Subject matter expert interviews create the best content because they extract the beliefs, stories and lived experiences that make content resonate with real humans who make buying decisions.
Don’t take my word for it though, this fancy LinkedIn report from Edelman [1] found that 75% of decision-makers say expert-driven content prompted them to research products they hadn’t previously considered.
For founders and consultants, that means your expertise isn’t just content. It’s pipeline.
Waaaay too much content on the internet sounds the same.
And that’s because most people start with AI prompts or keyword spreadsheets instead of actual human insight.
I’ve seen this play out dozens of times.
Founders and subject matter experts have incredible stories and perspectives buried in their heads. But when they sit down to write, they freeze.
Or worse, they outsource to someone who produces technically correct content that nobody wants to read.
That can work if you’re extremely conscientious, have a large budget, and work super hard to find the right team to surround yourself with. Trouble is that mosts of you reading this are simply not on that level.
So read, and discover the truth. I got you.
What is a subject matter expert interview?
A subject matter expert interview is a guided conversation designed to extract specialized knowledge, lived experiences and unique perspectives from someone with deep expertise in a specific field.
You take what comes out of that conversation and turn it into content that actually sounds like it came from a real person with real opinions.
Two types of SMEs you’ll work with.
- Internal SMEs are your founders, team leads, sales reps and customer-facing people who live and breathe the work every day.
- External SMEs are industry partners, customers or outside experts who bring a different vantage point.
One thing worth calling out. A lot of people searching for “subject matter expert interview” are looking for job interview tips for SME positions. That’s a totally different thing. What we’re talking about here is knowledge extraction for content.
You’re pulling insights out of someone’s head so you can turn those insights into blog posts, LinkedIn content, newsletters and sales materials.
The biggest bottleneck in content creation isn’t the pure creation of assets.
It’s really defining a few key foundational assets with the vision and the mission clearly baked in, in a format that’s easy for the founder or expert to actually produce regularly.
The interview becomes the one foundational asset that enables everything else.
Here’s what I mean. You do a thirty minute interview with a founder. Then you give that transcript to the team that runs the newsletter, give it to the sales team to inform their decks and give it to the LinkedIn content team. In reality, there was one asset that enables the other teams to do their job.
The blank page problem disappears when you realize you’re not supposed to stare at it. You’re supposed to talk through your ideas first and then use that raw material to create.
This works whether you’re interviewing yourself or bringing in outside experts. The principle is the same. Stop trying to create content from nothing and start extracting what already exists.
Why expert interviews produce better content than AI or research alone
As AI tools commodify content creation, the value proposition becomes clear.
Do people resonate with who you are and the type of lived experiences and wisdom you have as a result of those experiences and your expertise?
Your founder’s personality, especially for early stage companies, is the brand of the company.
I think that is actually the unique value prop that’ll be most compelling for your content strategy as time goes on when anybody can create hundreds and thousands of pieces of content on every channel endlessly.
What’ll stand out is having a unique, specific opinion. A way of showing up, a way of speaking, a way of writing, a tone of voice that is unique to you in the market.
This plays out on LinkedIn every single day. The posts that generate real comments, DMs and inbound leads aren’t the ones that follow viral templates. They’re the ones where a founder shares a specific story from their actual experience.
A deal that fell apart and what they learned. A belief about their industry that goes against conventional wisdom. A moment of honesty about what’s hard.
Those are the posts that people save, share and respond to with “can we talk?” And those posts come directly from the kind of insights that SME interviews are designed to extract.
This matters more right now than at any point in the history of content marketing. The Linkboost 2026 State of LinkedIn Report found that inbound outreach from people who consumed your content converts at 14.6%, compared to 1.7% for cold outbound. That’s an 8.6x difference. If you’re a founder or consultant spending more time on cold DMs than on building a content engine from your real expertise, the ROI math doesn’t hold up.
The same thing that makes your content resonate with humans is what makes it perform well everywhere. On LinkedIn, the algorithm rewards posts that earn saves, comments and meaningful engagement over posts that get quick likes and move on.
