How Can Subject Matter Experts Drive Content?

In this episode, we interview David Fitzpatrick, Vice President of Marketing at Modus Create, an IT services and consulting firm specializing in digital product engineering.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• How to engage subject matter experts in content creation.
• Strategies to amplify individual and business expertise authentically.
• The importance of balancing brand cohesion with SME freedom.
• Tools and processes to streamline content ideation and distribution.
• The shift in content marketing towards community engagement over traditional gating.

Tune in to explore how SMEs can elevate trust and authenticity in your marketing efforts!

Transcript

David Fitzpatrick (00:02)
in my case, the director of content who has helped develop those standards and practices to make sure they're compliant. Some cases that could be even pairing them with a writer to help.

Solidify the brand voice, but then we're gonna take it and go promote it and we're gonna suggest to you how you can be involved in that promotion as well Of course you wrote it. It's your insights never gonna be branded as the company right and to the point on trust earlier What I'm trying to avoid is there's one person off in an ivory tower in marketing who? Is gonna end up looking like the thought leader on digital transformation or digital product engineering, which is not the case The whole company is made up of those people. We're then there to

give them direction, the tools they need, and we're there to amplify their contribution.

Ben (01:07)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by David. David, welcome to the show.

David Fitzpatrick (01:13)
Thanks for having me.

Ben (01:14)
You bet. David, I'm excited for the discussion. It's going to be a fun one. But before we dive in, let's get to know you a little bit. What's your background? What do you love about content and marketing? We'd just love to get to know you a little bit before we dive in.

David Fitzpatrick (01:27)
Yeah, sure. So, my name is David Fitzpatrick. am the vice president of marketing at a company called Modus Create. We're a IT services and consulting firm specializes in digital product engineering. I got started in the very early days of small startup agencies when big brands needed to outsource social media management to

case, early millennials who are at the bleeding edge of smart people who understood social media and could try to bring that to the masses to make a little bit of a one-on-one brand connection. And that evolved number of different roles and creative agencies, both national conglomerates and ones based in and around the Washington, DC area.

My role at Modus, I've been here for six years and this is my first brand side experience. I was our first dedicated marketing hire and had been building the team from the ground up. Like I said, we're services business. spun out of open source software into broader consulting services across the software development life cycle. So always been a cornerstone of our go-to market.

When you're buying consulting services, it's ultimately a game of trust, right? So how do you demonstrate that trust? Well, you can do so by demonstrating that you have a mix of strategic and tactical knowledge through something like content. So very relevant conversation.

Ben (02:50)
I love it. So the focus for today is really around subject matter experts. And the way we engage with subject matter experts is so different from business to business. And I think everyone's figuring out what's the right way or the wrong way. We're going to really focus on how to get them, the SMEs, the subject matter experts, to create the content.

and then promote them as the experts of your business and of that content. So really like first and foremost, David, why this philosophy? Why have them write the content and then promote those subject matter experts in behalf of the business?

David Fitzpatrick (03:30)
the one word that would immediately jump to the front of my brain is authenticity, right? I've tried to frame a little bit of a simplified marketing funnel for the activities that we do against attention, recall and trust. The first two being very squarely in the realm of marketing and we have strong influence on trust. But I think in the services business where our previous work

And the people who are doing that work, understanding both the strategic implications and the tactical execution of that product development roadmap they're shaping of that front end application they're building, it's hugely important. Right. So as we move down the funnel, we're really looking to amplify the people who are actually going to be doing the things, right. And being very cognizant too, if I was a frontline now, we'll call it consulting, but I worked in many agencies for

12 plus years and that's where the insights are. Those are the people interacting day to day with the clients and doing the execution. There's very often some very interesting fodder for the company level story that's hiding behind, no one asked me or I never knew how to bring it

Ben (04:38)
Yeah, I love that. So when we're looking at giving some freedom to create content from subject matter experts, there's always the question of how do we make it into a cohesive brand, a unified message, and really make sure it aligns with some of the business objectives and goals. How do you kind of measure and balance those elements?

