How to Balance Content Skills with Subject Matter Expertise in Your Marketing Team

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If you’ve ever led a content marketing team, or been tasked with growing one, you’ve probably run into this question:

Is it more effective to get content from a subject matter expert (SME), or to instill subject matter expertise into content creators?

A big part of getting your blog to rank in Google and search engines is E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness).

Great writing skills are not enough. There must be subject matter expertise as well, and Google gets better at understanding this over time.

Maybe balancing content skills and subject matter expertise gives you chicken-or-egg vibes. Us too.

But helping skilled content creators become SMEs is usually a better strategy.

However, there are two conditions necessary for this strategy to work:

  • Your brand or business is willing to invest time and resources to educate content creators about the topic.
  • The content creators want to learn about the topic.

So how do you turn content creators into SMEs?

We suggest three steps:

  1. Create an education program so content writers can study the subject.
  2. Integrate a subject matter expert into your team so they can share ideas and experience with the content writers.
  3. “Rent” top-level subject experts as you scale. This will help you fill editorial gaps as your content production scales up.

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