On Google, the ranking systems increasingly favor content with genuine experience and expertise behind it. Both platforms are optimizing for the same thing. Real perspective from real people.
This is why the interview step isn’t optional. I’ve seen what happens when people skip it.
A few years ago I worked with a client who wanted to scale their content fast. They had ambitious goals but didn’t want to wait for SME interviews. They wanted to skip steps. They wanted to upload a spreadsheet of keywords instead of taking an intent-based approach.
They went forward with scaling the FAQ production without any context from the experts. For a month or two they saw some benefit. But the overwhelming majority of those articles didn’t get indexed. Didn’t perform well. And caused fluctuations in their previously high performing content because of cannibalization.
They ended up having to take that down, delete it, rehire a bunch of people to rewrite the FAQs manually.
And it took the product team even longer because they had to edit stuff instead of just scheduling the initial knowledge share like we wanted.
When done incorrectly, it’s not just neutral. It’s twice as much time and effort and resources wasted because you have to go back and prune the bad stuff.
The foundational interview step is what separates content that builds trust from content that clutters the internet.
Why LinkedIn, Google and AI search engines all reward expert-driven content
Here’s where this gets interesting for anyone wondering if the effort of doing interviews is actually worth it from a distribution perspective. Whether you’re posting on LinkedIn, publishing blog content or trying to get cited by AI search tools, the same principle applies. Content grounded in real expertise outperforms content assembled from other people’s ideas.
On LinkedIn specifically, this has become even more pronounced.
The platform’s algorithm has gotten dramatically better at identifying low-value AI-generated posts and deprioritizing them. Founders who share specific stories, real numbers and genuine opinions consistently outperform accounts that post polished but generic advice.
The posts that trigger DMs and drive pipeline aren’t the ones that sound like they were written by a committee. They’re the ones that sound like a person with a strong point of view, which is exactly what a well-run interview produces.
On the search side, Google’s E-E-A-T framework stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. The first E, Experience, was added in December 2022 specifically to reward content created by people who have actually done the thing they’re writing about.
An SME interview is the most direct way to inject both experience and expertise into your content. You’re not rewriting what someone else already published. You’re capturing firsthand knowledge from someone who lives it.
After Google’s December 2025 core update, sites that demonstrated genuine experience and expertise saw measurable ranking improvements, while generic content farms continued to lose visibility. Google is getting better at distinguishing between content that comes from real knowledge and content that’s been assembled from other sources.
And it’s not just traditional search anymore.
The same Edelman-LinkedIn research I mentioned earlier found that 53% of B2B decision-makers said that when an organization’s thought leadership is strong, brand recognition matters less. Read that again. If your content demonstrates real expertise, you can compete with companies ten times your size. For founders and consultants who don’t have massive brand awareness yet, that’s the whole game.
The 2026 TopRank Marketing and Ascend2 study of 797 senior B2B marketing leaders reinforced this. They found that 67% of marketers say original research and expert-driven content remains more valuable for building trust and credibility than AI-generated content, even as AI adoption accelerates. The marketers with the highest-performing thought leadership programs were nearly four times more likely to report very high ROI.
Peer-reviewed research from Princeton, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi (Aggarwal et al., presented at ACM KDD 2024) took this a step further. They studied how content performs in AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. They tested nine content optimization strategies across 10,000 queries and found that adding credible citations and specific data points improved visibility by up to 40%. Traditional keyword stuffing actually performed worse than doing nothing.
Content built from real expert perspectives, with specific stories and clear attribution, is exactly what LinkedIn’s algorithm, traditional search engines and AI answer engines all want to surface. The same qualities that make an SME interview valuable to a human reader are the qualities that earn engagement on social and citations in AI-generated responses.
For founders and consultants building their authority your lived experience isn’t just good for connecting with your audience. It’s literally what every major platform is designed to reward.
Whether someone discovers you through a LinkedIn post, a Google search or an AI-generated answer, the content that wins is the content that could only have come from you.
How to find and select the right subject matter expert
If you’re building founder-led content, I’ll save you some time. You are the SME. The interview process is about extracting what’s already in your head, not going on a talent search.
