Jesse Harris Get Great Content From Subject Matter Experts

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Some of the best content ideas in your company are probably stuck inside the heads of people who have absolutely no interest in writing a blog post. Jesse Harris shares how marketers can earn the trust of subject matter experts, draw out what they know, and turn highly technical expertise into clear, compelling content without watering it down.

How to Get Great Content Out of Your SMEs (Subject Matter Experts)

Every company has someone who knows the product better than anyone else in the building. At a biotech firm, it’s the PhD in the lab. At a boat manufacturer, it’s the person who’s spent 20 years building keels.

That knowledge is exactly what your audience wants. It’s also one of the hardest things to get onto your blog.

I recently talked with Jesse Harris, Senior Editor at C&EN BrandLab, the custom content studio within the American Chemical Society. Jesse helps B2B companies reach scientific audiences, so he works with subject matter experts (SMEs) every day. His advice applies whether your experts wear lab coats or steel-toed boots.

Why Your Subject Matter Experts Keep Ghosting You

Start with incentives. You’re measured on leads and pipeline. Your SME? Jesse pointed out that helping marketing might be “point number 17” on their job description.

Then there’s perception. Many technical folks see marketing as, in Jesse’s words, “the coloring-in department,” with no obvious line from a blog post to a sale.

Finally, there’s the curse of knowledge. Once you become an expert in something, you forget what it was like not to know it. You assume everyone shares your baseline, and you end up talking right past your audience. That’s great for peer review. Not so great for a landing page.

Do Your Homework Before Talking to an SME

Jesse’s first tactic is also the easiest one to skip: learn the basics of their field before your first conversation.

If you walk in asking obvious questions, the expert feels like they’re babysitting. If there’s been turnover in your role, they may have explained the same fundamentals three times already. (Nobody wants to be Doc Brown explaining the flux capacitor to a new intern every six months.)

YouTube, ChatGPT, and Claude won’t make you an expert, but they can get you surprisingly far. When a white paper client sent background materials late for a kickoff in a niche Jesse didn’t know well, he dropped the public materials into ChatGPT and grilled it on how the technology worked and how it compared to the competition.

“It definitely wasn’t 100%,” he told me, but the next day he walked into the kickoff with good questions and a working understanding of the topic.

Just remember that AI gets things wrong in specialized fields. Use it to prepare for the conversation, not replace it.

Sell Marketing in Their Language

Some SMEs are openly skeptical that marketing does anything. Pointing to Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign probably won’t convince them.

Instead, meet them where they are. For scientists, Jesse compares content to something they already understand and respect: publishing in academic journals.

He also leans on data. His go-to is the 95/5 rule from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and LinkedIn’s B2B Institute. At any given time, only about 5% of B2B buyers are in the market. The other 95% aren’t, but they will be eventually, and you want them to remember you when they are.

For a data-minded expert, that’s far more convincing than “we’re building brand vibes.”

Make Contributing Easy

If your SMEs won’t write, stop asking them to write.

Jesse recommends a regular conversation, monthly or weekly depending on what makes sense. Ask what questions customers are raising, what concerns are coming up in the industry, and what alternatives buyers are weighing. Record it, grab the transcript, and run it through ChatGPT or Claude to pull out blog topics. Then you do the writing.

As Jesse put it, “If it’s half an hour per month, everybody can probably handle that.” If someone can’t spare 30 minutes a month, you have a different problem.

Another option is to build around content formats your experts already value. Jesse helped SMEs in his organization publish an academic journal article, then spun it into a campaign of summaries, excerpts, and social posts. The experts got their names on a paper that could help their careers. Marketing got a pile of content.

When you have a choice, start with the experts who want to participate.

Jargon Isn’t The Villain (It Might Even Be Your Superpower)

Marketers have been told for years to cut the jargon. Jesse has a more nuanced take.

