[Build Backlinks Online] Subject Matter Experts and Their Role in Digital Marketing Strategy - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Subject Matter Experts and Their
Role in Digital Marketing Strategy - Whiteboard Friday'


Posted by Eric Enge

Establishing expertise and thought leadership is key to the success of your
digital marketing strategy. In today's Whiteboard Friday, learn how your team
can work with (or become!) subject matter experts in your niche, giving
consumers of your content a chance to learn from the best.






Whiteboard Friday - Eric Enge - Subject Matter Experts and Their Role in
Your Digital Marketing Strategy






For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!



Video Transcription



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.




Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!






You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/jBBLTkDqA4U/subject-matter-experts-and-digital-marketing-whiteboard-friday

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com