How to Create a Series Around a Recurring Expert on Your Team

Hey. What's going on, folks? It's Daniel Litwin, voice of B2B, and I'm here to give you some tips on how to get that expert that you're looking to turn into a consistent content creator, right, a content contributor, how to get them to actually do that in a consistent fashion. And the hack here is that you're going to build a series around that recurring expert. This is a foundational UGC strategy, right? Getting your internal experts, whether C suite or engineers or IT or sales or customer service, whoever, right? Identifying their area of expertise that's relevant for internal or external content output and messaging, and getting them to contribute consistently around a consistent lane. The area of friction that comes up in this strategy is usually around the recurring side of things. You might identify a solid expert, solid topics for them to speak on, but they stop doing it after their first or second recording. Or you have to constantly pull teeth to get them contributing. Right? Or you fail to build a system that's repeatable, and it actually ends up falling on your shoulders as a marketer, let's say, where you do get that expert contributing consistently, but now you've got a video in your inbox and you just don't have any time to do anything about it. Right? You can't get it finished and published. So this is why building a series, an actual consistent show style lane with consistent branding, a cadence of production and output, and then leveraging the tools in MarketScale Studio as well as the right kind of early buy in with the expert. That's why this is all so, tried and true. Right? I've seen this work with a lot of customers, and so I wanna give you guys the tips that are gonna help you get that expert to be a recurring expert and do so via a series. So here are the basics. Right? First things first is that when you're actually reaching out to this expert in the first place, you wanna get them speaking on something that they already own, that they already know, and that they're true experts on. It can be easy as a marketer or someone orchestrating content, you know, that you want to get from someone else to sort of imprint a topic desire onto someone else. It's maybe something they know tangentially or is a responsibility in their day to day, but isn't really an area of expertise. This is why it's very important to actually get them leading on topics that they speak to daily, that are intrinsic to their day to day. It could be questions they have to answer constantly, internally, right, to colleagues or externally to customers. It could be processes that they're masters of that they develop themselves or often have to explain internally. It could be just having them spotlight work that they're proud of constantly and consistently that they know intimately. Right? This makes it so that when you're engaging the expert and turning them into a content contributor, you're not doing so with a content ask, where it's like you're asking them to participate in a marketing chore. This makes it so that you are passing them a mic on something that they already deserve to be leading from the front on. Very critical. Next tip is that you want to tie an expert's participation into, you know, an actual job payoff, a real practical use case that connects with their day to day. In the sense of don't just have someone create content that's beneficial for you as a marketer, but have people create content that's beneficial for their own day to day. Maybe there's a question that an engineer has to answer constantly. Wouldn't it be great to platform that expert, but also have them explain that concept so that they can share it out with their own colleagues and save time? So what's the win win? How do you get this expert to contribute consistently? Well, you wanna try to frame it in a way that's actually relevant to them beyond what you need, AKA maybe it helps reduce their inbox of questions. Maybe it helps them build their reputation because they're C suite or sales and they need that brand building cranked up to eleven. Maybe it's that they need to be documenting more knowledge that they're carrying because they're moving into a management position or they're retiring soon, right, or because they're just a natural mentor. So open with that area of authority and connect this lane of contribution to something practical for their own day to day. Now, once you've got the buy in down, right, you've identified a true lane of expertise for that expert, you have tied their participation into something that's relevant for them, Now, you wanna try to build a system that lets them contribute consistently. And part of this is building a true series. When you create a series with consistent branding and consistent cadence of creation, production, and publishing, you help turn content contributions into a habit. Right? And you help create more momentum organically around those contributions. So you're not having to start the engine from scratch every time you want that expert creating content. So before you go to record with this person, have a series name in mind. Maybe get some branding put together. Create a new brand book in MarketScale Studio just for it. Obviously, you're gonna wanna know who the recurring expert is, but then what's the episode format? Is this something that they can film at their desk direct