His argument: the real problem is bad writing, like 40-word sentences with three clauses and plenty of repetition. Clean that up first, and you’ll be surprised how much jargon disappears on its own.

What remains might be necessary. “Imagine trying to talk about blood biochemistry without using the word hemoglobin,” Jesse said. The right technical term describes something precise, and talking around it creates a mess.

I’d add that jargon also signals belonging. If I know what hemoglobin is, I know you’re talking to me. Define it in every post for an audience of scientists, and they’ll feel like you’re addressing a fifth-grade science class.

The trick is knowing who’s buying, because the gap between expert and buyer can be huge. Someone buying a boat wants one that’s dependable and doesn’t tip over. They don’t care about hydrodynamics. An engineer designing a tanker absolutely does.

Watch for the Curse of Knowledge

How do you keep your SME (and yourself) from assuming everyone knows what they know? Jesse admits there’s no easy answer. Knowing your customer is part of it.

He also uses AI as a spot check, asking ChatGPT or Claude whether certain terms would be familiar to a given audience. It’s not perfect, but it catches the far outliers.

When in doubt, he leans toward a slightly wider aperture without talking down to the core audience.

Provide Feedback to Your Subject Matter Expert

Your SME gave you their time, you published the content, it generated leads… and the expert never heard another word about it. From their side, the work just disappears into the ether.

Share results on a regular cadence, framed around what they care about: leads if that’s in their KPIs, views and follower growth if they value thought leadership. Give them something to show their own boss.

Your next steps

1. Pick one SME and spend an hour learning the basics of their specialty before you meet.
2. Schedule a recurring 30-minute conversation. Record it and mine the transcript for content ideas.
3. Build around a format your expert already respects, like a white paper or journal article.
4. Edit for clarity first, then decide which jargon your buyers need.
5. Send your SME a quick results report after every piece goes live.

Your subject matter experts have the insights your audience is looking for. Your job is to make sharing those insights worth their time.

Transcript From Jesse Harris’s Episode

Rich: My next guest is a senior editor at ACS BrandLab, where he helps B2B companies connect with a scientific audience. He’s a self-certified LinkedIn obsessive and is a nerd about all things science and marketing.

Today we’re going to be diving into how you can extract great content from subject matter experts with Jesse Harris. Jesse, welcome to the podcast.

Jesse: Thank you so much for having me.

Rich: Now, you started in chemistry and chemical engineering before veering into marketing. What, if anything, from your scientific origins have you brought to your new role as a marketer?

Jesse: Oh, I think it’s really useful, honestly. I think that marketing can learn a lot from sciences.

I think that the rigor and the experimental mindset and understanding how different systems fit together, and this one thing affects this other thing and knocks this other thing down and such. There’s all of those sorts of bits of training that I’ve taken into becoming a scientist.

And also, really deeply understanding different subjects and being a nerd, being an enthusiast for those sorts of science of things is, I think, a really big plus for it, too. So yeah, definitely I think it was a background that really set me up for being a good marketer.

Rich: And as part of your role, you’re talking to these scientists who may not be marketers, may not be content creators, and at least how marketers think about that. But the advice that we’re going to talk about today really works for any SME, any subject matter expert. Is that correct?

Jesse: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I’ll actually say that, yeah, definitely I specialize in marketing to scientists for it, and I’m sure that there are nuances with engineers and lawyers and doctors and such that will have some challenges and not a full overlap for it.

But I do think that there are some experiences and some issues that are common across all of these groups. Something that I think I was mentioning to you earlier was that the impetus, the idea around this conversation actually came from a previous talk that I gave that was at B2B Forum last year. It was something that I had given a presentation about marketing to SMEs, marketing to these expert audiences as well, and I got a bunch of questions afterwards from folks that were kind of all variations of the same question, the SMEs never have enough time for me.