David Fitzpatrick (04:57)
It absolutely is difficult. I'll say my preamble to this is the classic, depends answer. think it re first, it just starts with greater exposure and conversation, right? How do we engage SMEs and even leadership over the frontline consultants in our case? How do we engage them in a regular conversation to pull out ideas and begin to get some of those?

to get a little bit more tactical than that I framed for our people a somewhat basic, we'll call it content life, content development life cycle. The first stage and the last stage I think are where marketing can play that first stage being, this align to what we want to be talking about? Or are we talking about making a better toaster or something that's totally not aligned? Or is it,

full of curse words or whatever that doesn't align to our overall, but is this aligned to our audience, what they care about, where our company wants to go, then sharing some editorial guidelines. Some of it can be basic tone and voice. A lot of that seems to get more marketer centric than just empowering people with them general guidelines around active voice and tooling and best practices to support them.

doing the bulk of it in the middle, which is indeed sharing their own insights, right? Here's a set of tools. We use Grammarly, always gut check it with ChatGPT before you send it back. Here's what we think from a voice perspective. Here's where we're going. We use the term themes a lot, and that's one that seems to have resonated internally.

which is not just we're focusing on selling acts, but there's an overall demand or a lot of conversation in the market with our buyers, with similar firms around the implementation of AI, right? So how do you relate back what you're saying to that overall theme, right? Doesn't mean you need to build a better AI mousetrap. There's many different directions you can take it, but does it align and show off our expertise related to that overall theme you want to be talking about?

give them the tools to go forth in that middle part. And then of course, the bulk of marketing coming in at the end, which is to say, do we promote and amplify, right? What channels are available to us? Well then, you know, obviously check the middle and that's routed through a single editor.

in my case, the director of content who has helped develop those standards and practices to make sure they're compliant. Some cases that could be even pairing them with a writer to help.

Solidify the brand voice, but then we're gonna take it and go promote it and we're gonna suggest to you how you can be involved in that promotion as well Of course you wrote it. It's your insights never gonna be branded as the company right and to the point on trust earlier What I'm trying to avoid is there's one person off in an ivory tower in marketing who? Is gonna end up looking like the thought leader on digital transformation or digital product engineering, which is not the case The whole company is made up of those people. We're then there to

give them direction, the tools they need, and we're there to amplify their contribution.

Ben (07:49)
I love that. So the natural question for me is how are you amplifying effectively? What are some strategies and maybe some tactics that are working really well? And then on top of that, how do you get that to resonate with your brand and the business and not just the individuals like you mentioned there lifting the whole business up to say these are the caliber of individuals working for us and that will work with you in your use case with the services industry.

How do you kind of tie those all together?

David Fitzpatrick (08:18)
I think some of that has to come through the marketing department steering with things like themes, right? And that's where having regular conversations, like I said, with the senior leadership that sit over some of our consulting lines of business, for lack of a better term, really helped because they can then delegate even to more technical and frontline people, participate in the content development process themselves. But

By being involved in regular conversation and indeed involving marketing much earlier, we're able to actually help craft that. What we never want to do is, yeah, we did a marketing campaign on that thing and we look back and it's actually like we did a LinkedIn post, right? There's so many channels that we can avail ourselves of. And even if we're not delivering it, we can help polish the stuff or we can recommend what that is. And to your point on distribution.

A lot of times, you know, what resonates for a firm of our size is where are we getting up and speaking, right? Where are we actually getting in front of the communities of other practitioners or other buyers? And that's something you can't fake. It can't be David up there talking about how we implemented a new overhaul to the CI CD framework, because we've already tested my limits of knowing, you know, what those words mean and their application in the software development life cycle. But the people who can go much deeper.

We presented them with, Hey, here's what we think is like the playbook that we can run. We need you to be involved. And there's some SLAs on how you can, when you should turn things around and what we need to help you. But we're here to, facilitate you doing these things. And that's what makes a campaign, right? The landing page accompanies the content coming from the SME is the same topic as being brought to.

a few selected conferences. Hopefully that person is then evangelizing the same thing on their own profiles to add further authenticity and get in front of their networks, not just the company's networks, and to extend our reach further. been a big uplift for us. think we've also seen the major trend in overall content marketing and moving away from the 2014 playbook, perhaps, of gating stuff behind email, which is

it does introduce some tracking problems, but giving it away for free, right. And knowing that some element of interest, that awareness and recall is unmeasurable, I think is, pretty core to what we're doing, right. If we're in those communities, authentically, we've seen over time that creatively that does increase, meaningful pipeline contribution, right.

And it's in a less predatory and more high value way than, okay, we got 300 people that downloaded the ebook and an SDR has just hit them over and over with seven touches until one person, you know, reluctantly decided to do a demo intro call, right?

Ben (10:58)
Yeah, I love that. So one of the questions that naturally comes to my mind is what percentages of your content are coming from subject matter experts as opposed to business written or produced content. And then along with that, how do you ensure there's enough of the subject matter expert content? How do you...

kind of put a fire underneath some of these people. If they're less willing to produce content, so you kind of hit the numbers and the quantity that you're looking for.

