Interviewing business experts and thought leaders on topics that are important to your audience can be a great addition to your website or podcast. Besides providing people with relevant and informative content, it improves SEO performance by being helpful, expert, authoritative and trustworthy. By bringing a fresh perspective, it will help you to deliver original, high quality, recent, content focused on solving business problems will out-perform generic ‘bloggy’ content - whether that’s produced by human writers or AI.

As a digital marketer, there are few tools in your kit as effective as a well-executed interview (except, perhaps, a well-executed case study). Interviews draw upon your contacts' responses to crystallise their lived experiences for your audience’s benefit.

It’s a heightened level of insight and expertise that Team Quantity simply can’t hope to match - and we want to put it at your fingertips.

Who Should You Talk To?

Sometimes you’ll need to identify the best interview subject to fit your topic or content idea. Other times, you’ll be planning a campaign that requires quotes from clients to firm up a white paper and you’ll have exactly the right people in mind. Alternatively, a juicy conversation with a client or colleague might present the interviewee first and you’ll need to refine the subject of the conversation.
 
For our purposes, let’s assume you’re starting at zero. You have an empty slot in your content calendar and want to do something different with it. In that case, start by deciding who would be an interesting interview subject.

If you’re part of a larger organisation, you probably know at least one member of your executive leadership team with a great back story that your customers would want to hear more about. Come up with an idea, pitch it, and let them work for you. This can be especially important if you want your content to connect with a C-suite audience. You need to be speaking their language, and one of the easiest ways to do that is by speaking with their peers.

If your C-suite is out of reach, focus instead on other influential members of your organisation. Who has business experience that speaks to your company’s credentials? Which subject experts have a distinctive approach or unique perspective to share?

Another option is to flip this whole suggestion on its head. Talk to a junior team member who’s fresh out of university for a hot take on where the elders have got it all wrong.

In all cases, once the interview is complete, your interviewee can share it on social media. Not only will they be humanising the brand, growing the business’ authority, and boosting your content’s visibility; their professional profile also stands to benefit.

Don’t forget about external contacts. You can approach clients, customers, and contacts in your extended network for interviews if their area of expertise overlaps with your topic. If you’re connected with a budding LinkedIn influencer, see if they’d be willing to sit down with you - they might be happy for the extra exposure.

Preparing for the Interview

Content Type Considerations

You may already have some questions in mind, but before you delve too deep, confirm your marketing goals for the interview.

• Is this an in-depth profile piece, or are you mostly hunting for quotes to sprinkle into a more extensive article to help make it easy to read?

• Can your quotes bolster a blog post?

• Can you turn them into images that promote a LinkedIn post?

• Will this be the thematic jumping-off point for a broader content marketing campaign or perhaps the lead-up to a webinar series?

After confirming your goals, spend some time strategising how you’ll repurpose this content and weave it into the greater tapestry of your marketing efforts. Interviews take a fair amount of effort to pull off, so make sure you’ve considered how you can increase your ROI.

Think beyond text-based content for the strongest results. Getting people to agree to an audio or video recording might be more difficult, but the payoff for your broader content marketing strategy is worth it. Good audio can be the seed for a podcast. Video content can be sliced and diced into enticing, bite-size chunks that drive social media engagement and enrich landing pages.

Another way to stand out is to live stream on social media. Broadcasting live creates a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and interaction with your brand. Done well, it has the power to humanise and connect in a way that few other mediums can. With planning and your phone, you can go live, connect with your most engaged prospects, and start building relationships.

Refining Your Topic

By this point, you’ve probably got a topic firmly in mind. If not, now’s the time to dig into your subject research. You will uncover interesting angles that will help you further define the direction of your conversation and start thinking of questions for the interview itself.

Put on your journalist cap. what stories need to be told in your industry? What problems need solving? What stories aren’t being covered by other people?

And what does your interviewee bring to the table? Tap into their interests and expertise. Did they follow a unique path to success, or do they hold an unconventional stance on some aspect of their field?

Examine your interview topic and interview guest from your audience’s perspective. Will your piece offer them something valuable or interesting? Will it help them solve a problem they’re facing or offer new insight?

It’s also essential to ensure your organisation is best placed to cover the topic. Will this interview mean anything to your audience, coming from you?

To put it another way - if you got the chance to interview Bill Gates for 15 minutes, which direction would you go? You could ask him about innovation in tech, his role as a business leader, philanthropy, his famous reading habit. The right answer for a third sector organisation would differ from a SAAS start up. So what would be right for you?

