Moving Past Being the “Friendly, Accessible Expert”

I’ve been involved in digital marketing numerous ways for about a decade. Trends come and go, realigning best practices and causing other paradigm shifts.

Despite all the changes, there has been one consistent component to content marketing efforts: Brands wanting their content voice to be that of a “friendly, accessible expert.”

I get it: everyone wants to be the authority people can go to to have their questions answered and solutions in hand. It sounds great! There’s one issue with this approach: This is how just about every company wants to present themselves. In the attempt to differentiate from the competition or in a crowded social or digital marketplace, companies pivot in the exact same way; in the end, they end up sounding the same, just in a new dialect.

So, how do we break free from friendly, accessible expertise and aim to genuinely stand out from the masses?

Go Back to the Basics: Revisit Your Brand Documents

Falling into the friendly, accessible expert trap is a result of not having done the advance work of marketing: knowing yourself and your target audience. 

For example, when trying to engage engineering and science-centric audiences, focusing on friendliness and accessibility tends to actually distance the reader from a brand. These markets typically want information readily offered and presented with precise language and insights. Speaking to pharma or biotech, accuracy and adherence to compliance matters more than whether or not your content comes off as sufficiently cheery. (I strongly recommend Bridget Cunningham’s piece on marketing to engineers for more on working thoughtfully and precisely with those in these fields.)

The uncomfortable truth is we want to focus on being friendly and accessible when we’re not fully confident in what we have to offer, undercutting expertise. And a marketing lead or agency that doesn’t take the time to suss out the details of both who you are and who you want to do business with is doing you a disservice. Those tedious brand conversations and interviews at the start of any engagement? They set the tone for every asset, deliverable, social post and component in marketing and sales enablement. Without doing the work upfront, everything that follows will miss the target.

Funnels and Flywheels and Infinite Loops in Three Dimensions

Business development types love their mechanisms. In and around the Inbound world, there was the funnel, then the flywheel and now, HubSpot offers us the loop.

The problem with each of these – I’m partial to the flywheel methodology that I feel came and left too soon – is that they’re two-dimensional, which in turn flattens out strategy, any strategy, into a linear, formulaic process.

When strategy and tactics become too reliant on a process or formula, so too does creativity. Websites become sales flash cards and marketing becomes static and generic. Enter the friendly accessible expert.

Getting someone’s attention no longer happens by simply being nice; it happens by getting someone to stop and think. Friendliness can be ignored, anything that can be read easily can be just as easily discarded. Expertise grabs a person’s attention and doesn’t let go.

Genuine expertise also creates ways to allow readers to access complex ideas.

Any paradigm people use to better understand their business development process – funnel, flywheel, loop, merry-go-round, whirligig, doo-dad, what have you – has to take on a three-dimensional element: depth, volume. There are times that marketing materials are straightforward, light-hearted and upbeat; at other times, they need to be impactful and intelligent from the jump. 

Awareness, consideration and decision are no longer points on a continuum or phases generally assigned from first to last touch: they are happening all the time.

Three-Dimensional Content Marketing: A Rough Sketch

What does this look like in practice? Well, I think it’s inbound in its purest form: placing audience value at the heart of strategy and content development. That means respecting your readers’ time, intelligence and savvy.

Get to the point. Don’t bury the lede: the people you want to reach need to know what you know. Show what you know and why that knowledge matters to your audience.

Dump keyword stuffing practices. Jamming as many keywords into an article as possible has always been poor practice. It’s just a more refined poor practice now.

Any brand’s credibility suffers when work is undercut by an increasingly obvious need to get Google’s attention, not to mention the faux pas that occur when a thirst for rank overtakes the need to compellingly convey an idea. Common industry phrases get twisted into something with a keyword in it, ideas get scrambled, points are lost. This abandons both your reader and the crawler, so don’t. Trust the Inbound process.

If you think it reads like AI, your reader probably does, too. I covered this in the last Notebook entry, so I won’t belabor the point.

Expect your ideal customer at any and every stage in the customer lifecycle. This takes a greater level of tactical expertise. Content marketing has long been dominated by the idea that certain assets or deliverables should be tailored to certain points along the way. This is just not the case!

Again, awareness, consideration and decision happen all the time, just perhaps in different degrees. A customer may not be aware of another product or service offering you have, or they might be weighing that product or service against one they currently use in their business ecosystem, or they might want to buy into your entire product suite and need a reason why. 

In the attempt to reach people where they are, we actually are hammering square pegs into round holes. That’s anything but ideal.

Expert content is able to hit the target with any prospective readers all at once. That’s why it takes experts in your business and expert writers able to translate that expertise.

I concede that I’m not discussing video in this piece, but that’s because people who want to know about specific things still take time to do research. Despite a wholesale increase in video engagement – and to be clear on this point, video should be a part of many if not all marketing strategies – prospects, especially high-intent prospects, still consume written content.

If your blog post, article or whitepaper is compelling and credible, they’ll keep reading, regardless of whether they’ve been in your field for years or are just searching out potential options and solutions.

You don’t need to be the friendly, accessible expert to reach your business goals. You just need to do what you do well, and say what you want to say the best way it can be said for the people who need to hear it.

If you struggle with the latter, that’s what we do particularly well.