Why You Should Create Content Based on Interviews With Experts

If you’ve ever gone through the process of writing an article for your company website, then you’ve likely come across these issues:

  • You want to write an article that covers specific product features, which means it has to be written by someone who knows a lot about the product — but no one ever has the time

  • The content you want to write about is quite technical and advanced, so someone technical has to write it, but all your freelancer writers are generalists

  • You know your target market will only care about specific features, but you don’t have the time to figure out which ones specifically and which ones to prioritise in the article

If you’ve ever encountered these issues, then that’s totally normal. When it comes to creating content, alignment is a big issue.

In this article, we’ll dive into one way to overcome these issues: by creating content based on interviews. We’ll cover the main challenges marketers face when creating content for the website, and then tips on how to do articles based on interviews effectively.

The main issues with creating content the “usual way”

The usual way content to create content is:

  1. Give a topic and content brief to a freelance writer (generalist, sometimes specialist) with a short summary of your target market, topics to cover, etc.

  2. The writer then goes and does research to create the content, usually based on online research and reading other articles and papers

  3. The writer submits the article, you edit and approve it and then publish it

We’ve been on all sides of that equation, which is why we know this is the usual method financial services companies use to create content online.

There’s a few reasons this approach doesn’t work if you’re creating high quality, advanced content that is designed to bring in customers, position you as an expert and help financially educate your audience:

Your writer is not an expert, so you can’t create expert content

Although your writer will try their best to do research and find good information, they are unlikely to be experts.

That’s because most people are either experts or writers — not both. Your writer could be the best writer on the planet, but without that expert knowledge they still won’t be able to write about topics relevant to your product or target market. If they do happen to be experts, then that’s great — but you are likely paying a (rightly) high premium for it.

The issue is then that you end up with content which has been written based on other articles online, and it can quickly become “copycat content” — which is essentially content that has just been rewritten from other articles.

With more and more people creating content online, creating something unique and different is more important now than ever.

Not only that, but if your mission is financial education and literacy or even to position yourself as an expert in the industry, then you want to create something that is genuinely useful and based on expert knowledge. If you are publishing regurgitated content, then you are not really adding any value to the reader since they’ll be able to find that information anywhere else.

You can’t create unique content if it’s based on research of content that has already been written online. 

This is especially true in a B2B setting where you might be targeting CFOs, CTOs and people who are experts themselves. If you want to educate them, then writing content that can be found anywhere won’t impress them. 

Your writer is not an expert in your product, so they can’t highlight specific product features

If you are using content to acquire customers and leads, then you’ll likely need to talk about your product and specific features from time to time (the essence of Bottom of the Funnel content).

If you don’t know what Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) content is and why we prioritise it, read this article: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?

But it’s very likely that your writer doesn’t use your product and doesn’t understand it in-depth, since it’s not really their job. This is especially true if it’s a complex B2B product.

They also might not understand your target market — which means they won’t know which features your target audience will care about the most (and reading one page on target market demographics and a list of pain points is not truly understanding).

What ends up happening is an article that can’t go in-depth about your product features and isn’t very customer centric. Sure, you’ll get visitors, but it’s unlikely to bring in real customers.

We don’t want to dunk on other people’s articles, but in this screenshot you can see a excerpt of an article that is meant to target CFOs and help them manage travel expenses. 

This article is about why a travel management platform is a great system to manage expenses while travelling — which is literally what their product does. Although they add links in the article, they don’t explain how their product solves the problem better than other systems. A big missed opportunity, in our opinion.

But only someone who understands the product in-depth would be able to write about how the product works. If you’re working with a generalist freelance writer, then you won’t be able to write about that. 

Compare the excerpt above to the articles we’ve created for Parpera, a money management solution for freelancers, where we go into extreme depth about the product:

These articles are so targeted to a specific person, that it even changes the order in which we list various product features and benefits. For example, in the article comparing sole trader accounting software, we begin by comparing the accounting features that Parpera offers — not the fact that it offers a bank account or debit card. That’s because someone comparing accounting softwares is primarily interested in the accounting aspect. The rest is just bonuses.

It’s insights like these that can only be executed when the writer understands the product and target market in-depth. 

You can’t create content that focuses on story of the founders, or other specific use cases

A big part of BOFU content is creating content that focuses on specific use cases, or feature-benefit scenarios that only happen in specific situations for specific customers.

For example, say your product works very well for travel agencies. You want to be able to explain in article why travel agencies find the product so useful and what are the particular benefits to them.