The technical folks in my organization are always coming in with all of these unnecessary edits and adding in more details and muddying up my content, muddying up my marketing messages with all of this jargon that’s really not performing for it. So that was something that ended up being a real ‘a-ha’ moment for me of this is a real challenge that exists across marketing in this space.

So I’m sure there are some folks out there who are laser focused on marketing to lawyers, and they’ll say, “Well, this little point here doesn’t quite work for it.” But I’m pretty sure that there’s going to be a decent amount of overlap.

Rich: Absolutely. And I know from my own experiences in working with clients in a wide range of industries, even things like boat manufacturing, trying to get the people who are working on the keel who have specialized knowledge that’s a subject matter expert also. So even if you don’t have scientists or engineers on your team, you likely have somebody who is a subject matter expert who may not be like, “I cannot wait to blog this week.”

Jesse: Yeah, no, I’d absolutely agree with that, too. And I think it’s worth also, we’ll probably get into this a little bit as well, understanding the differences that some subject matter experts take.

Sometimes it’s the type of person who did a PhD in this given topic, did a master’s in this given topic. Sometimes it’s somebody who’s worked their way up from the shop floor and isn’t obsessive about this particular piece of technology and such. And yeah, there’s definitely some nuance there about how you want to work with these folks, but definitely some overarching commonalities.

Rich: Absolutely. So I mentioned we have a number of clients who have SMEs on their team. And although they recognize the value that their expertise could bring to marketing the company, they can’t seem to extract that information from it. So why is it so difficult for us in marketing to get SMEs involved in creating content?

Jesse: That’s a great question, and I think there’s a lot of reasons behind that. You know, it’s multifaceted in some ways. On the one hand, it has to do partly with incentives.

As a marketer, again, most organizations you’re gold on how many leads you bring in. You’re gold on the pipeline leads you generate. Maybe you’re gold on the number of blog posts or whatever that you put out for it. That SME often has none of that on their job description or very limited amount.

Maybe it’s like a point number, 17 is help out marketing as able or something along those lines for it. And if it’s something that they’re not really aligned for that and they have a boss who’s pushing on them to focus on other parts of the work, it’s really just an incentives question there. So that’s half of, I think, the answer for it and is true in many cases.

But on the other hand too, I think that a lot of these folks don’t really get marketing in a respect. They think of it very much as you’re the coloring in department that is putting out these assets, generating the ads, that then generate the clicks, that generate the sales.

I don’t understand why this blog post really helps with that, for it. Or where can you show me how many sales is this supposed to get at the end of the day? And kind of, you’re putting that on a spreadsheet, and, that’s not really easy to do in in a lot of situations too.

So there’s kind of broader misconceptions about how marketing is understood. And I think that marketing generally has a hard time even talking about itself, because its role and how it’s approaching different questions changes from different situations. But then more broadly, too, I also think that the type of person that fits into these SME roles, maybe they’re not always the right fit for doing this as well, too.

Some of them are not interested in participating in these types of work. They’re very laser focused on, “I really love this technical side of the work, and I can talk about the details, and I really care about the nuance between this little piece of technology and that little piece of technology.” And it’s harder for them to zoom out and kind of abstract themselves from that curse of knowledge problem. I think is a big challenge when working with these folks.

Rich: Oh, I’ve always loved that phrase, the curse of knowledge. Maybe we’ll come back and explore that a little bit more.

But I’m curious, when you’re working with the SMEs, what are some of the tactics that you’re employing to better understand their motivations, their priorities, or even their incentives?

Jesse: So the one that I definitely start with is actually the importance of understanding the topic that they’re working on, the area of their science. The fact that I have a scientific background, I have master’s in chemistry and chemical engineering, and I’ve also even worked across a lot of different product areas and in industries now at this point, given my current role, this is something that allows me to talk with these folks, ask intelligent questions, understand kind of what they’re doing and such.

If you don’t have that as a marketer and you’re somebody who you don’t understand the science, you don’t understand the engineering, whatever the technical field is, and you’re kind of asking obvious questions or you don’t understand the fundamentals of how this area works, it’s going to be very tough to develop a good functional relationship.