For teams and agencies, the selection process matters more than people realize.
The person closest to the customer’s pain usually produces the best content insights. That’s not always the CEO.
I’ve seen sales reps who handle objections every day produce sharper, more specific stories than executives two levels removed from the front lines.
A customer success lead who hears the same frustrations on repeat is sitting on a goldmine of content angles.
What to look for:
- Can they share specific stories with real details?
- Do they have opinions they’re willing to stand behind?
- Can they explain complex ideas in plain language without defaulting to jargon?
What to watch out for:
- Vague answers that sound good but say nothing.
- Overly promotional language that reads like a press release.
- An inability or unwillingness to share real experiences, especially the ones that didn’t go perfectly.
The messy, honest stories are usually the ones that connect most with your audience.
What makes a successful SME interview?
Not all interviews produce useful content.
I’ve done plenty that went nowhere.
Here’s what separates the good ones from the ones that waste everyone’s time.
Ask the right questions
I’ve found that six to ten key questions with room for follow-ups will get you further than thirty surface-level prompts. The goal is to pull out stories, beliefs and concrete examples. Not just facts and talking points.
Questions like:
- What thing would make you angry in your business if another vendor tried to do to you?
- When you find yourself interacting with your friends, what qualities would they describe about how you act?
- Which stories come up most often when you think about your origin story?
- How did you know that this industry and this business model needed your unique talents?
That’s why a live or guided interview is best. You can extract some of these insights naturally as a starting place.
Follow-ups are where the magic happens.
Give space for the conversation to breathe
When someone says something interesting, ask them to go deeper. Even if it seems like they don’t have more to offer or you get to an uncomfortable pause.
The space to think and meander and co-create the conversation is how the best insights are extracted.
Here’s a few lines to use:
- Say more
- How so?
- Go on…
- What happened next?
- Why do you think that worked?
- What would you do differently?
All should be open ended or allow them to dig underneath the surface.
Lean in hard to values, beliefs and non-negotiables as much as expertise
Before you can create any content, you have to have a firm understanding of your unique beliefs, value systems, your verbal identity, the messaging you want to put out into the world and your unique perspective based on your own lived experience.
This goes beyond facts.
The technical information matters yes…but what really differentiates your content is the perspective wrapped around it.
Your unique beliefs about how things should work, your opinions that come from lived experience, the hills you’re willing to die on.
I’ve found that most experts don’t actually struggle with having valuable insights. The insights are already there. The truth is just buried. It’s behind a fence and it’s in a safe. People are either overly self-conscious or they’re not allowing that truth to feel real to themselves even though they know what they are.
My advice would be to free associate. Ask yourself what am I good at? What do people pay me for? What do I think is unique versus other people?
Don’t self-limit.
After doing that from a few sessions, you’ll start to see a few consistencies and patterns start to form.
How to use expert interviews to create and repurpose content
Once you understand why interviews work, you need a system to actually use them. Here’s the process I’ve refined over years of doing this for myself and with clients.
Step 1: Define your verbal identity before you record anything
Verbal identity is really how you sound. What language you use. The tone that you use. What’s different from you and competitors in how you show up. The personality of your brand.
The beginning is really sitting down and asking yourself what are three to five beliefs about business or life that I believe without looking anything up. Don’t look at your phone. You don’t need to ask anybody. But you should have core values and principles that set you apart.
For example, two of mine are that SEO is about revenue. Marketing is about revenue. It’s not about clicks or impressions or keywords. That might seem simple but everything that we do, every deliverable, everything that we put on our website has to flow back up to that statement.
And for me personally it would be leave everyone ten times more encouraged, empowered and clear than before they met me.
If a founder can start by defining those beliefs, those value pillars, then you move on and say what are the ways that we’re going to show up for our customers based on that? What are the non-negotiables for our customers?
And then once you’ve got that, it’s what do our customers need to hear on our marketing materials or in our content that maps back to my beliefs. That’s where you get the vocabulary, the style, the guidelines.
