When you can create content content at zero cost with an AI account, information will explode exponentially, but trust in that information will decline just as fast.
That’s why, in the coming years, trust is going to be the ultimate competitive edge. We’re in a period of social transition, and with every shift like this comes both major risk and rare opportunity. And expert-led content is one of those opportunities.
As Noah Greenberg, CEO at Stacker, puts it: “don’t sleep on the human desire to read stuff directly from another human’s mouth”. Experts want to know what other experts are thinking, not what a machine is repeating.
For B2B companies, where trust and authority is the ultimate factor influencing buying decision, content should be expert-led.
In this article, we’ll explore:
- What is expert-led content?
- Why expert-led content work for B2B?
- How to create good expert-led content?
Let’s dive in!
What is Expert-led Content?
Expert-led content is B2B content that is driven by real subject-matter experts (founders, operators, practitioners, engineers, consultants) rather than purely editorial teams. People with actual experience and expertise in the topic write content to express themselves, and their knowledge clearly shows in what they share.
In an expert-led content piece, it is common to find:
- Lived experience
- Original thinking
- Unique POVs that only that expert has thanks to their many years of experience
- Nuances that only people who have “walked the walk” have
Examples of Expert-led content
When content is written with actual expertise, you can see it immediately.
This is an example of an expert-led piece of content, published on Perceptric’s blog: “Why you must go beyond SEO in B2B content marketing?”.
It has all of the characteristics of a piece of expert-led content:
- written by an SEO and content marketing specialist who knows what they are writing about.
- expresses a unique POV that goes beyond the constrains of optimizing for the search engine
- challenges the status quo and requires readers to think twice about the topic
Here’s another piece of expert-led content that I particularly like. It’s the definitive article about “Pain Point SEO”, published by Grow and Convert.
They write with an authoritative voice, fill the article with charts and data to support their arguments, and explain the concept of Pain Point SEO in extreme depth for the audience. That’s what makes a true expert-led article.
Why do we need expert-led content in B2B marketing?
The SEO world has seen too much of average content written by people without expertise.
Having been in the B2B content marketing world for decades, here’s what I’ve observed about the industry: most content marketing teams consist of an SEO person who provides the strategy and content direction and a content person who handles the execution. However, either one of them (or both) don’t have the necessary expertise to do their job properly.
Why? Because B2B is a particularly difficult niche to write content for.
B2B product solves problems of big businesses, and writing for B2B requires a deep understanding of how businesses in that specific industry operate. For more technical products, you also need to have a Not everyone has the skills and knowledge to do those tasks well.
For example, here’s an article from Katalon, a platform to automate tests for websites/mobiles/APIs. It explains the cost of doing regression testing manually, and why it’s a good move to invest into automation testing for their team.
Without the help of an expert who understands technical terms like “manual regression”, or “automation testing”, or the nuances of how a QA team operates, as well as industry insights about the trade-offs of investing into automation, it’s really really hard to write a piece of content that resonates with buyers.
You need someone who has “been there, done that” to write content that truly clicks with the audience.
Benefits of expert-led content
When you publish expert-led content, readers know it right away.
- It differentiates your brand immediately: In a world where everyone sounds the same—either churning out AI slop or copycat content—your content has a distinct voice. That’s rare, and it shows that you respect your readers. You’ve just made a good first impression.
- People will come back for more: when they know you’re an expert, they will come back to look for your advice. You become the trusted voice in the community. Your opinions and thoughts carry weight.
- People actually learn something from your content: experts have good insights and knowledge to share. When experts create content, that knowledge shines through every paragraph. When people have a mini “aha” moment thanks to the content you create, they psychologically associate your brand with value and authority. That’s something millions of dollar in ad spend can’t buy.
- B2B buyers do a lot more research than you think: according to Wynter’s State of B2B SaaS Brand Marketing report, 92% of B2B buyers only purchase from the vendors already on their Day-1 shortlist. That means your prospect has already had much of the research done before even speaking with your Sales team. If you don’t influence their buying decision during that stage, you’re missing out, a lot. And of course, what else can be more educative than some good expert-led content?
How to create expert-led content?
Here’s a practical process I used to create expert-led content:
- Identify internal experts tied to customer problems
- Build a lightweight SME interview pipeline
- Turn expert insights into scalable formats
- Distribute that content
Let’s dive in!
1. Identify internal experts tied to customer problems
Let’s say you work with some of the smartest and most talented people you know. Millions of thoughts probably run through their heads daily, but most never materialize into articles that can be sent to customers and converted into closed deals.
That’s a lot of lost opportunities.
Instead, you should go out there, find the smartest guys or gals in your company, and start asking questions.
Here are some of the types of experts you can talk to:
- Sales: they work with customers on a daily basis. They hear objections, complaints, pain points all day, and there’s no reason for you not to harvest that.
