Are you an expert? Then you are a marketer. Or you should be.
We have written extensively about how to turn ordinary experts into high-visibility industry stars. But that’s not what we’re talking about today.
Instead, we want to make a different point. While not everybody has the interest or discipline to become an industry standout, any expert can—and, we would argue, should—be a marketer.
To explain what we mean, let us first let you in on a little secret that most marketers don’t fully appreciate: Expertise is the thumping heart of professional services marketing. It’s not SEO, or email, or social media. It’s not networking or referrals. In fact, none of those things would do any good were it not for the one thing that makes professional services unique—the deep, specialized knowledge experts use to solve their clients’ problems.
This is a truth not universally acknowledged. Many marketers and senior executives don’t recognize the wealth of marketing capital trapped like an oil reserve inside their organizations. Expertise pervades every corner of their business. Yet from a marketing perspective, it sits there, unknown, unexplored and untapped.
The Hidden Value of Expertise
When businesses seek out a professional services provider, they are usually looking for a range of characteristics, such as efficiency, responsiveness, past performance and good fit. But above all, they are looking for true expertise.
Evaluating expertise, however, is not easy. You can’t listen to a sales pitch or visit a firm’s homepage and determine if what they say about themselves is true. How, then, do buyers find qualified providers and select one firm over another?
In many, and maybe most, cases, buyers need to experience the expertise they are about to invest thousands of dollars in. But how do they get this critical exposure?
This is where all those experts come in.
They write the blog posts, put on the webinars, deliver the speeches and conduct the free consultations or demos that give potential buyers a taste of your firm’s expertise. Some prospects become so impressed with your expertise that they come back to sample it again and again.
How to Make Your Experts into Marketers
Chances are, not every expert on your team is a gifted writer or confident speaker. And even if they were, some experts are so in demand they have little time to dedicate to time-consuming marketing activities. But they can still contribute expert content. They just need a little help.
Start thinking of every expert on your team as a subject matter expert. Then you can pair them with someone—usually a professional writer—who can turn their ideas into content. The experts’ investment is small. They provide the raw materials up front, usually in the form of an interview or rough outline, then they review the drafted piece before it is published. Playing this limited role, they can produce a high-quality piece of content in a fraction of the time it would take them on their own.
Suddenly, you don’t have to rely on the two or three individuals in your firm who are willing, often inconsistently, to work late to produce all your valuable content. You have an army. Now, that thing that prospects want so badly (expertise) is available in spades.
With so many resources at your disposal, you can now produce content on more topics that your audience wants to learn about. You can do it more quickly. And you can deliver it in more channels than ever before. Moreover, because you can spread out responsibility you can do it without burning anybody out.
This is how experts become marketers. It’s also how stuck firms learn to grow and grow and grow.