To make the article customer centric and focus on the particular benefits for travel agencies, the writer would need to understand how the product benefits the customer. This kind of information can’t be found with a Google search since it is unique to your product.

Here’s an article that was designed for a specific audience and use case: credit cards for startups. We were only able to write this article because we understood how the Jeeves product benefitted and worked for startups:

How content based on interviews solves the challenges above

So what’s the solution? Never work with freelancers? Only do work in-house?

Not exactly. It’s not black or white, and it’s about what works best for you.

Based on our experience working with 20+ fintech and financial services companies on their content, we found the best method is: create content based on interviews with experts. That means, relying on the experts knowledge, rather than the writer’s knowledge.

Instead of sending a brief with a summary to your writer, interview an internal or external expert on the topic, and then send the recording and a brief to your writer.

Here’s how this approach solves the challenges mentioned above:

Your content is original and adds value

By relying on experts rather than Google research, you can add real value to the conversation that comes from a position of expertise.

This is one of the best ways to position yourself as an expert, and we would argue is better than writing “thought leadership” content that is outsourced to a generalist writer. 

It means you can add unique and original insights, that will help your readers, and will genuinely move forward your mission to push financial education.

For example, for more subjective content such as “how to price yourself as a freelancer”, we didn’t regurgitate advice that was already online. We got in touch with an experienced freelancer (we call “external experts”) and worked together to create a unique and genuinely useful article.

Read it here: How to Price Yourself as a Freelancer (Based on Expert Advice)

For another client, Jeeves, we wanted to talk about scaling your marketing globally. As writers and content strategists, we don’t know anything about that topic. So we reached out to an external expert, and based the blog post on an interview with them. 

Read it here: How To Scale A Business' Marketing Internationally: An Interview With Hanns Schempp

Your content is advanced or technical

For B2B and enterprise firms, it’s even more important to create content that matches the level of your target audience. Sure, writing an article on “types of payment methods” will get you traffic, but your target audience — a CFO or CTO — will not be searching and reading this.

By creating content based on interviews, you can create content that is a lot more advanced and technical. Sure, you might need to work with a specialist writer in some cases, but we’ve been able to create relatively advanced content on payment orchestration without being developers or experts ourselves, and simply interviewing the internal experts of that company.

Here are two examples of content we wrote for Zai, a payment orchestration company:

As you can see, we would not be able to write about float users and custom payment workflows without talking to an internal expert.

And when a CTO starts reading your content (which they often do before requesting an RFP), which will impress them more? An article on “How our split payment API works”, or an article on “How to create a business plan for investors” — which you can see is what another B2B financial services company targeting CFOs publishes on their blog: 

You can highlight specific product features

If your product or services genuinely helps people and is useful, then talking about your product shouldn’t feel “salesy” or icky. If it does, we would argue that you have a product problem, and not a marketing problem.

Ideally, you want to be able to talk about your product naturally, wherever it makes sense. You want to be able to explain to the reader what features they might find useful, and how it works in certain situations.

By interviewing an internal expert — someone who understands your product inside out, as well as the customers — you can make sure you talk about the right product features and highlight the benefits that you know that persona would care the most about. 

Not just that, but you can also add in screenshots and direct quotes. For example, if it’s an article on taxes, then highlighting how your product solves for taxes should be included in that article.

Here is an example from an article we wrote with Parpera. Technically, it’s Top of the Funnel — we’re talking about sole trader deductions. But we also manage to mention the Parpera product throughout the article, wherever it makes sense and fits naturally (there’s no hard sell). 

We do talk about the product at the end of the article, so people get the value first. And as you can see, the features we mention in the product are not the invoices or money management features, they’re the tax features: because that’s what the reader would be interested in. 

Readers are more likely to take you seriously and see you as an expert if you’re able to communicate well how your features benefit them in a certain way. It also helps with customer acquisition. We know that article above brings in customers for Parpera.

See how we add a separate sentence in this article with “Note” where we mention the Parpera product, but it’s not a hard sell and is just a product mention: 

You can create content that is based on use cases and story

Not every article you create will be informational and will be based on online research. What happens when you want to talk about something that is unique to your company or product?

For example, at Mint, we like creating founder story articles for our clients. These articles are useful to align people on a product’s value props, while also explaining the why behind a product and company. They also tend to bring in leads and customers.

As you can see in this screenshot, for the month of May the founder story brought in the most amount of leads for this client:

You can’t create this sort of article without talking with the CEO of a company. Since we create our content based on interviews, this type of article was straightforward to do.

