When it comes to technical content, many businesses come up against a challenge: who should be responsible for creating it? In general, content marketing teams are responsible for content generation, whether it’s through their team or third-party freelancers. However, most marketing teams aren’t equipped to create technical content because they aren’t experts in the technical topic. Which leads us to the alternative - have the subject matter experts (SMEs) create the content. This, however, introduces an entirely new host of problems.
There is a gap between who knows the information and who knows what to do with the information: Marketing and SMEs serve two very different functions. Your marketing team is there to promote your business and your products. Your SMEs are there to specialize in a highly technical field. Generally, the marketing team and the SMEs have vastly different areas of expertise, and as a result, you wind up with a gap. One group, your marketers, knows what to do with the information, but doesn’t know the information. The other group, your SMEs, knows the information, but it’s stored in an inaccessible (to everyone else) location - their mind.
SMEs already have a job to do. These are people who have detailed knowledge about a highly specific field. They are generally hired to conduct research, create new products, generate new business, etc. In most cases, they were not hired to write articles and build content calendars. Using your SMEs to create content takes away from their primary job function, which can be cost-prohibitive to your business.
SMEs are busy. There is a reason SMEs are hard to find. They are specialized, and as a result, they hold information and have skills that most people in your company don’t have. This generally creates a tremendous demand for their attention, help, and time. As SMEs prioritize these demands, marketing needs often drop lower and lower on the list because they generally aren’t considered business critical.
Sometimes (not always) SMEs do not excel at generating content. While they may be specialized in a specific field, SMEs may also be uncomfortable when you put pressure on them to write content, present information, or appear on screen. This is perfectly understandable - if these people were interested in these kinds of tasks, they would probably be in marketing.
It’s easy to see where the need for technical content creates challenges for businesses. So when we ask the question, ‘Should SMEs be responsible for generating content?’, the general answer is: kind of. They are much more useful to your business doing the things they were hired to do. Yet, they cannot be entirely extricated from the content machine; they have what marketing needs - information.
In this regard, businesses should use their SMEs in the ways that require the least amount of their time, specifically: interviews, reviews, and advising. Generally, this allows them to offload the bulk of the work onto your technical content creator/technical writer. After an interview (or a series of interviews), your technical writer will have the information they need to generate the content, and they’ll have a resource on speed dial should they come up against a wall.
Once the content has been created, your SME should review the content for accuracy. Specialized topics are generally nuanced, and these details can get misconstrued in translation, so their final input is crucial to ensuring accuracy.
That being said, one thing we’ve discovered in working with SMEs is that they are generally very passionate about the work that they do, and they are eager to share their knowledge. SMEs are often a fountain of ideas for new content, products, and research, and they can offer incredibly valuable input when it comes to proposing topics for thought leadership.
So where does that land us? SMEs are busy, but it’s impossible to cut them out of the content generation process entirely. You need the information they have, and you need to get it as efficiently as possible by using a technical content specialist who can quickly understand a new topic and knows what questions to ask to get to the heart of the content. Make your SME an advisor, not a creator (of content).
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