expert content reflects a company’s unique viewpoint, allowing it to showcase proprietary insights that resonate with customers seeking innovative solutions.
- Anticipating Challenges: Customers are attracted to partnerships with leaders who can anticipate industry trends and challenges. By sharing forward-thinking expert content, your brand becomes a trusted guide that clients turn to for future-proof strategies.
Creating Content that Helps You Sell
Expert content persuades! By aligning content with the sales process, B2B companies can effectively guide prospects along the sales funnel toward closure. Here’s how:
- Top-of-Funnel Awareness: At the awareness stage, blog posts, articles, and social media updates introduce prospects to your brand while providing informative insights on industry trends and emerging challenges. Expert content at this stage establishes thought leadership and builds trust, encouraging prospects to delve deeper.
- Mid-Funnel Consideration: Detailed whitepapers, case studies, and webinars can address specific industry problems, highlighting the company’s products or services as potential solutions. Educating prospects on how your offerings align with their needs, you nurture them toward a purchasing decision.
- Bottom-of-Funnel Decision: At this stage, expert content like ROI calculators, in-depth guides, and customer testimonials can solidify your company’s value proposition. This content provides prospects with the necessary information to make informed decisions, reinforcing why your solution is the best choice.
- Post-Sale Loyalty: Retaining customers requires ongoing support and relationship building. Expert content in the form of FAQs, onboarding guides, and how-to videos helps customers maximize the value of their purchases. This creates a positive brand experience that encourages repeat business.
Subject Matter Experts vs. Content Experts?
There are two distinct roles in content creation – subject matter experts (SMEs) and content experts. While both roles are crucial, they serve distinctly different purposes.
- Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): SMEs possess first-hand knowledge and insights into their specific topics. With years of experience, they provide a profound understanding of their subject areas that can’t be replicated through simple research alone. Their expertise offers authoritative and unique insights that can establish credibility and depth in content.
- Content Experts: In contrast, content experts specialize in communication. They excel at translating intricate technical knowledge into accessible and engaging narratives for broader audiences. They’re adept at crafting stories, optimizing for SEO, and ensuring content is comprehensible and engaging while maintaining technical accuracy.
The real magic happens when the deep, technical know-how of the SME is translated into engaging, readable content by a skilled content expert.
This synergy is vital for B2B founders who aim to produce authoritative, impactful content that resonates with their audience. Working with both SMEs and content experts allows businesses to deliver content that embodies their deep industry expertise while effectively guiding prospects through their buyer’s journey.
How to Create Expert Content?
Creating expert content is equal parts art and science!
It combines the in-depth knowledge of an SME with the storytelling and technical skills of content creators.
Start by identifying the core topics that matter most to your target audience and involve subject matter experts to get the facts right. Pair these experts with seasoned content writers who can shape the raw information into polished articles, white papers, and blog posts that resonate with readers and comply with SEO standards.
An effective approach to B2B content marketing involves the following:
- Thorough Research: Initiate the content creation process by conducting extensive interviews with an SME. This step is crucial to tap into specialized insights that aren’t available through simple internet searches. Use these interviews to ask pointed questions that dig deep into the topic. This will help you uncover unique viewpoints that can provide real value to your audience.
- Collaborative Writing: Once the initial research is complete, bring your subject matter experts together with skilled content writers. This collaboration should lead to a dynamic interchange of ideas where the deep, technical understanding of the SME is translated into accessible and compelling narratives. Encourage regular interaction between these two groups to ensure the content remains accurate yet digestible.
- Iterative Editing: Expert content isn’t produced in a single draft. Implement a rigorous multi-stage editing process that refines ideas into polished output. Start with a technical review to ensure accuracy, followed by SEO optimization to enhance discoverability. Finally, conduct a thorough copy edit to polish the language and tone to engage readers effectively.
Getting Better Content From Subject Matter Experts
Preparation is key to making sure you extract the maximum value from your subject matter experts.
Start by developing a well-thought-out interview brief that outlines the goals you hope to achieve with your expert content, the target audience, key questions, and the context of the discussion. This brief must serve as a roadmap for both the interviewer and the interviewee.
Here’s how to prepare a good expert interview brief:
- Clearly Define Objectives: What do you hope to achieve with this content? Be specific about your goals to keep the session focused.
- Research Thoroughly: Before the expert interview, conduct detailed research to formulate informed questions that provoke thoughtful, comprehensive responses.
- Outline Key Points: Include a list of topics or questions in the brief to guide the discussion and ensure all relevant points are covered.
- Provide Context: Help your experts understand the audience and what they care about. This will help align the expert’s insights with audience needs and expectations.
The Power of Interviews
The power of interviews in content creation lies in the authenticity and authority they bring. Interviews with SMEs often provide unique viewpoints that enrich your content and make it more engaging and authoritative.
Their in-depth knowledge helps illuminate complex topics and offers your audience a unique insider perspective.
How We Support B2B Founders in Producing Expert Content
At Rampiq, we’re well aware of the hurdles B2B founders encounter in creating expert content.
That’s why our process is designed to maximize efficiency and impact while allowing founders to produce expert-level content with minimal time investment.
Here’s how we streamline the content production process through strategic expert interviews:
Defining Interview Topics
Our first step is to align interview topics with your content plan. This is to ensure every piece of expert content serves a strategic purpose and addresses the key interests of your target audience. We work closely with you to identify topics that will resonate with your customers and enhance your SEO and online presence.
Researching Sub-Topics
Next, we delve deeper by researching sub-topics that are relevant to your primary keywords. This targeted approach helps us craft content that is informative and also optimized for search engines. It increases the likelihood of high search rankings and better visibility.
Approving the Interview Brief
We make sure you have enough time to review and approve the brief before the interview. Once that is done, the brief acts as a blueprint for the conversation. It outlines the key points to cover and ensures the discussion remains focused and valuable.
Handling the Interview
Our team of skilled interviewers handles the execution of the interview with in-depth questions that elicit detailed, insightful answers from subject matter experts. This process is designed to be efficient yet comprehensive enough to capture the maximum scope of the expert’s knowledge.
Processing Interview Results
After the interview, we process the results to distill the expert’s insights into engaging and authoritative content. We focus on clarity and accessibility by making complex topics understandable and relatable to your audience.
With our streamlined process, B2B founders can expect to receive two to four pieces of high-quality expert content from just one hour of interview time.