This is also true for use cases. As mentioned above, we know that use case articles do very well for highly targeted SEO and customer acquisition. But these types of articles are only possible if you understand the particular features and benefits fot he use case. You also want to be able to add real examples, to add legitimacy and to prove your expertise.

See this use case article with Jeeves, where we talk about the different use cases for virtual cards. Notice how we include real examples with Jeeves customers, how in-depth the features/benefits are and the fact that we include screenshots.

This was only possible by interviewing a salesperson and understanding how the Jeeves product is relevant to that target audience.

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Objections to creating content based on interviews:

We’ve heard quite a few objections to creating content based on interviews that we thought would be worth responding to here.

Our experts are too busy for interviews

This is the most common objection we hear. It’s often true that the people who are the most expert are also the busiest.

The best way to go about this is to demonstrate the value of content, and make it clear the big impact that content can have. Start by figuring out what the expert really cares about: do they want to see more leads? Or people telling them how good their content is?

Then focus on creating content that can help them in what they care about. When they see the results, they are more inclined to help out. 

However, we understand that it’s easier said than done.

There are a few other solutions:

  • Do a one day workshop that breaks down the power of content. You can either organise this yourself, or reach out to us and we can do a 90 minute online content workshop for your team or a half-day in-person workshop. 

  • Make it as easy as possible to do the interviews. Do the calls when they have the time. If they prefer written, then encourage them to do the writing.

  • Schedule the next call when you’re on a call. This way you can agree to it early. Or set up a recurring call in the calendar (weekly is probably best).

  • If all else fails, talk to leadership so they themselves ask the experts to contribute. 

If it’s still impossible to get internal experts on, then you can start small by working with external experts. 

Meaning, reach out to well-known people in your industry and experiment with creating a piece of content based on an interview with them. Sure, you might not be able to go as deep about the product as you’d like to, but it’s a start.

The key is to start showing results early so that the sales or product team understand the value early on, and are ready to commit their time.

It’s also up to your team leader and manager to set the tone, and make it clear that content is a priority. If after a lot of trying and convincing, no one still wants to do anything, then it’s simply a sign that content marketing is not a priority and it’s best to move onto something else.  

We don’t have experts on our team

If this is the case, then it might be tricky to creat expert content — although not impossible. Although they might not be experts in your industry, they will be experts on your product and target audience, so you can still interview them to get a good understanding of the product and how to frame it.

However, if you want to dive into more technical topics and share real insights, in that case it’s best to find an external expert that can help you. At Mint, we work with both internal and external experts when creating content to make sure all content is based on expertise and not regurgitated online information (as you’ll have seen in the examples we added above).

Our writers don’t want to do interviews

This is a tricky one. If you are working with a high quality writer, then they should have no problem doing interviews with experts since they will understand the importance of creating unique content.

However, if you are working with content mills and low-quality, low-pay writer, then it’s natural that they won’t want to do an interview, since it’ll require additional time and effort from them.

If you are serious about content, then you’ll need to have a budget of at least £300 ($370) per article (and that’s on the low end). At those rates, you’ll be able to find good writers who are either open to doing the interviews themselves, or are happy to write content based on an interview that you do with the expert, and that you would send to them. Often, writers would much rather create articles based on an interview since it means less research for them and they get to create something unique and put their skills to practice. 

At Mint, it’s either a content strategist or writer who is in charge of doing the interview. The content strategist will usually be the one who decides on the intent of the article and thinks of a structure. Then they ask the expert questions that will help produce the main content of the article. 

The other thing that helps is working with writers long term. Over time, writers will get to understand your product and niche a lot better, which will happen even faster if they are also able to do interviews and ask their own questions. 

Content based on interviews helps you position yourself as an expert, create content that is genuinely valuable to your audience, and helps you acquire customers

Creating content based on interviews is a different approach to the way that most content is written.

We’ve all been writers and have experienced first hand the reasons why the “usual” approach doesn’t work when writing for a company. As a writer, we’re good at writing and communicating, we’re not the experts on the topic. So does it make sense to create more unoriginal content that anyone can find online?

As more and more articles clutter the pages on Google, creating content based on expert interviews is the best way to stand out. Not just that, but it means you can further your mission of genuine financial education, and best of all, it’s a strategy that actually helps grow your company via customer acquisition. 

If you liked this article, and are curious to hear if this approach would work for you, reach out to us to see how we can help you!

Financial Services Content StrategyAraminta RobertsonComment