In the B2B world, companies have access to a limited audience of organizational buyers. Many companies attempt to break through the noise using tactics like email blasts and cold calling.
While these efforts have worked in the past (at very low return on investment), as buyers have become more accustomed to doing online research to find the right solutions for their needs, these tactics have become all but obsolete.
The answer is to adopt a more customer-focused strategy that identifies their pain points and illuminates paths to solve them. Connecting to your audience by providing expert marketing content that not only educates, but relates, positions you as a trustworthy thought leader when the time comes for them to make an informed buying decision.
You need to publish expert content like industry insights and data sheets to help your audience with their industry-related challenges and to increase your brand recognition. You can use these content pieces to heat up their interest in your product and get their attention. When expert content is used in conjunction with SEO, paid ads, and partnerships, you can insert your product into your customer's natural buying process rather than aggressively pushing for a lead conversion well before the buyer is ready to have that conversation.
For example, consider the difference between receiving a cold call from a salesperson claiming they can solve your problem and the experience of doing your own research and finding a blog post written specifically about solving your exact problem. With the right approach to expect content, your ideal candidates will be presented with a step-by-step solution that seems so clear that you could swear the author consulted you when they wrote it.
If you’re currently experiencing:
- Wasting time and money on PPC ads that don’t generate leads
- Publishing blog posts that don't increase leads
- Buying leads for your sales team, but 99% of their calls end without next steps.
This guide can help drive effective content curation and proactively position you as a thought leader to your audience.
Step by Step Guide to Creating Expert Content
We have established a tried and true method of crafting engaging, high conversion expert content at Mostly Serious. While there are many methods to creating expert content, our approach leads to consistently great results.
Step 1: Identify the Key Decision Makers You Will Target
The first step is to identify your audience. Who is the expert content going to be created for? Your organization may already have this defined. For example, at Mostly Serious, our client's key decision makers are typically members of the marketing department at executive, director, or management levels depending on the size of the organization.
A good place to start is by asking your sales team. We know the key decision makers because they are the people we regularly talk with throughout the sales process. While we may meet the CEO at some point, and they may approve the decision, there is almost always someone else who does the research, assembles options, and decides which to recommend.
If you still find it difficult to nail down the key decision makers, another approach is to look at the organization's budget and identify the people who have the authority to allocate funds. That is often the person making the decision.
Step 2: Identify the Specific Needs and Pain Points of the Key Decision Makers
Now that you know who within the organization you will be writing expert content for, it's time to understand how you can help them.
The best way to learn more about them is to simply ask them. This can be done in two different ways. First, you can ask them questions in 1:1 conversations either by phone, email, or on LinkedIn. An overlooked opportunity by many marketing teams is the power of talking with customers for at least one hour per week. Alternatively, you can survey your existing customer base, which presents an opportunity to ask questions beyond needs and pain points, which will provide your company with data that can be used across many departments.
Step 3: Identify Who in Your Company Contributes to Solving the Needs and Pain Points
You now know who you need to reach and what they need to learn. All that's left is creating the content.
Easy, right? Unfortunately, no, and this is where most businesses fall short and their content marketing efforts fall out.
The first step is to identify who in your organization regularly delivers on the needs and solves the pain points of your key decision-makers. These people are your internal experts, and they can provide a treasure trove of content topics to use.
However, the experts on your team are busy. There's a reason they are experts. A strategic error we've seen many companies make is to think that the experts on the team should write the content. While they should absolutely contribute, relying on your experts to write content is likely to leave you without any content. Instead, your marketing team should interview your experts to gain insights.
How would your experts meet the needs and correct the pain points of your key decision-makers? This approach offers the best of both worlds by getting your team the expert perspective without requiring a significant amount of their time.
When conducting the interview, it's a great idea to record the session. The audio and video content from the discussion can be used to enhance the written content and provide effective content that can be used on LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social channels.
Step 4: Content Creation
At this stage, you have every component to begin creating and releasing expert content. There's just one final hurdle. Highly effective organizations have someone in charge of writing content. However, not all organizations and departments are highly effective, which means writing content likely falls to a person who consistently has a stack of commitments that are more pressing than turning the expert insights from your interviews into digestible content for your audience.
We understand not every company can invest in an agency partner. For those that must continue juggling a variety of responsibilities, we have a few tips for creating content:
Schedule a content writing retreat. Even a half day of time off-site to focus your team on creating content can load up your pipeline for weeks. At Mostly Serious, we aim to have between two and four retreats per year to keep our content pipeline full.
Create evergreen content. We are firm believers that you should never take the time to create a piece of great expert content and only push it out to your audience once. The return on investment is simply too low. Instead, post your content more than once across all channels. Your audience won't notice, and you'll greatly expand your reach.
Maximize content by using it in all channels. Another mistake many companies make is to only use a piece of content on one channel. For example, you may post an expert blog and then create a post on every social media channel pushing to your website. That's great, but that's a lot of missed opportunities. Instead, use your blog post to create highly targeted, specialized posts for each platform. We regularly create 5 to 10 pieces of content from every expert interview, ranging from LinkedIn posts to podcast soundbites to YouTube videos.
Takeaways
It is important to focus on quality over quantity, and the content must meet the specific needs of your key decision makers. You should also interview your experts to gain insights and coordinate all other aspects of this process, including customer research and interviewing internal experts.