Because often how they might feel whenever they have to talk to you is like, “Okay, I have to go do some babysitting. I have to re-explain this idea for the fifth time to somebody.” Maybe there’s been turnover in this role too, and that the last person came in, they had to explain all this stuff, somebody else comes in, now they have to start back from zero for it.

You can imagine how that probably feels, especially for somebody who takes this very seriously and has dedicated years of their lives either working in this field or studying it academically, et cetera. And so I think the best place to start by far as a marketer, take seriously trying to understand the technical area as best you can.

These days that’s easier than ever, too. There’s YouTube videos out there. There’s ChatGPT, there’s Claude. You can ask questions for these places, and it will not get you to that expert level of proficiency, but it can get you pretty far. And if you come into that first conversation or the second conversation with smart questions and you’re not retreading that basic stuff, it’ll give you a good amount of credibility and let them know that you’re somebody who is like with a program for it.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that you bring that same level of expertise to the marketing content that you’re actually producing at the end for it, but having that with that conversation that you’re having with the SME, I think it’s just a sign of respect.

Rich: Right. ChatGPT, please explain microbiology to me as if I am a fifth grader.

Jesse: Yeah. Well, one example that I give for this, I’m somebody who has background in some of these fields for it. There was one client that I was working with that we were going to be working on a white paper project for it. They were supposed to get some materials to us before this kickoff call that we were going to do. They ended up getting it to us quite late, and it was in this little niche area that I wasn’t very proficient in.

So what I did is I took those materials, that were publicly available materials, to be clear. But I took those materials, plopped it into ChatGPT, and just had a conversation with it and being like, “Okay, this piece of technology that they’re talking about, this service that they’re selling, et cetera, how does it work? How does it compare to the competition? What is the specifics of the mechanics of that for it?”

Kind of diving into that and finding those cleavage points, et cetera, that really matter with the project. And it definitely wasn’t 100%. There were definitely some moments where it was kind of not giving me the full answer for it. But the next day, which is just this pretty fast turnaround to learn this relatively sophisticated area for it, the next day when I go in, talk to the client, I have good questions, I understand the topic. I can dive in and say, “Okay, this is the part here that I thought was interesting on this. Does that resonate with you folks?” And I think that worked there for that project being successful.

Rich: Yeah, that’s definitely an interesting take. So if we can show interest and understanding, at least on a fifth-grade level maybe, of what they’re experts in, that will help.

But there must be SMEs you’ve worked with who hold real disdain for marketing. Really anything that’s not their area of focus or their obsession. How can we, or is it even possible for us to convince SMEs that marketing for the company is valuable and a good use of their time?

Jesse: So I think that there are a few ways to get to this, and changing mindsets, changing understanding around marketing. One is so trying to understand it and explain it in a language and using examples that are relevant and at least understandable to the relevant audience.

So for example, scientists, who are the folks I am familiar with working with, academic papers, publishing in academic journals is something they’re pretty used to as a concept, and that you can use this as sort of a way of saying, “Okay, this is how we can get started. This is the type of thing that we’re talking about here.” And so that’s one example for it.

Or you can show them how other folks are using these things as well. There’s also some great research that’s been done in the field of marketing science, too. You can pull some results from those in order to explain this as well. One of the ones that I go to a lot is the 95/5 rule. Is this one that you’ve heard of in B2B marketing?

Rich: I don’t believe so, no.

Jesse: Okay, so this is one that comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the LinkedIn B2B Institute. What they found is that in across B2B marketing, roughly 95% of the market at any given time is out of market. Meaning that they’re really not interested in buying a given product, and only 5% are roughly in the market at any given time. And this is across B2B industries for it.

