How to Become a Trusted Expert

To develop thought leadership, you need to start to think like your buyer personas. (See previous post in series How to Develop Buyer Personas)

71360654 You don’t want to become a Trusted Expert to everyone (well, you would, but it’s nearly impossible to do), you want to become a Trusted Expert within your buyer personas (a much more accomplishable task.)

Remember that being a Trusted Expert is about educating your potential customers on how to solve their problems, it is in no way related to trying to sell them something. It may go against every instinct you have, but you can’t mention your company (besides letting them know who the information is from) or the products or services you sell.

Really, this is what becoming a Trusted Expert is all about. It will turn you from Jim, the guy with a website that sells shed plans, to Jim, the Trusted Expert on the construction and building of sheds who helps us out by also selling plans that have been given his seal of approval. Who would you rather buy from? I thought so.

And to become a Trusted Expert, you’ve got to give a little to get a lot.

If may seem counterintuitive, but you’ve got to give away some info that is valuable enough that you could probably charge for it, but you won’t since you’re Jim, Trusted Expert, who just wants to educate people about how to build good sheds; and if you happen to need a plan to build that shed, why I’ve got one right here for you.

There are many ways that you can establish yourself as a Trusted Expert. Ways to communicate with your potential customers include blogs (hi!), email newsletters, ebooks, webinars, podcasts, video content, research reports, and white papers. Each is a way to communicate useful information that people will value, and, in turn, assign value to your company.

When preparing these communication pieces, there are several things that you need to keep in mind:

This is not a sales pitch; being a Trusted Expert has nothing to do with advertising.
Know your organizational goals.
Understand your audience (buyer personas); you can’t provide them with useful information if you don’t know what they want.
Make sure to promote your efforts; treat it as a press release worthy thing – let reporters, bloggers, and analysts that would be interested in the information know about it.
Decide whether you want to provide the content for free, or if you’re going to require people to register. You’ll get more people downloading it if it’s free, but you could also be building a qualified mailing list if you require them to provide you with an email address. Depending on what your company does and what your goals are, either option could work best.

Don’t underestimate the power using someone else’s expertise to help establish you as a Trusted Expert in your business. Hitch your cart to their star, as they say, and leverage that person’s authority and thought leadership and use it to promote your business, and you as a Trusted Expert.

Get someone who is already respected within your category to write something that you will feature on your site. It could be a guest blog post, a white paper, either a written, audio, or video interview. Not only will you get the benefit of their authority, but you can also get a boost in traffic through promotion on their site.

Here’s what you need to do:

Come of with a list of useful information that you can give to your buyers that will help establish yourself as a Trusted Expert.
Decide what, out of that information, would be the most useful to each of your personas.
Then, decide where you will promote the availability of this information so that each of your personas will become aware of it.

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