Interviewing Client Experts: Content Strategy for the AI Age

At Flaunt Digital, we’re honoured to work with clients who possess vast, impressive expertise in their respective specialisms. So, we’d be remiss if we didn’t marry our content expertise with a client’s field expertise through thought-leadership interviews.

Our clients are industry leaders and innovators, and their content should reflect this. And in the age of AI, being loud and proud about the human brains behind your amazing work is more important than ever…

Thought leadership content describes blogs, guides, PR campaigns, and other content that contains unique insights and ideas from a specialist. This content offers talking points not found on competitor sites, signalling it as a useful source of fresh information to Google.

You have experts, we have writers – together, they can create incredible content. But your experts are busy, and pencilling in an interview requires admin… can’t we just create a great blog based on the information we can find online?

Well, yes, we can. But as AI advances further, the magic touch added by your unique expertise becomes more and more valuable.

The practice of compiling the most relevant info and insights from other online sources – previously a tried-and-tested SEO content production method – is now handled expertly by AI. All the bits of information from existing blogs have already been gathered into the AIO at the top of the SERP, or spat out by an LLM in response to a hyper-tailored question. 

By using the individual expertise and informed opinions of a real industry leader, we differentiate ourselves from pure AI-generated content through uniqueness and fresh value.

Your experts likely have a thousand blogs’ worth of knowledge. But do they have the time to write them? Of course not, they’re field experts with a million plates to spin.

That’s where our content specialists come in, taking only an hour of your expert’s time to ask the questions that gather the best intel. Then, we transform the answers into skillfully written blogs, guides, landing pages and more.

Your expert’s incredible knowledge doesn’t deserve to be buried in the SERPs. And with the help of SEO content specialists, it won’t be. When we transform your wisdom into a blog, we bring all of our SEO know-how. From optimised introductions that ensure Google classifies the content correctly to tailored headings and keywords woven into the text, we implement tried-and-tested techniques to ensure your expert content ranks.

Nowadays, users increasingly use AI chatbots to research, with ChatGPT alone accounting for 20% of search traffic. Those who use Google often gravitate toward the prominent AI Overview for their answers. Therefore, brands aren’t just competing for results page rankings, but also to be recommended or named in chatbot query responses and AI Overviews.

Offering unique insights and fresh information, especially with a verified expert name attached, is a great way to get featured in the AI Overview and be directly referenced in LLM chatbot responses. This is because you gain an ‘Information Gain Patent’ as the originator of a new viewpoint or piece of information, making your unique perspective likely to be highlighted for relevant queries. 

At Flaunt Digital, we’ve even custom-built our own LLMLens tool, enabling us to track AI brand mentions and entity recognitions, so our clients can see where they stand with different LLMs and strategise how best to optimise for them. 

To learn more about navigating the world of AI search, including how AI actually researches your brand, see our selection of AI search blogs.

The other side of the content coin to SEO is writing. From tailoring language to the client’s tone of voice to creating well-structured, understandable pieces, we take everything discussed in an expert interview and make it digestible, appropriate for the content type, and appealing to read.

You want to be the kind of brand consumers feel they can trust. In content marketing, we build consumer trust through EEAT, which stands for expertise, experience, authority and trust. Original, expert-led content is the perfect way to tick off the first E, as a detailed quote from a verified industry expert in your onsite content gives a glimpse into the depth of knowledge behind the brand, reassuring and emboldening potential customers to put their trust in your company. 

Unique, expert-led content is also one of the best ways to position your brand as an industry leader. What better way to stand out from repetitive, regurgitated competitor content than with disruptive viewpoints, original perspectives and fresh intelligence? With content created from expert interviews, you answer the questions no one else is answering, offer the angle no one else offers, and create the conversations that move your industry forward.

Experts live and breathe their specialism, so it’s easy for them to forget that certain things aren’t common knowledge. A content writer will bridge the gap between your expert and your consumer.  

An inevitability of expert interviews is that your expert will use acronyms and jargon that someone less specialised in the field wouldn’t quite understand. Our interviewers catch these specialist terms, ask for definitions and explanations, and then let the interview proceed smoothly onward with a better understanding.

When it comes to B2B content, it’s experts speaking to experts – we’re here to make sure the knowledge from your experts is actually seen and acknowledged by your desired clients.

Corporate decision-makers don’t make impulse decisions the way a B2C consumer might. They want a high level of confidence before considering even opening a conversation with a potential supplier or service provider. Standing out as a thought leader is the way to do this. 

Expert interviews are especially instrumental in a sector-by-sector content (and/or PR) approach. If you want to work with clients in a specific industry, content with original insights and challenging opinions relating to your chosen sector is the way to get noticed. 

That’s not to say expert interviews don’t have a place in B2C content strategy, though. Content with groundbreaking new expertise or fresh takes is a great way to get people talking about your brand. Plus, B2C clients in a YMYL sector – meaning they offer a product or service relating to consumers’ finances or health – also need to provide a high level of reassurance. Demonstrating that you ‘know your stuff’ through expert-led content achieves this. 

Our content specialists employ several best practices to gain the most useful and rich knowledge from an expert interview.

There is absolutely no point in wasting an expert’s time by asking questions that Google could easily answer. An expert interview searches for the answers that a scroll through the SERPs can’t find. So, our specialists familiarise themselves with the generic, broad information already available to ensure they enter the interview with a solid base understanding of the subject. This then allows us to ask the questions that push further.

Expert interviews aren’t about what our content specialists want to know (as much as we find the interviews fascinating). It’s about what your potential customers want to know. That’s why we conduct research into the long-tail keywords surrounding your specialism and identify gaps where queries aren’t currently answered in the available content. That’s where we find prime subject matter for an expert interview.

Balance is the best approach in life, and that’s our view on whether expert interviews should use structured questions or free discussion. 

Pre-preparing questions and knowing what you’re trying to get out of the interview keeps things on track. However, we don’t like to prepare too many questions in advance. Why? Some of the most beneficial questions come to mind in the moment, inspired by the discussion at hand, and can yield some of the most insightful answers.

So, unless a client specifically requires an interview conducted only with pre-planned, pre-approved questions, we like to embrace flexibility to deliver the best results for expertise-rich content.

We may also ask if we can re-interview annually. This allows us to optimise the content in accordance with industry and company developments, keeping the content fresh, relevant and in line with the latest information. This means LLMs and AIOs continue to recognise you as the freshest source of unique, industry-leading info. 

We may even ask the expert when they expect to see major industry developments and make a note to re-interview at that point. 

We’ve been honoured to have some of our client experts lend us their time already, and we’ve been delighted with the results.

Explore our case study to see how interviewing The Airedale Group’s experts in school kitchen design helped us raise awareness of the brand’s wealth of experience in this sector, resulting in multiple high-value deals for school kitchen projects.