How to Write Expert Content: A Step-by-Step Guide

Note from 2025: This step-by-step expert content process still works beautifully—but today we pair it with AI-led interviews and generative tools to move from raw subject-matter expertise to polished drafts much faster. MSAI helps teams use structured interviews, prompt libraries, and safe AI workflows to turn expert insights into fully customized content without losing the human voice.

Learn how our AI training services accelerate content creation.

In the B2B world, your audience is small, specialized, and busy. For years, companies tried to reach them with tactics like cold calls, blast emails, and generic ads—tactics that interrupt instead of help.

Today’s buyers expect to research on their own. They look for articles, guides, and case stories that reflect their reality and offer clear paths forward. When your content shows up at that moment with specific, trustworthy advice, you become the partner they already trust before they ever fill out a form.

Expert content—rooted in your team’s real experience—is how you make that happen. Instead of forcing people into a sales conversation before they’re ready, you meet them where they are with useful, relatable guidance that steadily warms them up.

Compare these two experiences:

• A cold call from a salesperson insisting they can solve your problem without demonstrating that they actually understand it.
• Finding a thoughtful article that describes your exact situation and lays out a step-by-step plan that feels like it was written just for you.

The second path wins almost every time—and that’s the bar for expert content.

If this sounds familiar, this guide is for you.

You might recognize your current approach to marketing if you’re:

• Spending on PPC campaigns that generate clicks but almost no qualified leads.
• Publishing blog posts that don’t move the needle on leads, opportunities, or pipeline.
• Buying lead lists for your sales team, only to have 99% of calls end without next steps.

This guide can help you shift from one-off marketing activities to a repeatable expert-content engine that proactively positions your team as the go-to thought leader in your space.

If you’d like help designing or running that engine, that’s exactly what we do with clients. Get in touch with our team.

Step-by-step guide to creating expert content

At Mostly Serious, we’ve refined a simple, reliable process for creating expert content that’s both helpful and high-converting. While there are many ways to do content marketing, this four-step approach keeps teams focused on the right people, the right pains, and the right voices.

Step 1: Identify the key decision-makers you want to reach

Every effective content strategy starts with a specific audience. “Marketing leaders” is a start; “marketing directors at B2B manufacturers who own the website budget and lead-gen goals” is better.

At Mostly Serious, our primary decision-makers are usually marketing leaders—VPs, directors, or managers, depending on company size. They aren’t always the CEO, but they are almost always the person responsible for researching options, shortlisting partners, and making a recommendation.

If you’re not sure who this is for your business, start with your sales team. Ask them whose name appears on the calendar invite, who asks the detailed questions, and who ultimately signs off on a proposal.

• Look at recent deals and write down the real titles of people who advanced conversations.
• Review which roles actually control or strongly influence the budget.
• Clarify which industries, company sizes, and regions you most want to serve.

Your goal at this step is a crisp statement, like: “We’re writing for multi-location healthcare marketing leaders responsible for digital acquisition.” That clarity makes every future content decision easier.

Step 2: Map the real needs and pain points of those decision-makers

Once you know who you’re writing for, the next question is what they actually need help with. The fastest way to find out is to ask them directly.

Schedule short conversations with current customers, prospects, and even churned clients. Ask open-ended questions about their goals, obstacles, and what has made past vendor relationships succeed or fail. Listen for the phrases they repeat—those phrases often become your best headlines.

In parallel, send lightweight surveys to your customer list and look at support tickets, sales call notes, and CRM fields. Patterns will start to emerge: repeated frustrations, bottlenecks, or wishlist items that never seem to get prioritized.

Finally, layer in industry research. Read reports, competitor content, and expert commentary to understand how your buyers' world is changing. For example, in a recent study from our sister team at Habitat, manufacturers cited attracting and retaining younger talent as a top pain point—insight that directly shapes the stories we tell for them.

By the end of this step, you should have a small set of clearly defined problems your audience feels regularly, stated in their own words. Those become the backbone of your expert content calendar.

Step 3: Find the internal experts who actually solve those problems

Expert content needs real expertise. Inside your company, that usually lives in the people who deliver work every day: strategists, consultants, engineers, account managers, and service leads.

A common mistake is asking those experts to “go write a blog post when you have time.” They rarely have time, and even when they do, writing isn’t always their primary skill set. The result is an empty content calendar and frustrated marketing team.

Instead, treat your experts as interview subjects, not copywriters. Have your marketing team sit down with them for 30–60 minutes and ask focused questions about how they diagnose problems, what options they consider, and what advice they give customers in real conversations.

• Record the interview (with permission) so you can revisit exact language and stories later.
• Ask for specific examples, not just theories—“Tell me about a time when…” is your friend.
• Look for strong quotes and mental models that will make your article more memorable and quotable.

Those recordings become raw material for articles, sales enablement pieces, webinars, and more.

And with modern AI tools, you can responsibly summarize, cluster, and outline that interview content much faster—as long as you start with a thoughtful, human-led conversation.

If your team doesn’t have capacity to run this kind of research and interview process, we regularly handle it end-to-end for clients—planning the questions, running the sessions, and turning the output into usable content. Talk with us about expert content research.

Step 4: Turn raw expertise into repeatable, evergreen content

By this point, you know who you’re writing for, what they’re struggling with, and how your team helps. The final step is building a sustainable rhythm for turning that insight into content your audience will actually see.

In highly effective organizations, someone owns content creation as a core responsibility. In reality, many teams juggle content alongside a dozen other priorities—which is why good ideas often die in a shared doc instead of making it to your website.

If that sounds familiar, try building structure around the work instead of hoping it will happen in the margins:

• Schedule dedicated writing time. Protect half-day or full-day “content retreats” where your team focuses only on turning interviews and research into drafts. At Mostly Serious, a single retreat can fuel weeks or months of publishing.
• Create evergreen assets. Invest time in pieces that will stay relevant for a long time—guides, how-tos, and explainers—so you can keep resurfacing them instead of constantly starting from scratch.
• Maximize each piece across channels. Use one expert interview to create a flagship article, several LinkedIn posts, a short video or webinar snippet, and even sales-enablement one-pagers. Most companies dramatically underuse the stories they already have.

The goal isn’t to publish as much as possible; it’s to publish a steady stream of genuinely helpful content that keeps your brand top-of-mind whenever your buyers are ready for the next step.

Strapped for time? Let Mostly Serious run the process.

For many marketing teams, the bottleneck isn’t ideas—it’s capacity. Between launching campaigns, supporting sales, and reporting on performance, it can be hard to carve out time for high-quality, expert-led content.

We help by acting as an extension of your team: leading research, interviewing your internal experts, building an editorial roadmap, and using AI where it makes sense to accelerate drafting while keeping humans firmly in control.

The result is a content engine that feels tailored to your buyers, grounded in your team’s real experience, and sustainable for the long haul. Let’s talk about building your expert content program.

Key takeaways

Expert content works when it is specific to your decision-makers, anchored in their real-world pain points, and built from the experience of people who solve those problems every day.

By identifying the right audience, listening closely to their needs, interviewing your own experts, and creating space to turn those insights into evergreen assets, you’ll replace one-off campaigns with a durable content engine that attracts, educates, and converts over time.