In professional services, expertise is marketing. After all, expertise is what your buyers so desperately want. And the most powerful way buyers can be confident they are making the right choice is to sample that expertise. When experts produce and promote valuable educational content, they are giving future buyers exactly what they want and need.
But there is a natural force that is always working against this approach: the billable hour.
Professionals are trained then hired to solve specific business problems. They cultivate a mindset that they are most valuable when they are performing client work. And there is a very real logic to that mentality.
Even if your firm doesn’t bill by the hour, profits are higher when your highly paid professionals are working on client projects rather than focused on other things.
The problem, of course, is if everyone at your firm were busy all the time doing the work, you would soon run out of work to do. Projects run their course and most clients don’t last forever.
That’s why running a successful firm requires balancing work and marketing (which, for the sake of convenience, we will say includes business development and sales).
In last week’s article, I explored this tension. I am writing again on the topic because it is such a frustrating challenge for many marketers and professionals that it deserves more attention. Most experts struggle to find the time to plan and produce a single piece of content, much less multiple blog posts, videos or webinars.
In both of the articles I’ve linked to I suggest some general strategies you can use to get past this roadblock—and on with your professionals’ Visible Expert® journeys.
Now, I want to lay out a more tactical plan—or set of suggestions—to help your marketing team make the most of your experts’ limited time. While the assumption is that the expert will write the piece (though ghost writing is a viable option, too), marketing can significantly lighten the expert’s burden by taking on components of the process.
So let’s dive in!
Come to the kickoff with a menu of topics. Sometimes just figuring out what to write about is hard. So bring a list of four to six topics or preliminary titles to the initial meeting. This gives your expert options—and tangible ideas to react to. If they don’t ultimately choose a topic from the list, they are likely to think of a different one instead. In a matter of minutes, you have identified your starting point! Make sure your list sits at the intersection of what your experts know and what your audience actually cares about.
Interview the expert. If your expert needs help organizing their thoughts, conduct a short half-hour interview. Be sure to record it. Here are some questions you might ask your expert:
- Explain the issue or challenge in simple, easy-to-understand terms.
- What are some real-world examples of this problem?
- What do you consider when trying to solve it?
- What is the thing you enjoy most about tackling challenges like this?
- What can go wrong? How do you keep that from happening?
- What would happen if a business ignored this problem?
- What does success look like at the end of the engagement?
- What are some things a potential buyer might be interested in learning about this issue or the way you solve it? Can you think of any questions you’ve heard from real clients?
Offer to draft an outline. This is where AI can be very helpful. Convert your interview recording to a transcript and load it into your favorite LLM. Next, ask the LLM to create a blog post outline based on the interview. Rarely is the outline perfect, so expect to make some changes. But AI can be a real time saver here. Then give the expert the outline to work from. If you have a keyword in mind, this would be a good time to supply it to them.
Offer to proofread or edit the draft. Writing is usually better when it is a team effort. Additional eyes catch embarrassing errors. If you can afford a professional editor—or if you have one in-house—so much the better. They can smooth out any awkward phrasing, improve the structure and make the piece more readable.
Offer to draft a social media post. Whenever an expert publishes a blog post, we recommend they promote it on social media. This signals to their network that they are engaged in thought leadership. It can also generate conversations that lead to new business. To simplify this task, draft a brief social media post for the author that describes the article and why they are excited to share it. Make it clear to the expert that they are free to change any or all of the language. Also supply an image, or a selection of image options, to give the post some visual impact.
Shoot a video. After the post is written, or even after it has been published, ask the expert if they would be willing to shoot a video on the topic. With the information freshly in mind, many experts find this is an easy way to convert all that hard work into a fresh new format. The marketing team can interview the expert or the expert can work from an outline or script. When done, add the video to both the blog post and your YouTube channel. You can even chop it up into snippets to share on social media. In fact, if your expert is more comfortable in front of a camera than a computer keyboard, they can do the entire blog post as a video instead of text.
Is your marketing team struggling to engage your experts in a consistent content marketing program? You aren’t alone, my friend. I hope the steps I outlined above, as well as in the two previous articles (here and here), equip you with a new set of tools to change the way your organization thinks about and delivers valuable content.
