It’s no secret that audiences are consuming more content online than ever before. Because of this, organizations around the world are trying to keep up with content marketing programs but end up focusing too much on speed and not nearly enough on quality. From click bait to fake news, today’s savvy audiences are quick to abandon websites serving misleading and uninformed content. They are now actively seeking out sources that demonstrate a high-level of knowledge and credibility – which is where expertise marketing comes into play.
According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer Study, experts play a vital role in establishing credibility amongst audiences and developing more meaningful interactions with businesses and organizations. As far back as their 2019 report results showed that 56% of people trust businesses as a source of news and information while only 47% trusted the government. On top of that, they also reported that 73% of participants were worried about false information or fake news being used as a weapon. This distrust has only gotten worse since COVID and the polarizing politics of recent years. With this in mind, there’s a real opportunity for knowledge-based organizations to step up and show their smarts through expertise marketing.
What is Expertise Marketing?
Expertise marketing is the practice of making the knowledge and skills of your human resources more visible to your partners and audiences. It draws attention to the value that your people can bring as brand ambassadors and strategically leverages the work your experts are doing to tell a more personal story. In many cases, expertise marketing can also be used to showcase your strengths in research and innovation. Creating a stronger digital presence, expertise marketing more effectively uses your channels to connect with audiences such as media, customers, partners and donors. It builds a sense of trust with your audiences and above all else, it helps establish your reputation as an industry leader.
Expertise Marketing Defined:
- The practice of collectively promoting an organization's experts as brand ambassadors to demonstrate their skills or knowledge.
- Best practices to publish and connect organizational expertise in ways that foster internal discovery, collaboration, shared knowledge and diversity.
- Activities that leverage expertise to nurture conversations and connections with audiences such as media, customers, partners, government and funding agencies.
How to Make Your Expertise More Visible
Properly executed, expertise marketing is about harnessing your in-house expertise and making it more visible. By delivering comprehensive, relevant information in a visually engaging format, you can create a window into your organization that helps audiences better understand your offering and encourages more meaningful conversations.
Here are three areas where expertise excels:
On Your Website
There’s a good chance that you already created touchpoints for expertise marketing but they’re just not optimized for audiences. For example, many organizations are unaware that the “About Page” is the second most visited page on a website and may overlook its potential for attracting audiences. Other webpages that strongly benefit from expert content include:
- Speaker’s Bureaus
- Media Rooms
- Employee Directories
- Faculty Directories
- Blogs
- Employee Intranets
- Awards Recognition
- Research & Technology Transfer
Through Search Engines
Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) go hand-in-hand – and it’s key to making your expertise more visible. In Google’s search algorithm, factors like trust and authority are significantly impacted by items such as content and expertise. While SEO is no small task, tools like the ExpertFile Platform are designed to make aggregating and optimizing expert content as seamless as possible. In addition, organizations can also improve their rankings by:
- Identifying and showcasing a range of expertise
- Using rich media to display expert content
- Regularly updating your website with expert content
- Producing content related to current trends and emerging news
In The Media
For many organizations, media opportunities are an afterthought but it’s the perfect way to highlight your expertise and attract a broad range of audiences. Media outlets are constantly on the hunt for topic-specific experts to speak at conferences, weigh-in on their editorials and enhance the overall quality of their reporting. By making your experts more visible to this audience, you’re not only building your brand reputation as an industry authority but you’re also creating opportunities for new revenue.
Starting an Expertise Marketing Program
Bringing an expertise marketing program to life starts by taking a deeper look at your human resources and pinpointing the people in your organization who can support your expertise marketing initiatives. This post on Identifying Expertise is a great starting point for understanding what makes someone an expert and how you can position them for various tasks in your expertise marketing program. From there, it’s about getting buy-in from key stakeholders, collaborating across departments to surface expert content and strategizing with your team about where your expertise is best served.
Download The Complete Guide to Expertise Marketing
For a comprehensive look at how expertise marketing benefits the entire organization and drives measurable return on investment, follow the link below to download a copy of ExpertFile’s Complete Guide to Expertise Marketing: The Next Wave in Digital Strategy or download one of our tailored Guides for Corporate & Professional Services, Higher Education Institutions, Healthcare Institutions or Association & Not-for-Profits.
