Create expert content to grow your audience

There are a lot of businesses out there trying to get their customers’ attention. Among the ways to engage your clients and stand out from the crowd is ‘thought-leadership’ or creating content that highlights your expertise, builds relationships with your audience, and encourages them to think of you when they need your goods or services.

You can provide expert content through many forums:

  • Social media
  • Your blog
  • Other people’s blogs
  • Websites, through e-Books
  • Journals and research publications
  • Articles in industry publications
  • Workshops and webinars.

This guide reveals some of the ways you can use content to establish your expertise, and important issues to think about when you create expert content.

Using expert content to build relationships

Before you begin, there are some important factors to keep in mind regarding what expert content can do for you and your business.

Credibility

Credibility is crucial to successfully building relationships. People are more likely to listen to others who have been there already and can relate to their issues. Your content should be related to your experience and expertise, as well as to situations that you have either directly been in or helped someone else through.

If you can prove that you know what you’re doing and have the specific expertise to do the job properly, you’ll reassure potential customers to trust in making a purchase.

Expertise

Successful business owners often have expert knowledge, years of experience, a particular passion and a reputation as a ‘thought leader’. It’s not enough to brand yourself as a thought leader, you need to demonstrate authenticity.

Focusing on a niche topic that you have in-depth knowledge and experience in will help, as well as being the go-to person for a topic related to your niche, such as sharing content related to the industries your clients work in.

Build an online presence

Building a credible presence online is vital, as most people will carry out online research to check you and your firm out. Include as much factual information about your business as possible on your website, including your physical address, testimonials from happy customers (ideally well-known customers), photos, demos and videos to showcase what you do.

Follow these additional steps to generate more awareness of your business.

Blog

Blogging is an inexpensive and easy way to keep your brand name front-of-mind, and increase your prospects.

Your blog lets your personality shine through. People often prefer to buy from someone they feel they have a personal connection with. And it’s easily shared across your social media platforms, as well as by others.

Your blog helps you by:

  • Driving traffic to your website
  • Converting traffic into leads
  • Providing content for your social media
  • Establishing your expertise
  • Developing a relationship with your readers
  • Increasing awareness of your firm
  • Sharing important information
  • Offering additional value for your clients
  • Encouraging people to download your lead generators or subscribe to grow your email list.

Build relationships on social media

Write an engaging post that draws the readers in, ask them a question or share an interesting fact or idea, then encourage your followers to engage with the post by commenting on it with their thoughts.

Integrate your blog with your social media to further your reach

You can have links on your blog posts that allow your readers to share your content on their social media. Or, you can encourage readers to sign in through social media to comment on your blog. Depending on your platform, you can automate sharing your post on social media, so new blog posts are automatically sent to your social media pages.

Join social media communities to further promote your blog. Facebook and LinkedIn have groups that allow people who share commonalities, such as an industry or geography or hobby to come together. Follow any guidelines on promotion and be sure to engage with the group, don’t just join for the sake of talking about yourself.

Don’t oversell

Try not to overtly market yourself or include a sales pitch as part of your expert content, as it should speak for itself. The goal is to get people to see you as an expert in a particular field and as the go-to person when they have specific questions or problems they need solved.

What to write about

First, ask yourself: What are the top five questions clients always ask me? “Can I claim that as a tax deductible expense?” is probably going to make the list!

Write down the questions and a few bullet points that answer the questions. Here’s what to do with that list of questions and answers:

Blog

  • Write a blog about each question and its answer
  • If your clients are always asking you these questions, other people are thinking about them too
  • Some will be searching in Google for the answers and your blogs could show up in those searches
  • The blogs are great for existing clients too as you save time saying the same stuff repeatedly.

With the blogs written, look to amplify them using other marketing channels:

Email

  • First, send emails about them to clients and prospects. These could be one-off email blasts or sections in your email newsletter.

Social media

  • Next, create at least three social media posts about each blog
  • Use a tool like Canva.com to make these posts look great
  • That equals 15 social media posts, all linking back to valuable content on your website
  • These posts can be recycled and reposted regularly given that they are evergreen content.

Lead magnet

  • You should also have a lead magnet on your website
  • This is a valuable piece of content you give away in exchange for someone’s email address and turns your website visitors into leads
  • The constraint is usually finding the time to create the lead magnet content but your blogs can be combined into an ebook which makes a great piece of lead magnet content
  • You could even create a downloadable resource like this accounting firm did.

Webinar or event

  • Finally, you could use the question and answer structure to create a live event or webinar
  • Events are a tried and tested marketing tactic for accountants
  • A webinar can replace in-person events for a similar effect.

You now have all the content ideas you need to get started on creating expert content.

Final thoughts

Providing expert content is an effective way to grow your brand and increase awareness of your business. Focus on an area you’re an expert in, create content that’s authentic and relevant, and share it online to keep top-of-mind for your audience.

Related resources

  • Find out more about lead magnets in the Turn website visitors into leads guide.