Are we going to use buzzwords and be cutting edge? Are we going to be fundamental in our language and our principles? Are there words that we’re always going to use? Are there ways of writing our sentence structures that we’re never going to use?
Creating these yeses and these nos. Those three steps give you an excellent start.
Step 2: Conduct the foundational interview
Block sixty to ninety minutes. Have someone interview you or record yourself answering your core questions. Talk through your beliefs, your stories, your opinions on what’s broken in your industry and how you’d fix it.
Don’t edit yourself while you talk. The goal is raw material. You can clean it up later.
If you’re interviewing someone else, come prepared with questions but stay flexible. Follow the energy. When they light up about something, dig in.
Get the transcript. That transcript is now the foundational asset that empowers everything else.
This is about being resourceful. What’s the one foundational asset you can create that then empowers other people and other tools to repurpose and distribute to other channels?
Step 3: Extract the core themes and angles
Go through the transcript and highlight the good stuff. You’re looking for strong opinions, specific stories, contrarian takes and anything that made you lean in while reviewing.
Group related insights together. You’ll start to see themes emerge. Maybe you talked about the same frustration three different ways. That’s a pillar topic.
Each theme can become multiple pieces of content. A story about a client win can be a LinkedIn post, a section of a blog article, an email to your list and a talking point for your next podcast appearance.
The differentiation piece is what trips most people up. People have this idea that their product is really a one of one or a novel idea. And the reality is that there are very few inventions or novel ideas.
I don’t think you should focus on differentiation before creating and distributing content assets. What I would say instead is it’s important to understand what your unique values and belief systems are and just lean into those.
The differentiation is your story. Your unique lived experience. If you lead with that, the differentiation will take care of itself because people will naturally resonate with your story.
Step 4: Repurpose across formats without starting from scratch
This is where the leverage kicks in. One thirty-minute interview can feed your newsletter team, your social content, your blog and your sales enablement materials.
You’re not creating from nothing each time. You’re adapting existing material to fit different formats and platforms.
The counterintuitive thing about content repurposing that most creators and founders get wrong is this idea that it takes a lot of time. If you’re not familiar with tools like N8N or Zapier or similar automation platforms, you’re going to assume that you have to record a video, sit down and write out 1800 words, record a podcast as separate things.
But whether it’s through a team of people or a collection of tools and automations, you’re really not having to start from scratch every time. It’s a lot more efficient than most people think.
I’ve seen this work with early-stage founders who don’t have money for agencies charging eight to fifteen thousand dollars a month.
Pick one medium that fits how you naturally communicate. Create it in one session. Use technology to update it for whatever the needs of the platform are and also distribute it with technology and automation.
How many pieces of content can one interview actually produce?
People underestimate the output of a single well-structured interview. Here’s what a 30-minute session can realistically generate:
- 3 to 5 LinkedIn posts, each built around a different story, opinion or framework from the conversation
- 1 long-form blog article that weaves together the core themes
- 1 email newsletter pulling the most compelling insight for your list
- 2 to 3 short-form video scripts using direct quotes and stories from the transcript
- Talking points for podcast appearances, sales calls or investor conversations
Do the math. If you interview yourself once a week, that’s 15 to 20 pieces of content from roughly 30 minutes of actual creation time. Compare that to the alternative. Sitting down with a blank page, staring at a cursor and spending 3 to 5 hours writing 2 or 3 posts that still don’t sound like you.
The interview-first approach isn’t just better content. It’s dramatically more efficient.
Some mistakes to watch out for with SME interviews
A few shortcuts come up often in my work with founders, CEOs and their teams.
The biggest mistake I see them make is continually finding the most viral templates and just copying that without injecting any of their own unique beliefs or experiences.
That’s the kind of person who has a lot of views and followers but their company is sub one million ARR.
What’s the point of being famous and having a bunch of impressions and views if your customers aren’t sticking around?
The second mistake is trying to go to too many channels at once before you’ve really maximized one channel and one strategy.
The third mistake is over-editing the raw material. I’ve seen founders record an incredible interview, full of energy and real stories, and then water it down during the editing process until it reads like a corporate blog post. The rawness is the asset. Clean it up for grammar and clarity, but don’t sand off the edges that make it sound like you.