to webcam? Is this something they're gonna be filming out on the road on their mobile phone? Maybe it's something you're gonna film with them. Right? You're gonna collaborate with them or a colleague is gonna film them. This is going to inform the production cadence because it's going to inform the workflow, and it's gonna help you understand the best workflows in MarketScale Studio to help make this smooth and easy for the expert. Then naturally, the release cadence will also inform how often you gotta do this, what's a realistic, you know, production cadence that matches with that ideal release cadence, etcetera, etcetera. So see, when you get the series infrastructure or the scaffolding built out, it helps give more reason to a lot of granular elements of turning content contributions into a true habit. Now you also wanna leverage MarketScale Studio as a tool to help you scale this stuff out. One of the best ways to do this is to use the saved order in MarketScale Studio. Right? So here is a proofing room in MarketScale Studio where you submit edits. Let's say this video from Michelle was, you know, a very similar style of video, you know, that fits into sort of a bucket. Let's say I'm creating a collection of training videos. Well, rather than explaining how I want this video to feel and getting it edited from scratch, I could give direction on this video based on previous direction, based on a previous attempt within the platform to get a training video done. This is the saved order tool and logic. So when I click request edit now on this video, I could fill out this edit request form from scratch. Right? Sometimes you're gonna need to do this. But let's say this is episode five of a series. Right? Well, now instead of filling this out from scratch and giving the same direction over and over again, I can click this button right here, the studio tutorial saved order that I built, and I can signal to editors, I want this same style of edit applied to this new video with these notes and directions, and look how much shorter the edit request form is. You only need to provide a little bit of extra direction on nuances or unique aspects to this video, and obviously still choose the relevant branding. This is critical, because this is going to help you scale content contributions easily and actually feasibly launch something like a weekly FAQ corner from, you know, an IT lead. It's also gonna help build that validation mechanism and engine that's going to show that contributor, look at what you're creating, right? If it takes weeks for someone's contribution to see the light of day, they're not gonna wanna contribute that often. But if they get to see their contribution posted and alive within a day or two, because you leverage something like a saved order to quickly get it into editing and mapped to the same branding and style that you've already locked in as valuable and something you want to recreate, amazing, right? Everything speeds up and that validation mechanism fires more consistently. So that's the saved order workflow, and you can build these off of completed edits. So once you complete an edit, let's say episode one or two of a supposed series, you can go and mark it complete here. This will then give you an option to save it as an order, and that will lock in the initial direction, revision feedback, as well as the project file, all the assets and branding for the editor to redeploy in the future. So last but not least, right, name each of these episodes in a consistent way in studio as you're getting yourself organized. You can also do folder tagging for this. This is gonna help make it easy to find this content in the future and actually start to build a catalog. And you can do this again, leveraging folders. So I could tag this into folders like, you know, let's say Michelle's corner or something, right? And I can also start to add finished videos to the asset library up here. And the asset library is a great place to showcase finished content in different categorized buckets for sharing externally or sort of gallery cementing for your internal team. So they can go to the asset library and say, okay, well, here's what episodes of UGC workshop live look like. I'm gonna emulate that. This is how you then build a culture around consistent contributions. This is how you help solidify for people that being a recurring expert is possible. Check out what the platform can do, and now we're gonna work with you to find that lane, to turn you, you know, from a pro or just, you know, a career professional into an expert, and from an expert into a content contributor. So there you go, folks. That's the workflow here for how to build a series around a recurring expert. Start with the buy in, identify a topic that's relevant to that expert, make it have real tie in and, you know, connection with day to day that they have to deal with so that there's a real reason to contribute to content. Lock in a series cadence and approach, branding. Right? Leverage the platform to scale the editing workflow, and then organize and categorize your stuff to build a culture, a resonance across your company. That recurring expertize is possible and everyone has the tools to do it. So there you go, folks. Looking forward to seeing how you build more series around recurring experts at your company leveraging these tips. And if you got any questions, you know where to find me.