- Solution Architects: they design and oversee the implementation of your products/services to solve business problems for clients. Solution Architects sit at the intersection of buyer intent and technical feasibility, so ask them any questions in that grey area.
- Customer Success/Support: they know the dark parts of your company. Ask them about the common failure points and adoption blockers.
- Engineers: these guys are usually the most brilliant, but they don’t share their thoughts too much. Talking to them helps you understand the nuances of the product and why it was engineered that way.
- Founders: sometimes it’s can feel intimidated to talk to the CEO, but I promise they’re a goldmine of content ideas. Ask them about the “Why” behind the product/services, and insights about where the market is actually heading.
2. Build a lightweight SME interview pipeline
Each interview should be short—a 30–45 minute recorded conversation—scheduled monthly or bi-weekly for each SME.
Always prepare a list of questions to send to SMEs so that they can prep in advance. For example, here are some topics our team prepared internally.
A problem that we faced in the beginning of the SME interview process is that SMEs aren’t sure about what topics that they should share. It makes sense, because sometimes the idea of “thought leadership” makes people hesitate. In their mind, thought leadership is something ground-breaking, thought-provoking, fascinating, awe-inspiring, and they may think that their ideas are nowhere near “thought-leadership” level.
That’s why I advise you start a “Topic Bank”, which includes:
- Objection topics
- Mistake topics
- Comparison topics
- Implementation topics
- Decision framework topics
After that, you can ask SMEs to:
- React (agree/disagree)
- Correct nuance
- Add edge cases
Instead of asking SMEs to generate ideas, ask them to react to a real problem. “What is your opinion on the problem we’re trying to solve?” This reframing immediately lowers the bar psychologically. It:
- doesn’t ask for originality, only real experience from the SMEs, which they are more likely to share.
- doesn’t require a polished stance.
- shifts the focus from self-expression to customer reality.
3. Turn expert insights into scalable formats
Of course, don’t forget to click Recording to record the interview. We have AIs to help us write meeting minutes (thank you AI!), and they do a pretty good job at that.
Once done, turn that interview into scalable formats:
- You can easily turn one interview into 2–3 thought leadership articles.
- You can also turn snippets from the interview into video clips for social media promotion and ad campaigns.
Beyond marketing, interview insights can be repackaged into:
- Objection-handling documents
- Internal FAQs
- Talking points for sales or customer success teams
That means SMEs only have to contribute insight once per month, even per quarter, but Marketing can turn that insight into multiple formats to use across a wide range of channels. Over time, this creates a repeatable system where expert insight becomes a renewable content engine rather than a one-off contribution. Make sure to build a content calendar to facilitate this process.
4. Distribute that content
This is the biggest pain point of expert-led content.
Most expert-led content and thought leadership content is never written to rank high on Google. To be able to express a truly unique opinion, you need to write something that the crowd doesn’t really expect. Meanwhile, Google’s job is to rank content that follows the search engine’s guidelines, sometimes even at the expense of content quality. That’s a big conflict.
- Genuinely good content doesn’t get easily discovered on search engines
- Well-optimized content doesn’t have room for writers to express their thoughts and opinions freely
Every time you publish a piece of expert-led content, you are essentially starting from zero. You have to go out there and share that content to a wider audience. Even if people visit and read that post, the initial traffic spike usually wears off after a few days.
That’s why it’s really essential to balance SEO content and expert-led content in your content strategy. I use an approach called the Knowledge – Narrative content strategy.
Knowledge – Narrative content strategy
It is two fundamentally different approaches to organizing and producing content. It helps content teams choose how to structure their blogs, what types of content to prioritize, and how to measure success.
- The Knowledge Model treats content as a structured, evergreen knowledge base like a reference library. These articles are well-optimized for SEO in an attempt to rank high on Google and bring in that consistent traffic.
- The Narrative Model treats content as a place to express unique POVs and insights that challenge the status quo. These articles are written in a more freestyle and experimental tone in an attempt to trigger a (positive) reaction from the reader. They are the expert-led and thought leadership content we’ve been talking about.
So here’s what you should do: within your highest-ranking SEO articles, strategically introduce expert-led content via contextual internal links, callout boxes, sidebar links, inline citations.
For example, here’s how I introduced some expert-led thought leadership content in my SEO-led article about B2B SEO (you should check it out because it has everything you need to know to rank an article high in virtually any B2B niche).
Conclusion
At the end of the day, I genuinely believe in the powers of expert-led content. It has worked so well for me and my clients. It’s the most effective in industries where clients are looking for someone who have “walked the walk” and talked the talk. On the top of my mind, those industries are:
- Professional services (agencies/engineering firms)
- B2B SaaS that’s trying to disrupt a category
- Healthcare and Life Sciences
- Technology (people in this sector love anything future-forward)
Remember: you don’t have to write something ground-breaking. Sometimes just an honest opinion on the state of things is more than enough to make your content stand out.
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