Content Marketing for Experts: A Practical Action Plan

If you are an expert (coach, consultant, author, skilled professional, etc.) then content marketing is a great way to build and market your expertise.

Doing so helps you:

1. Elevate your brand as an expert
2. Attract leads for your business
3. Increase client lifetime value

However most of us find content marketing extremely challenging.

We start well but then our efforts stall within a few weeks.

In this post we will show you how to create and execute a content marketing plan that is more organic, easy to build, and very effective. This concept of building an expert brand is also called Authority Marketing. 

Why Content Marketing Feels So Hard for Experts

For experts like coaches and consultants, content marketing often feels frustrating and daunting. Not because they lack ideas, but because their expertise has not been translated into a model that is aligned to their lead generation or growth funnel.

As a result, they end up producing content “just to stay active”. It’s better than nothing but it feels more like an obligation than a planned effort.

Common pitfalls include:

• Running into writer’s block.
  This leads to posting inconsistently or without a clear funnel tied to your buyer’s journey. A blog one week, a motivational quote the next – but lacking a structured path that moves your audience from awareness to action. For example, if you are a business coach, sharing “3 habits of successful leaders”  or personal war stories is helpful, but it should also tie back to your own unique methodology or offer.

• Undifferentiated messaging
  Many experts fall back on “staying visible”. But this often doesn’t work because their posts are not reaching new audiences. And within a few weeks or months, the efforts fade and so does the visibility. Without a distinct point of view or framework, even great content dosn’t standout.

• Letting content slip due to client delivery work
  When you’re buried in sessions or project work, content becomes an afterthought. This leade to rushed posts like “New month, new goals!” or reposting an old article just to stay visible. These posts don’t expand your reach.

• No lead magnet
  A lead magnet is a lead capture mechanism. It is a valuable, often free resource offered in exchange for a prospect’s contact information — like an assessment, checklist, or eBook. Every promotional activity should lead to it. However most experts rely solely on “Book a call” action. This becomes a high-commitment action for early-stage prospects. 

The root issue? Experts must turn their know-how into a repeatable, visual framework that others can easily grasp and act on.

Content marketing for experts – An actionable plan 

“Content marketing is using useful content to build your brand and engage clients into a mutually beneficial conversation.”

So if we align content marketing with our expertise, it’ll thrive. We must focus on “showing how to solve a problem that our target audience faces”.

There are just 3 steps to ensuring that you will successfully execute your content marketing plan and also drive sales results.

1. Identify the problem you are solving & create a simple model that gives the answer to
   • “How can we measure how well our clients are doing?” and
   • “What would we tell our clients to do?”  
2. Write a simple, helpful about each of these items. Use case studies, examples, and don’t be afraid to really dig into the topic. 
3. Let your clients and prospects know

As you execute step 2, you can also add more bells and whistles to your posts. These could be optimizing for SEO, creating different formats such as an infographic or a checklist etc. 

Don’t stop doing step 2 and step 3 in a loop until you have addressed all aspects of step 1.

And don’t spend too much time on step 2 either. Your content can be glamorous, but being helpful is more important. 

Now let’s explore these topics one by one so you have more clarity.

Step 1: Identify the problem & create a model to diagnose it

This should come naturally to most of you.

It’s as simple as taking your knowledge & expertise and translating it into a questionnaire or a checklist.

That’s what a maturity model is.

Here are some examples to better understand this:

1. A life coach may use a Wheel of Life that measures satisfaction with various dimensions such as family, friends, career etc. Then they would help their clients address the issues.
2. You could also use a DISC or Big 5 Personality traits assessment. These are free to use with your Evalinator account.
3. A digital marketing consultant may create a questionnaire measuring how well their clients are at social media marketing. Then they would go about systematically addressing the issues faced by their clients. 
4. A cloud computing company may create a questionnaire that measures various dimensions of cloud adoption. 

As an expert helping your clients, you are in the best position to create this questionnaire.

Remember to keep it simple – no more than 8-12 questions, or 3-5 dimensions with 3-4 questions each. The questions should be easy to answer.

Don’t try to cover everything but just the most important items.

As you get engaged with your clients, then you can create more sophisticated questionnaires or needs assessments. 

Why create an actual assessment or checklist?

It’s very useful during client and prospect meetings. It gives your sales team a little more than a presentation to talk to, and so it generates actionable and meaningful follow ups. 

Step 2: Write about each of the items in your maturity model

If you’ve ever had writer’s block, you know how it’s like to look at a blank screen.

However, with the approach outlined in this post, you will say goodbye to writer’s block.

You have already broken the problem down into smaller parts and addressed it in your assessment or maturity model. Now all that is left is to take each part and tell your clients how to address it. 

You can follow this effective format for your blog posts:

1. Why is this specific topic important (hint: it’s part of your overall questionnaire or model). Provide some statistics if you have them.
2. Cite a story of someone who successfully overcame this specific issue, or didn’t. This story can be fictional so long as you state that it is fictional.
3. Explain briefly how one can go about addressing this topic. You can give examples and best practices. Bullet points are ok. Focus on quality, not quantity. Think about it like this: If you were explaining this to someone, how would you do it.  
4. If you work with any partners who have a relevant product or solution around this, borrow from their material
5. Don’t be very prescriptive. Instead offer a discovery session to provide more details.

PS: Take the questions in your assessment, put them on 1 page, add image and title, convert to PDF, and you have a checklist! Make it available for download on your website! It’s a lot more than most people do.

Step 3: Let your clients & prospects know

This step delivers the ROI for you. 

Relying only on SEO needs significant investment of time even if you have something unique to offer.

For example, this blog post is buried deep inside Google search results. No one can easily find it. We think this is a unique take on content marketing, but Google is not very intelligent right now so it doesn’t show it. And we have to look for other channels.

But this is still a long game as much as you’d like quick results. So, don’t ignore SEO, but do these as well:

1. Share your posts on social media that your customers use. Always include a link back to your checklist, assessment, or blog post
2. Add a call to action button or link (CTA) in your blogs and website. Point it to your checklist and your assessment. That’s a way to grow your email address list. 
3. Email your existing clients the material – best to do this using a simple email automation tool like Mailerlite, MailChimp, Kajabi, ConvertKit, or HubSpot. 
4. If you have create a lead magnet (a quiz, or a download), then use your email automation to send them the material too
5. If you have the budget, spend a bit on google or social media ads for your posts. Target them properly. Start with a low budget like $20 a week or so, and expand when you see results.
6. If you have external listings on directory websites, link them if possible to your checklist landing page, or assessment

The key for all of these is to be consistent but keep looking to improve your reach.

• Request other people to share your posts.
• Comment on the posts of influencers in your area of expertise.

If you’d like to be more creative then use a storytelling format. 

Whatever you choose, just get started.  

Next Steps

That’s all there is to it – create a framework, make an assessment or quiz out of it, and then communicate the framework in a way that is helpful to your clients as they try to solve a problem.

This kind of approach also has a psychological aspect to it. It builds trust and positions you as an anchor in your customers’ minds. So they keep coming back to you as they make a decision to buy.

If you want to try out this approach for your business, then get started with a 2 weeks trial with Evalinator! 

We’re here to help.

Good luck!