So once you understand this, this is I think something that a lot of marketers sort of understand intuitively, that people are buying every day. They don’t wake up in the morning and think about boat keels, for example, as you were saying, as something that they’re passionate about buying. But for those 5% of the people who are buying it, they change their focus on talking about, “Okay, I want to learn about the product features. I want to learn about benefits and trade-offs,” et cetera. So they can be focused on that for it.

But for that 95% who are out of market, you want to be able to explain to them, or you ought to be able to message to them in a way that creates affinity, creates friendliness, creates recognition, et cetera. So using that kind of data-driven explanation, I think, often is a little bit more effective when communicating with these subject matter-minded folks. Rather than talking about things like brand experience and different vibes that brands want to create and such like that. That’s a little bit harder to kind of explain to some of these folks.

Rich: So lean more into the hard scientists and the hard sciences than the soft sciences in this particular case.

Jesse: Well, I think that there isn’t some… And it depends on the person for sure. But I think that you can find those pieces of information, find those examples for it, and explain it in that context for it.

Because how you explain it and how the examples that you use for it. You look at something like the Think Different campaign from Apple, or the other stuff that Apple does, or you think about Nike campaigns and “just do it”, et cetera. Those are all campaigns and all stuff that us marketers can respect and understand how effective those are.

But put that towards the average subject matter expert and they’re kind of like, I don’t really believe that this works in this cases for it. So I think that that can help in some cases get over the skepticism. Obviously, there’s going to be some other cases that are a little bit harder, in which case maybe you want to be talking about how do you shift incentives, who you’re working with, that more politics, internal management questions that you need to be trying to navigate.

Rich: If our SMEs are too busy or simply have no interest in writing a blog post or creating a social post, what are some ways in which you’ve found that you can capture what they know and then turn it into marketing gold?

Jesse: Yeah, that is something that I think that there is a number of strategies that you can use for that.

Doing something like a monthly or weekly cadence conversation interview with them and say, “Okay, what are the customer questions that you’re thinking about these days? What are the concerns that are happening in this space? What are the alternatives that our customers are thinking about for it?”

Using those examples, having those conversations on a regular basis first, that does help in terms of building that familiarity, trying to understand each other’s side of things, which is one part of it that’s important.

But it can just be this relatively unstructured half-an-hour sort of conversation. You take a recording, you get the transcript, maybe you can pull that through either ChatGPT or Claude, for example, to get some ideas for the blog post topics that you can use yourself to write it up, whatever your kind of preferences are there in terms of what your workflows are. But it’s something that’s a lot lower lift for them if it’s half an hour per month. Everybody can probably handle that. If you’re really avoiding it that much, then I think there’s another problem that’s kind of going on in that respect.

Another possibility, though, is to talk about these article types, talk about these content types that maybe they do respect, maybe that they do understand. One project that I worked on was using an actually academic article. I worked with some subject matter experts in my organization to write an academic article that was published in an academic journal for it, and that that was kind of the start of a multi-piece content campaign that was based off of that, that was summarizing it, that was taking excerpts from it and then putting that on social media as well.

And because they understood what that was, they understand the value of that, they also see that this is the kind of asset that, hey, if my name’s on an academic paper, that could help me get a promotion. This could help me get my next job and such as well. So they see the value of that now.

So those are some things to consider as different ways to approach it. A lot of it kind of also comes down to feeling out the specifics of your organization. For example, finding who are the people who are most interested in doing this as well. So if you have any choices with that, it’s obviously best to work with those who are more interested in this kind of attention.

Rich: More open to it, yeah. So how do you take something that’s highly technical and then turn it into something that’s useful without oversimplifying it or maybe losing the SME’s trust?

Jesse: That is a hard question and it’s something that is part of what I spend a lot of time on as an editor there. The one that I think is really important is understanding things like story structure and logic, too.

