Communicating your expertise: 7 steps to success

You're an expert in your field. There's no doubt about that.

You've achieved 'mastery' of your craft - 10,000 hours or more - and you've spent a good chunk of your career investing in courses, conferences and customers.

So why aren't leads flowing in the door? Why aren't you getting speaking gigs consistently?

Most likely you haven't communicated your expertise consistently enough - or crafted a long-term plan to help deliver these results regularly. 

This is my step-by-step guide to communicating your expertise by using content marketing as a strategy. You'll learn the fundamentals about how to nurture and educate your target market using content so they get to know you along the journey.

1) Choose your goals (business and content)

Start with your business goals first. Like many businesses owners, you might want to bring in more leads and drive sales. 

Ok - so how do these relate to my content goals? You need to understand your content's part in helping achieve your business goals. 

An example of a content goal could be to inspire conversation to get them to understand your way of thinking.

Or perhaps, you want to build a subscriber base. Maybe you want to evolve your existing customer relationships, so they buy more often from you.

Only choose one or two related content goals to start. Otherwise, you'll lose focus.

2) Choose your target audience

Things break down for many business owners here.

Choose one clearly defined target audience profile - not two or three. It might feel tempting to spread yourself across many markets, but if you do, your content plan will suffer, and you'll end up with a confusing marketing plan that doesn't appeal to any set market.

I suggest sticking to one ideal client profile (listing their demographics, psychographics, and who they are as people). We will cover this more detail in another post. 

3) Undertake some audience research

You might think you know what your ideal client wants to hear. But in my experience, I've learned that this usually isn't the case unless you ask.

This step requires you to gather some audience intel. You can do this in the following ways:

• Ask your top 3-5 customers about why they use your services. What difference has it made in their lives? What frustrations were they experiencing before they contacted you? The goal here is to understand the underlying social and emotional context behind what you offer. At the same time, ask them what they'd like to know more about. (Check out this book for more information on how to uncover revolutionary audience insight.)
• Create a survey and email it out to your database. A short 3-4 question survey to understand their biggest challenge they are facing - again, valuable intel for your content program. For more on Ask Campaigns, click here.
• Get online. Go to Reddit, Quora, Facebook and other online forums and see what questions and challenges people are having about your topic.

You'll also find out where your ideal client hangs out. Is it on Linkedin? Email? At events? 

4) Choose your content niche

Armed with plenty of knowledge and data, you can now set about creating content around a central theme for the next 6-12 months.

For example, if you are a business coach and your research indicates your ideal client struggles with understanding business fundamentals, then create your content around this.

Do a brainstorm with your team (or a mentor) about the topics people would find interesting relating to business fundamentals. Systems, processes, marketing, teams - there will be plenty.

By narrowing down your focus, you'll find it achieves two outcomes:

• You'll get more confident about speaking about this theme, and
• You will make it easier for your ideal client to search for you.

Once you do a brainstorm session, it is time to choose how you are going to deploy your content marketing strategy.

5) Choose your narrative

How you tell your story is going to be a key factor in your success.

You might decide to a blog or resource centre on your website to start with, posting all your content through Linkedin and email, so it goes into a central point.

Perhaps your ideal client is extremely time poor and loves audio.

Are you going to create a podcast or use short emails to nurture this audience?

Or do you think it would be more effective to use video, if your service was a highly visual medium (real estate, construction, food)?

In this step, I suggest choosing only one key platform where you can make the biggest impact. Then once you do, you can reassess to other platforms.

At Conqurve we suggest incorporating a series of keynote speaking events throughout the year where you can speak one-to-many. 

6) Create your content plan

Here's where you will save yourself heaps of time and stress. You can view my plan in the above image. Or use our template in Google Sheets here.

Create a 6-12 month content plan that includes all your content items.

You've already done some of the heavy lifting as you've defined your niche.

Plot out what content you are producing each week, who is responsible and notes on the results.

Remember to do an audit of the existing content you have created previously. This can be repurposed, if appropriate, into your plan.

7) Measure success, tweak and keep going

Content marketing is a strategy to help you reach your business goals.

Along with your 6-12 month plan, track the results of these activities each week.

How many discussions did you have with prospects? How many attended your keynote? And how many did you convert into clients?

Communicating your expertise might seem confusing or difficult to get started. I hope this post has helped you get some clarity about how you tackle this goal.

Now it's your turn. What has worked well for you? Please comment below or send me a personalised connection request to chat further.