What Happens When Expertise Meets Editorial Thinking

Original thinking and distinctive point of view matter more than ever. Much of that thinking already exists within the business, shaped by the experience and knowledge of its Subject Matter Experts (SME). They understand the industry, the challenges customers face, and the nuances that may not be visible from the outside.

The challenge is turning that expertise into ideas that audiences can understand and relate to. However, deep knowledge automatically does not translate into compelling communication. When experts speak in the language of their own discipline, what is clear to them can quickly become difficult for everyone else to follow.

In 2023, LinkedIn launched an ad campaign around a simple question: “Can you explain what your son or daughter actually does at work?” It struck a familiar chord for many marketing professionals. One ad features a mother trying to make some guesses about her son’s job involving selling cloud services, and how these are invisible clouds that someone else makes. In another ad, a father is baffled by his daughter’s usage of acronyms, like CTR, ESM, and even ASAP.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLQydYYLlWc

Both ads end with the message that while parents don’t understand what their children do, LinkedIn’s global professional community of a billion members does – LinkedIn is the place for B2B.

Although the ads raised eyebrows for leaning into ageism, its underlying premise points to something fundamental about professional knowledge – its value is often tied to how well it can be understood beyond the people who work with it every day.

The Expertise Trap: When Knowing More Makes One Harder to Understand

SMEs typically come with years of experience which gives them a level of familiarity making certain concepts and terminology feel obvious. For someone without the same context, the information pieces can make an explanation difficult to follow.

Consider an enterprise technology expert discussing artificial intelligence with a marketing audience. The expert may naturally talk about large language models, orchestration layers, APIs, data governance, model accuracy, and system integration. All these topics are relevant, but the audience may first need to understand what any of this changes for the business.

The gap between what an expert knows and what an audience needs to understand is where much B2B content loses its impact. The problem becomes even more pronounced when organizations rely on SMEs to generate content ideas themselves.

Now, when suggesting topics, an expert may point to a new technology, a regulatory development, or an emerging industry trend. The resulting content can be accurate and informed, but it can risk being similar to the content that other players in the industry are publishing.

Go Beyond the Obvious to Find the Perspective

SMEs have the information to develop a distinct thought worth publishing. But information is not the missing ingredient here. It is interpretation.

This is where content teams need to take a more deliberate role in their conversations with SMEs. They need to go deeper to find patterns, challenge assumptions, identify implications of decisions, and draw conclusions from their experience.

The right questions can help bring that thinking to the surface. For example, instead of asking an SME, “What are the latest trends in your industry?”, a more useful conversation might begin with questions such as:

• What are the common assumptions that businesses are getting wrong about this development?
• What are your clients asking you today that they were not asking two years ago?
• What changes when this trend moves from experimentation to implementation?
• What problems are companies solving the wrong way?
• What have you learned from working with clients that is not obvious from industry reports?

These questions shift the conversation from what is happening in the industry to what the SME has learned from seeing it happen. That is where content teams can uncover ideas that go beyond the obvious and begin to develop a distinctive point of view.

Build a System for Extracting Expertise

Extracting a strong insight from an SME is only one part of the process. The insight still needs to be researched, structured, written, reviewed, and adapted for the audience and format in which it will appear.

An informal process can be challenging and difficult to sustain alongside the existing workload on internal teams. SMEs have their core responsibilities, marketing teams have campaigns and channels to manage, and content teams may already be balancing multiple priorities.

A more deliberate approach treats expertise extraction as an editorial process.

Look beyond the obvious experts

The most senior executive may have the broadest strategic view, but they are not necessarily the only source of valuable insight.

• Sales teams hear objections and questions directly from prospects.
• Delivery teams see where transformation initiatives succeed or struggle.
• Consultants recognize patterns across client engagements.
• Product teams understand how customer expectations are changing.
• Analysts may spot shifts in data before they become broader market conversations.

Each group has a different view of the market. Bringing these perspectives into the content process creates a richer pool of ideas than relying on a single executive voice.

Separate expertise from editorial execution

One of the most useful changes an organization can make is to stop treating an SME interview as a content-writing session.

The SME's job is to provide knowledge, experience, and perspective. The writer's job is to identify the strongest ideas, connect them to audience needs, bring in supporting evidence, and turn them into a coherent narrative.

Trying to make the SME do both can create problems. Experts may struggle to structure their knowledge for an unfamiliar audience, while writers may focus too heavily on producing polished prose before they have uncovered the strongest argument.

Create a repository of ideas

Not every insight needs to become an article immediately.

Organizations can maintain a simple repository of SME observations, recurring customer questions, emerging themes, contrarian views, useful anecdotes, data points, and unfinished ideas.

Over time, this becomes more than a list of potential topics. It becomes a record of how the organization is thinking about its market.

That repository can also make content planning less dependent on whatever happens to be trending when the next editorial calendar is created. Instead of starting with a blank page, content teams can return to a growing pool of proprietary perspectives and identify which ones are most relevant to the audience at a particular point in time.

The result is a shift from content production to knowledge activation. Organizations do not have to constantly think about what to publish next. Rather, they can begin with a more valuable question – “What do we know that our audience needs to understand?”

There is More to Uncover

There may be ideas sitting inside your organization right now that could make your brand more credible and relevant to the market. The difficult part is finding them, knowing which ones are worth pursuing, and giving them the shape they need to travel beyond the people who already understand them. That is where having the right editorial capability can change the equation.

Businesses do not necessarily need to build another layer of specialists internally. An agency that knows how to work with SMEs can become an extension of the team – bringing the editorial thinking, research, questioning, and content expertise needed to turn conversations with your experts into ideas worth putting into the industry market.

And perhaps that is a conversation worth having.

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