So understanding you’re trying to think really hard about what’s necessary in a piece of content and what builds for making this interesting, as an example. So if you can find that thread of what is it about this compelling that’s different, that’s new, that’s whatever, and you have that essence of the story, then you sort of build around that. And you say, “Okay, what are the points that are necessary to support this?” Or, “What is the things that follow logically from that?”

The other point that I also talk a lot about and people bring up a lot about in this space has to do with jargon in technical works. People, even in these spaces, complain about too much jargon in white papers and e-books and webinars, et cetera. This is a point that I actually try to have some nuanced thoughts on. Because on the one hand, I actually think that jargon is not as big of a problem as people often think that it is. The problem is that the writing is bad in this content.

You know, you get these long, convoluted sentences that are 40 words long and three clauses and such like that. If you just look at it from a grammatical structure perspective, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s repetitive or circular. Be really disciplined about that and focus on having just really clean, clear writing first. Once you do that, you’d be surprised how much jargon you can cut in it and how you’re like, we’re just down to the essence here of what we’re trying to get to. We’re really stripped down to the points and the pieces of this that support that clear argument, the compelling point to it. Now, we can have a bit of a conversation of the jargon that remains, how much of it is really necessary?

The one thing that I say, and this is a point that is important for marketers to understand, is that jargon is important for subject matter experts. Because if you’re using the right term to describe a very specific thing, jargon is powerful for doing that. Like, imagine trying to talk about blood biochemistry without using the word hemoglobin. It would be such a mangled mess to be able to try to triangulate and get around it. That particular word has power because it’s talking about a specific protein that has a specific purpose in it. So think about that when you’re trying to talk about jargon and asking people to cut jargon for it.

Rich: It’s a really interesting point on jargon because, yes, for years marketers are always told to cut out all of the jargon. But it can also be really, I think, is audience dependent. You’re marketing to scientists.

Jesse: So dependent. So dependent.

Rich: And if you’re talking like a fifth grader or even a fifth-grade science class, you’re going to lose them. So I think it’s important. Jargon can also signify that the reader or the audience is part of the community. Because if I know what hemoglobin is in reference to that, then I know that you’re talking to me.

So I think that’s an interesting point that all jargon, at least, is not bad. And jargon can serve a very powerful purpose when employed correctly, and maybe it’s just those circular patterns that you mentioned that need to get the old heave-ho.

Jesse: Language is about culture in many respects. It has all of these signals about who’s included, who’s excluded from it. There’s one startup that I’m familiar with, kind of friends with the founders for it. Their content, a lot of it is very rich in jargon and such like that, very dense stuff.

Like even me, I have a hard time getting through it. It’s more at the healthcare validation kind of side of things for it, so not my area of expertise to be clear for it. They seem to be having a lot of success working with that team and working in that area, because the other people who they’re selling to tend to be enthusiasts, tend to be obsessives about that same area. And oftentimes there’s actually kind of a pretty big gap between who’s the subject matter expert and who is the buyer for it. And you have to kind of assess that for it.

In the case of ship keels that you were talking about, I wouldn’t be surprised if the gap there is pretty large, that the person who is buying a boat wants a dependable and efficient boat that doesn’t tip over, and doesn’t care about hydrodynamics and things like that. They just want to be able to be certain of it. So in that case, yeah, strip out as much jargon as you can get away with for it.

But if you’re selling this to who are the engineers of tankers, in that case, I think that you need to have some jargon in there. And if you’re just defining what a keel is in every blog post, they’re going to be like, “You think I’m a fifth grader?”, as you were saying.

Rich: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned a phrase that I love earlier, and I want to circle back around to it, which is the curse of knowledge. And this is the idea that after becoming a subject matter expert in anything, you don’t realize how much you actually know, and you think that everybody has a certain amount of knowledge and you almost talk past them.

So what are some of the techniques that you’ve employed in the past to keep an SME from falling victim to the curse of knowledge?