And the fourth is not recording at all. If you’re having a great conversation with a customer, a partner or even a friend about your business and the insights are flowing, hit record. Some of the best content comes from conversations you didn’t plan to use. The transcript is always more valuable than your memory of what was said.
Be patient.
Lean into whatever lights you up and whatever you believe about the world and what needs to exist in the world.
That’s way more scalable and cost effective than chasing the algorithm.
Frequently asked questions about SME interviews
How long should a subject matter expert interview be?
Thirty to sixty minutes is the sweet spot for most founders and experts. Shorter than thirty minutes and you typically don’t get past surface-level answers. Longer than sixty and fatigue sets in, which means the quality of insights drops. For a foundational interview where you’re defining verbal identity and core beliefs for the first time, block sixty to ninety minutes. For ongoing content interviews after that foundation is set, ten to thirty minutes is usually enough to generate a week or more of content.
What questions should you ask a subject matter expert?
The best SME interview questions are open-ended and designed to pull out stories, beliefs and specific examples. Avoid yes-or-no questions entirely. Strong starting points include asking about origin stories, industry frustrations, lessons from failures, non-negotiable beliefs and the advice they find themselves repeating. Six to ten well-crafted questions with room for follow-ups will consistently outperform a list of thirty shallow prompts. The follow-up is where the real insights live. When someone says something interesting, ask “say more” or “why do you think that worked?” and give them space to go deeper.
Can you interview yourself as the subject matter expert?
Absolutely. Founder-led content often starts with self-interviews, and it works well as long as you have a structured set of questions to guide the conversation. The challenge with interviewing yourself is that you tend to self-edit in real time, which kills the raw, unfiltered insights that make the best content. Recording yourself answering questions out loud, rather than writing responses, helps get around that tendency. Guided interview tools like Meet Sona are specifically built for this. They ask you targeted questions, capture your natural spoken language and then convert your answers into publishable drafts.
How do SME interviews improve LinkedIn performance and search visibility?
On LinkedIn, interview-based content outperforms generic posts because it contains the specific stories, real opinions and lived experiences that the platform’s algorithm rewards with reach and engagement. Posts built from interview insights naturally include the kind of vulnerability and specificity that triggers saves, comments and DMs from your ideal clients. The Linkboost 2026 State of LinkedIn Report found that inbound outreach from people who consumed your content converts at 14.6% compared to 1.7% for cold outbound, which means the content you create from interviews doesn’t just build awareness. It builds pipeline.
On the search side, SME interviews directly feed the signals that Google and AI search engines use to evaluate content quality. Google’s E-E-A-T framework prioritizes content demonstrating firsthand experience and genuine expertise, both of which are natural byproducts of a well-conducted expert interview. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that 64% of decision-makers trust thought leadership content more than marketing materials and product sheets when assessing a company’s capabilities. For AI-powered search engines, peer-reviewed research from Princeton University (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) found that content with credible citations and specific data points can see up to 40% higher visibility in AI-generated responses.
How is an SME interview for content different from a job interview?
A content-focused SME interview is about knowledge extraction. You’re pulling insights, stories and perspectives out of someone’s head so you can turn them into content assets like blog posts, social content and newsletters. A job interview for an SME position is about evaluating whether a candidate has the right expertise for a role. The question formats, goals and outcomes are completely different. If you’re here because you want to create better content from expert knowledge, you’re in the right place.
What’s the difference between a subject matter expert and a thought leader?
A subject matter expert has deep, specialized knowledge in a specific area, whether that’s a technology, a process, an industry or a skill set. A thought leader is someone who has developed and publicly shared strong opinions and perspectives based on that expertise. Not every SME is a thought leader, but every thought leader started as an SME. The interview process is actually how many experts make that transition. When you regularly articulate your beliefs, share your stories and put your perspective out into the world through content, you naturally move from “person who knows things” to “person whose perspective people seek out.”
Use Meet Sona to easily create authentic content with AI voice interviews
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