David Fitzpatrick (11:28)
I would estimate probably 70 % of our stuff comes from the people themselves and that is across. We have an open source program office that does highly technical content and open source contributions. That is who's authoring things on our blog. That is the executive comms stuff that we support, right? Where our C-suite.

have their own insights and publish those out into the market that are aligned with the direction we're going, the firm we're building, macro trends, right? Those are to some degree facilitated by marketing, but all not coming from like a person called Modus Create on LinkedIn, right? We are amplifying a person's, indeed a real person's connection. I think in terms of maintaining the drum beat,

I do not think any firm has cracked the code on that and it is an ever moving target for us. think what has helped organization is lucky in that we have people given the roots of the company that still carry through with the co-founder and CEO who's still involved. Folks want to contribute.

And that's where I think the guidelines, we did something that seems quite easy, but we have a submission portal. Hey, you have a content idea in what medium is it? What's the thing about? Is it sourced from a client? Do you think it's critical? Is it relevant for other people? Where'd you get the idea? Right. And that can just even build a backlog to just start that conversation and through giving people some standards and guidance or

These are the three themes we're really hitting next year. So anything comes to you, right into 2025, talk to your direct manager, talk to their boss, use the portal, right? Get in front of us because we'd love to have a conversation about how this can fit in. Some of that is just content enablement, not in the sense of distribution, but how do we enable ideation Some of it is championing the who model the behavior that we, that we really want.

And then the rest of it is constantly evolving, right? How do we get more line of business aligned to be even closer to those conversations? Do we talk to account managers versus the consultants on the ground? Are there different perspectives that they can all add?

Ben (13:33)
I love that. I love all of that information. mean, you know, roughly 70 % of the content coming from subject matter experts. I think that's a great percentage for a business to strive for. And I think that that's a great gold standard. I also love that you were talking about the content enablement of the ideation side of things and how do we enable the subject matter experts to

Be excited to contribute. love that you're giving them ideas. You're giving them themes and you're making all these tools and resources available to say, if anything ever comes to mind, please get it in front of us. We want to help you. We want to enable you to be successful. And I think that's big. think it's bigger than just saying, Hey, can we interview and write an article and quote you? It really is this fundamental, almost this,

cultural expectation of let's get your name out there. Let's really promote you and we're here to help. So I really love that philosophy. think that's great.

David Fitzpatrick (14:31)
Yeah. And I think, you know, we talk about in the marketing agency sense, you talk about briefs a lot, right? You're going to do a Super Bowl ad, you send a brief out to Ogilvy or whatever. We actually found with some of our more technical teams that that paint by numbers approach actually really helped to say, you know, almost the same questions I was outlining in the portal. What is it? Is it relevant for more clients than the one that you did? Basically, what is the tech stack? Like without technical jargon, what did the thing do?

How did this help move the business? And answering all of those questions then helps my team prioritize. is like, well, you told me you named the elements of the tech stack that you used to build this infrastructure platform. But what you didn't tell me without the brief was that it's now supporting a hundred million dollar line of business within a year. I bet there's a lot of businesses that care about that second thing. And that just widens the aperture for the use case for the story that allows us to more effectively tell it.

I think the other thing, is, which is actually somewhat tactical, but people kind of love to understand the fruits of their efforts is a, is a basic campaign plan. you know, the LinkedIn, the one LinkedIn post is not a campaign, but this is indeed what it could look like. Here's the potential. Here's all of the plays in the sports sense that we could run, right? There's regional conferences we can go to. We can type this up officially and enter it to a call for papers for a big conference.

we would lodge it on this area of the blog, which means it would get promotion in the monthly newsletter and it would go on LinkedIn. We'd ask you to champion it. We would package it up for sales enablement, right? And it makes it much more real, but we're really doing something with this. We're getting something out of it. And this is more valuable, right? Then, Hey, I did my blog post. I finished it. And sometimes I forget to promote it, right? What we don't want is someone to participate in that process and then just feel like, I got done.

It's gone forever, right? And we definitely want them to take some ownership. And to your point earlier, it's an opportunity for them to then increase their own cache in the market, right? And their own value by being, by being a face to that.

Ben (16:26)
I love that. Well, David, we've run out of time. These episodes go by super quick. If anyone wants to continue the conversation and reach out to you online, how and where can they find you?

David Fitzpatrick (16:36)
Look me up on LinkedIn. That would be the easiest place. I try to be as responsive as I can to inbound messages. David Fitzpatrick is handle there. I'd be happy to chat with anyone else. And thank you, Ben. Appreciate it.

Ben (16:50)
Yeah, thanks again, David. Appreciate the time.