How to Market to Experts

I’m building a business for people who profess to hate me and everything I stand for—expert developers who know more about their work than I ever will.

I’m a content marketer, and like many others in my line of work, I don’t know a line of code. Unfortunately, for much of my audience, content marketers are little more than wolves in sheep’s clothing. I write for expert developers who routinely react to my field’s work with comments like:

• “Anything connected to ads or marketing triggers a visceral response of disgust in me.”
• “There’s no form of marketing I ‘like’ or actively reward, at most there’s marketing I fall for.”
• “Developers are logical and practical thinkers and despise sociopathic behavior. Developers have a very strong resistance to this sort of manipulation.”

This distrust of content marketing has stretched far beyond developers. We live in an era defined by the death of one form of expertise—that of writers and publishers, establishing the norms—and the rise of a new one—that of experts speaking directly to their audiences. This latter category of “intruder” expands beyond the interloping marketer to legacy media—including journalists and writers who aren’t seen as having practical, on-the-ground experience.

To get around this, many writers aim for beginners in their target audience. But content marketing for beginners is rarely worth the effort—especially for businesses pursuing product-led growth, a strategy that requires appealing to practitioner-level experts, such as developers. 

Additionally, broad-appeal beginner content, said Rand Fishkin, co-founder of audience research company Sparktoro, appeals to groups that are “high consumption” but “low amplification.” Higher-level content appeals to smaller groups that consume less content overall but have much more amplification potential. “The amplifiers can usually help you reach the beginners,” said Fishkin. “The beginners usually can’t help you reach the amplifiers.” 

That’s why you should be writing for experts. It’s harder to create content that appeals to them. But when you do, you can leverage their power, reach the beginners, and borrow their credibility along the way. Here’s how to do it.

Embrace and reinforce humility

Today, writers have to prove and re-prove their credibility in and across every piece. The biggest mistake you can make is overcompensating for this new deficit with overconfidence. Experts—skilled practitioners in the field you’re writing about—can see right through it.

“Experts can see more gradients of expertise than novices can,” explains business publication Commoncog’s Cedric Chin. Chin uses tennis to illustrate his point: for a beginner, a pro-level tennis game is merely a spectacle. For an expert, all sorts of moves, strategies, and implications can become visible. If a beginner proclaims, “Ah, a classic moonball,” the expert will be distrustful, not impressed. 

In response, many writers ask practitioners to write the content or pepper whatever practitioners they can find with questions. However, this adds another degree of complexity—content marketers and journalists need to know which experts to pick. For example, in software development, a Python programmer will know little about C++ programming, a frontend developer will know little about backend development, and a programmer at a small startup will know little about programming for enterprise-scale applications. 

That’s where humility comes in. In content marketing, you will often have to interview your company’s founders and compare their ideas against what practitioners inside and outside the company think. Similarly, in journalism, you might have to interview many more people than you’ll quote.

For example, in an article about a backlash to software vendors charging exorbitant fees for baseline security features, I expected to find a consensus among developers. But when I spoke to them, I found that several felt these fees were justified—far more than I had assumed. Their contributions helped add nuance and credibility to the final article.

Humility has to be central in the final product, too. Give the best objection its due. Look for red flags that might trigger skepticism (in developer marketing, a red flag can be as simple as explaining concepts a developer would already know).

Credibility is built block by block, claim by claim, and article by article. Experts can help, but the work of building expertise falls to the writer. 

Divide, collaborate, and conquer

Often, writing—or typing, really—is the last thing I think about. That’s not because it’s not important but because it’s not central. 

When I write, I try to tap into a spectrum of different skills and roles, and integrate other people’s skills and roles whenever necessary. Some of my best writing has actually come from ceding the writer-as-author perspective and diving into the gray zones that exist between editing and co-writing, or interviewing and ghostwriting.