Jesse: This one is really tough, and I think that it’s especially hard in these technical fields because it’s very hard to touch grass. What does a normal person who’s a buyer of this type, what would they know about what’s too technical, what’s not in it?

I think that it’s you, on the one hand, trying to be as close to the customer as possible is always part of the answer in market. I mean, in some respects, that’s kind of like a hack of an answer of know your customer really well. Yeah, of course. You know, everybody should know your customer pretty well for it. But it helps there. And being familiar with the other kinds of content that people review in this.

One that I’ve done before is taking some examples and running it through ChatGPT and Claude and other AI tools, and just trying a spot check to say, “Hey, are these the kinds of terms that would be familiar to this kind of an audience?” Not 100%. It’s definitely taking some liberties there, but there’s definitely some far outliers that it’s been able to help me with on that respect.

And then also, I think that trying to also feel it out with the SME as well, too. What are they attached to? What are they not? Why is this important to them in these cases for it? And in general, I try to lean more towards being a little bit more inclusive, having a slightly wider aperture of who we’re including in the conversation for it. But at the same time, trying to also stay conscious of these languages about culture kind of consideration, too. It’s really hard, is what it comes down to. And there’s so many caveats and exceptions to the rule and such there. But, yeah, know your customer.

Rich: Okay. So content creation is a never-ending job. It is just something that marketers need to do all the time because there’s always new people entering the market or moving somewhere down the funnel.

So once an expert has given you their time, how do you show them that their contribution had an impact and make them more willing to work with us for the next blog post, podcast, or social media post?

Jesse: I think that’s a great question, because it is something that we all put this work into, , generating a certain number of clicks, certain number of sales, et cetera, that come from the content that we put out there. Oftentimes, the subject matter expert who’s brought in to advise, to comment to edit, whatever, on this work sees none of that for it. Unless you explicitly bring it back to them, unless they explicitly ask for it, it doesn’t kind of just naturally flow back to them 9 times out of 10.

So I think that once again, it’s important to understand it within the context of their incentives. You know, the things that are in their KPIs, et cetera, that they’re kind of focused on. If you can phrase it in that way, it is helpful. Of saying, “Okay, we generated so many leads from this blog post that we posted, and that we’re expecting this many that’ll be coming in the future for it,” in some cases. That can be really helpful for them and be able to justify it to other folks as well.

If it is the kind of person who understands the importance of thought leadership, maybe that idea of, “Hey, how many people saw this? How many followers have we gained?” That kind of numbers, maybe that means it’s something to them and maybe it doesn’t. Coming up with some cadence though of being able to provide some feedback, provide some insight as to what’s come from the work that they’ve done is really useful. Because if you just have nothing on that, it just kind of feels like, well, I’m just sharing all this stuff and it kind of just goes into the ether, and I don’t know what happens to it. And it just feels a little bit frustrating in that respect.

Rich: All right, awesome. This has been really helpful. Because many of us, as we mentioned earlier, have to work with subject matter experts who are not naturally marketers. And so I think a lot of the stuff that you brought up is incredibly valued for those of us who find ourselves in that role.

If people want to learn more about you, Jesse, and the work that you’re doing, where can we send them online?

Jesse: Great. I’m glad this has been helpful. As I said, I’m Jesse Harris. You can find me on LinkedIn, of course. I’m very active on there.

The BrandLab team is part of the American Chemical Society, and we are also actually an agency that’s part of that. We do custom content for folks who try to reach scientific audiences. So if you have any questions about that, be sure to reach out, and I’d love to talk with you on that. Beyond that though, just hit me up on LinkedIn and I’d love to chat. 

Rich: All right. And we’ll have those links in the show notes. Jesse, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time today.

Jesse: Thank you.

 

Show Notes:

Jesse Harris is a senior editor at BrandLab, where he helps B2B companies turn complex scientific expertise into content that connects with technical audiences. Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn to learn more about the custom content work he is doing.

Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, digital agency offering branding, web design, and digital marketing located in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.