Subject Matter Experts and Their Role in Digital Marketing Strategy – Whiteboard Friday

Good morning everybody in Moz land. I’m Eric Enge, I’m the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting. I’m here to do a Whiteboard Friday here for you today. By the way, I’m also co-author of “The Art of SEO” together with the beloved Rand Fishkin.

So I want to talk to you a little bit about subject matter experts and their role in your digital marketing strategy. They play an incredibly important role. I see lots of businesses out there that publish sites and they put content out there and there’s really no identity behind them. It’s really important because, at the end of the day, your target audience wants to attach to a person more than they want to attach to a nameless entity. They want to feel like they’re interacting with real people.

By the way, your subject matter expert could be subject matter experts, plural, and that’s good, but incredibly important that you have something, somebody where people can attach to them in a material way. And at the end of the day, from my perspective, you have to have an expert or go home. You’re just not going to be able to succeed in a big way going forward if you don’t have some sort of established expertise for your business. That’s my view of it. You just have to have that expert, or you need to go home.

So with that in mind, you run into the next problem. Your experts are human beings. There are 24 hours in a day, right? They have limited time to do what they need to do, and that actually limits how much scale you can get out of their activity. Maybe they only have two hours a day. And if that’s the case, then that limits how much content and how much communication of that expertise can happen out in the wild.

So I want to talk now a little bit about how do we scale their efforts so you get more out of your expert, and that’s where we lead to a few ideas I have over here. All right.

Best thing to do is see if you can get some smart young people, don’t necessarily have to be young, but smart people to assist your subject matter expert in a number of different ways. Some great things you can do to help them out, one is you can research article topics. I know for myself, when I get up on Saturday morning, which is when I tend to write my columns, I sometimes spend two hours trying to come up with an idea for what the column is going to be about. It can be very painful, very frustrating. If you have somebody there helping you, coming up with ideas and really giving you a set of things that you can look at and think about for that next column or blog post or whatever it is, it can be a big, big help for you.

You can even potentially have them draft articles for you. You need to be careful about this. I’m actually not a big fan of ghost writing, because keeping in mind that people want to attach to an expert, if the thing is truly ghost-written, well, it’s not really the expert that’s writing it, and to me that relationship gets weakened. So I think it’s very important to have the subject matter expert really be involved in writing the article. But you can have someone draft an article as long as the subject matter expert sort of recuts it and tears it apart, not just simple editing, but actually turns it into their own voice. Can be very helpful though to have that drafted article.

Find influencers. Very, very important thing to do. Who do you want that subject matter expert to build relationships with? That can be a lot of work to figure out too. You can use a variety of tools to figure this out. You can do social media research, just bum around on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, whatever your social site of preference is, or all of them, and help identify people that you want have the subject matter expert interact with. Figure out how to contact them, do research on what they like, help get that relationship process going. Subject matter expert has to be the one to do the outreach, but you can make it easier for them by doing some research up front.

Next thing, just monitoring social media sites. I’m going to use Twitter as an example. Find tweets by key people, maybe by influencers, maybe just by good friends. Have your assistant, basically, help the subject matter expert by monitoring, in this case Twitter, more frequently and more thoroughly than they can on their own. So that’s a very valuable service. So you look at tweets by key people and tweets by others, direct questions that get asked of you, or breaking news, all these sorts of things to allow the subject matter expert to be responsive without having to live in the social media site.

Next up, you can draft actually social media posts, be it a tweet or Google+ or Facebook or whatever it is, and then send your subject matter expert proposed things that they can put out on social media. Again, a big time-saver.

You can curate content for them. The assistant can go ahead and research other articles and find things going on and actually suggest comments on those articles.

Creating graphics, I’m lucky enough that I have someone who is able to create graphics for me. So I can walk in, in the morning and say, “Hey I want to do this post today,” and I can sketch out a little design, here’s what I want to do, I want this, sort of build a little design for them, and then they go off and create it and then two hours later I have a beautiful graphic which I can go ahead and use for my post. I actually end up with a lot of custom graphics in my posts that way, which is really cool.

They can also just edit your articles. Hopefully, that’s not too painful for them, because hopefully your subject matter expert is a good writer. But this is another valuable service. It’s really great to have that person, that other set of eyes on the article to help you with that.

The big key in all these services that I’ve talked about, which will help us lead to our happy SME down here in the bottom, is all about the relationship between the assistant and the subject matter expert. The assistant has to be doing things the subject matter expert finds valuable. So, if I’m a subject matter expert and I don’t find your curating content for me valuable because I’m just too opinionated or I don’t want to put that stuff out there, then having you do that for me doesn’t help. So the subject matter expert and the assistant or assistants, as the case may be, have to build a special relationship so that they understand how to work together and really make it work.

So that’s some ideas for you on how you take your subject matter expert, you give them a little more time, and help them scale their efforts, leading to a happy subject matter expert and good results for your business.

Thanks for listening to me today, and have a good day.