Professional Services Marketing teams face a familiar tension: subject matter experts want to showcase their expertise fully, while marketers know dense, technical content won’t engage prospects. The truth is, both perspectives are essential. Great thought leadership requires accessibility and depth. 

This article explores how to bridge the gap between the two perspectives.

Why your content needs both accessibility and depth

If you’ve worked in Professional Services Marketing, you’ll know how it feels to be caught in the crossfire. While your Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) accuse you of ‘dumbing down’ their insights, you know that a 3,000-word technical treatise riddled with jargon won’t resonate with your audience.

This tension isn’t unique to Professional Services. In any industry where expertise is the product, the same battle plays out. SMEs want to 

showcase the full depth of their knowledge, while Marketing teams want to make that knowledge accessible and actionable.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: both sides are right. And both sides are wrong.

The Marketing Perspective

We’ve all seen what happens when SMEs take full control – technical language only insiders understand, dense paragraphs assuming extensive knowledge, insights buried so deep that readers can’t find them and jargon that only makes sense if you’re an expert in the subject matter. There’s a reason for the title. The result is content that impresses peers but means nothing to anyone else and certainly doesn’t attract clients to want to know more and speak to them.

As a Marketing team, you know that these audiences are being bombarded with information, so you want to create content that attracts, engages, and converts audiences into clients. You therefore instinctively take the technical content and apply the lens of the audience. You understand that simplifying the content is about respecting your audience’s time and writing to their level of understanding. Accessibility means presenting complex ideas in a way that draws people in rather than overwhelms them and pushes them away.

The SME Perspective

At the same time, your SMEs haven’t spent years building expertise to have it reduced to soundbites. When they see nuanced analysis condensed into bullet points or qualified statements turned into definitive claims, it feels like a betrayal of their professional integrity.

They worry about credibility – after all their clients are buying their expertise. If content reads too simply, does it suggest simplistic thinking? They’re also positioning themselves within their professional community, where oversimplification can damage their standing in ways Marketing teams don’t always appreciate. 

Why Both Perspectives Matter

The reality is that great thought leadership requires both accessibility and depth. Remove the depth, and you’ve got empty content that won’t differentiate you. Remove the accessibility, and you’ve got expertise that never reaches the people who need it.

There’s a famous Einstein quote that serves as a useful guide: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” But here’s the beautiful irony – that quote is itself evidence of smart simplification at work. What Einstein actually said was: “The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” 

It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. The shorter version didn’t ‘dumb down’ his thinking, it just made it land.

Finding the Balance

So how do you bridge the gap? It starts with recognising that this isn’t a battle, it’s a collaboration requiring both skill sets. 

The Marketing team’s role is translation, not over-simplification. Involve experts in understanding your audience and create clear guidelines that preserve credibility while ensuring readability. 

SMEs need to recognise that thought leadership is a business development tool designed to start consultative and productive conversations where you explore the client’s needs and how you can address them. It requires a different approach to academic writing. Consider a ‘layered’ approach – lead with accessible insights, then provide increasing depth for those who want it.

Practical Tips for Alignment

1. Start with the ‘so what’ – Before creating content, agree on the core message and why it matters to your audience. Or as my colleague Sarah always says, ask yourself: “What do you want to say, who do you want to say it to, why do they care, and what do you want them to feel, understand and/or do?”
2. Separate the writing and editing processes – SMEs write with full technical rigour. Marketing teams then work with them to make it accessible, with experts retaining approval rights. This preserves depth while adding accessibility.
3. Measure what matters – Move beyond vanity metrics to tracking if content is actually generating qualified conversations, supporting sales, and enhancing reputation with key audiences.

The Path Forward

The tension between accessibility and depth won’t disappear. Nor should it. That creative friction, when managed well, produces better content than either party would create alone.

The firms that excel at thought leadership see Marketing teams and SMEs as partners, each bringing essential skills. Marketing brings audience insight and storytelling ability while SMEs bring deep knowledge and credibility.

Your audience doesn’t want dumbed-down content that patronises them, but equally they don’t want impenetrable expertise that means nothing to them. They want insights that they can relate to, understand, and use, delivered by people they can trust. 

So, the next time you find yourself in that familiar argument, remember that you’re on the same team, creating thought leadership that showcases expertise while resonating with the people you’re trying to reach. That’s not easy, but it’s precisely that difficulty that makes it a genuine competitive advantage when you get it right.

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