Finally, one piece of advice that is often overlooked: make sure the topic actually interests you! Being invested in the project outside of just generating content will help build trust and rapport during your interview, as you’ll care about your subject’s answers.

Preparing Your Questions

Have you seen the Michael Sheen film, Frost/Nixon?

If so, you’ll know that experienced journalists prepare. They don’t rely on excellent questions springing spontaneously into their head in the middle of an interview. Coming to the interview with five to ten solid questions at the ready helps keep the conversation from stalling and can serve as a helpful reminder of the aim of the discussion, should your interviewee go off on a tangent.

This doesn’t mean you will stick rigidly to a script during the interview. You’ll want your conversation to feel organic and to follow your nose if your interviewee’s responses bring new questions to mind during the interview. These emergent questions will create quality content as long as they’re on topic.

If you’ve already put together some preliminary questions as part of your research, revisit that list. Make tweaks, discarding the generic for specific and interesting questions that show you’ve done your homework.

Remember, for your interview content to be most effective, it should help people solve a problem or answer a question. When refining your interview approach, keep the reader’s search intent in mind. For example, if your intention is to target people who are researching suppliers in your industry, you can frame your questions around search terms with high transactional intent.

You should also be prepared to probe your subject’s responses. Familiarise yourself with their background and brainstorm follow-up questions.

Also, think of variations on your original questions - sometimes asking the same thing differently prompts a new response. Your goal isn’t to trip up your interviewee, but to dig into their ideas and responses, giving them every opportunity to come across well. If you don’t think this person has something to say worth probing, you might have the wrong subject for your interview.

Asking your subject about lessons they’ve learned is a great way to prompt relatable anecdotes your target audience will eat up. It can also reveal their perspective on what makes a particular option, service, or experience stand out from others.

The right questions will prompt answers that will position you as the go-to source for what’s happening in your niche. By ensuring your target audience gets a clear idea of what this means for them, these rousing thought pieces can build trust as part of a B2B content marketing strategy.

Etiquette Counts: Considerations for Conscientious Conversations

It is important to confirm the ground rules for your discussion with your interviewee.

Every good interview is also a potential backlink. When you interview the CEO of a media company, they are highly likely to share that content with their audience (especially if you make a co-marketing agreement upfront), carrying your message to a wider audience.

With that in mind, do everything you can to make each interviewee feel welcomed, supported and, above all, important.

As a digital marketer, your goal isn’t to set up a “gotcha” moment. Discussing if there are any off-limit topics and providing questions ahead of time conveys respect and gives your interviewee time to prepare. Putting them at ease makes them more likely to give thoughtful answers than if they’re asked off-the-cuff.

Even if the purpose of your interview isn’t to create media for audio or video content, taking notes can be distracting and cause you to miss an insightful comment while you scribble away. Ideally, you will be able to use an AI transcription service, like Otter.AI or the built-in transcription service on Microsoft Teams. These convert audio to text with a few clicks, making the job of writing up the interview easier.

However, don’t assume that your interviewee will be okay with it on the day. Get into the habit of requesting permission to record as standard. If you are planning to create audio or video content, request an extra level of permission to cover that separately.

Remember that your subject may want final approval, including over the finished cut of your video or audio interview. If they do, you’ll need to factor that into your production timeline. If they also need to pass it through their legal department, it can take even longer.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, always aim to wrap up five minutes before the end of your interview. You can then ask if there’s anything the interviewee wants to add that you haven’t already covered. Doing so will usually prompt them to either 1) confirm and reiterate what they consider the most critical points of your conversation or 2) raise a point that wasn’t already discussed, prompting further questioning.

Finally, go the extra mile on the follow up. Send a thank you note or a token of your appreciation. Make it easy for your interviewee to share your piece by sending them links to the final piece when it is published and content assets to share on their channels.

No matter the rules, remember that your goal is to produce great content that aids your marketing plans. The business world is often much smaller than we think, so build a professional reputation as a great interviewer to make it more likely people will want to talk with you in the future. The more content you put out, the more people will see you as an authority in the field - it may even surprise you to find people reaching out to talk to you.

Next Steps

AI churnalism can never hope to replicate insightful thought leadership content like interviews. By choosing the right topics and asking the right people the right questions, you can sidestep the charlatans and bring your content to the top of the pile.

Need help to work interviewing into your broader content marketing strategies? 1827 Marketing would love to have a chat about how we can help you design a thought leadership strategy that lets you reap the considerable benefits of this great content.