Content marketing – What to look for in engineers and developers as content contributors

For engineering and software development companies

Want to create better content for your engineering or software development company?

If your content feels too generic, it’s probably because you’re not getting the insights that your customers care about from your experts.

There should be two main players:

A marketer.
Your engineer / developer / founder / sales – aka the SME (Subject Matter Expert).

The focus in this article is not the marketer (there are important aspects to consider for them as well), but rather the SME.

Also, the word “content” is too generic. Let’s get more specific. For the purposes of this article, we mainly mean:

articles,
landing pages,
and case studies.

Why you need SMEs to be part of the content creation process in the first place

You need SMEs because that’s where the core value of your company originates. These are the people that:

know how to solve your customers’ problems and
know what your customers care most about.

The core of good marketing involves the coherent expression of that value (in the form of articles, landing pages, case studies, maybe even calculators, etc) to your potential customers.

Your goal in marketing is to expose some of that value that resides in the minds of your SMEs out to the world.

A couple questions that might be rolling through your mind:

Can’t I just hire a marketing agency or consultant to create my content for me?

You can. However, this is not something I’d suggest.

Here’s why: if you put two people side by side, one of them that’s worked for your company for years, day in and day out, and knows all the intricate details of the work you do, your customers, and your culture, and compare them to an outsider (even if that outsider has some understanding of what you do based on past experience), who do you think has more relevant information and insights to share?

SME-driven content is authentic. Authenticity builds trust with strangers. Trust is what you need to convince those strangers to want to talk to your sales team (i.e. sales ready leads).

Can’t I just use AI to act as my SME and create content for me?

As of 2025, I wouldn’t go there. There are many reasons, not the least of which is that you’ll basically be regurgitating what’s already out there.

It won’t be your thoughts, insights, or beliefs. It’ll be some mixture of other peoples.

You build trust with potential customers by letting some of your knowledge and insights out into the world. From what I’ve seen so far, the mantra of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” holds true for leveraging AI in this manner. It’s not that there aren’t very helpful ways to leverage AI for marketing, just not to pretend to be your SMEs.

Most important attributes of a SME contributing to content

All engineers and developers are NOT identical. Some are natural content contributors. Some are not.

Many times, the people that know most about a topic have the hardest time expressing it. This is often due to a combination of personality traits and the “curse of knowledge” phenomenon.

There’s certainly nuance to the importance of different attributes depending on the content type being created (e.g. articles vs calculators vs landing pages vs case studies). However, at the foundational, level I’ve found that the most important SME attributes for contributing to content revolve around their:

Ability to provide real-world insights about the topic at hand.
Ability to communicate clearly.
Ability to take a stance on the topic at hand.
Knowledge of what their customers care about.
Willingness / availability to participate in the content creation process.

In 2025 I performed a quick bottom-up assessment of many of the SMEs I’ve worked with over the years and compared that with my overarching subjective gut feel about how challenging it is to help them get content out of their head. My gut feeling matched up quite well with my bottom-up assessment of these 5 attributes.

What does this mean for you?

It means that when you’re trying to identify SMEs to contribute to content, you want them be as strong as possible in each of these 5 categories.

A few comments about each attribute:

Ability to provide real-world insights about the topic at hand.

Why it’s important	The real value (especially in the age of ChatGPT and Google’s AI) doesn’t come from basic or generic answers about a topic. The real value comes from nuanced insights developed from real-world, boots-on-the-ground experience solving the problems that your company solves for its customers.
A tip on how to improve	Curiosity is king. Encourage SMEs to start asking why, not just what, how, when, and where.

Ability to communicate clearly.

Why it’s important	The easier it is for your SME to communicate, the more efficient (and less frustrating) the content creation process will go. Also, the better the SME communication skills, the more engaging the final content will likely be for your potential customers.
A tip on how to improve	Communication skills can be learned. There are good books on how to become a better writer. Good luck getting a SME to read them though. The more likely way for a SME to improve their communication skills is through practice. They need to start drafting articles with someone guiding them, providing iterative reinforcement learning style feedback (this was good, that was not).

Ability to take a stance on the topic at hand.

Why it’s important	If you have no opinion about a complex topic, you really don’t have much value to offer. Straightforward black and white topics are uninteresting. Where things get interesting and valuable is when you have a strong stance to take on a topic where the answer is either nuanced or consensus hasn’t been reached.
A tip on how to improve	Most people have strong opinions on most complex topics that they have knowledge about. It’s more likely that they’re afraid to express it. Help the SME feel safe and they’re more likely to share these opinions.

Knowledge of what their customers care about.

Why it’s important	If you don’t know what your customers care about, you have nothing to write about. Not landing pages, not articles, not case studies.
A tip on how to improve	You need to experiment with different methods for helping your SMEs gather customer feedback. This should eventually become engrained into your business processes.

Willingness / availability to participate in the content creation process.

Why it’s important	The best SMEs are worthless to your marketing efforts if they’re either unwilling, or never available, to contribute to content.
A tip on how to improve	If a SME is unwilling, don’t push. Find out why and see if you can resolve that. If a SME is willing but never available, put the ball in their court. Ask them to tell you what they think a reasonable timeline is. They’re more likely to feel compelled to respond when they’ve bought in.

How many SMEs do you need contributing to content?

The simplest starting point: 1 SME for every ~10 employees.

This number can vary significantly depending on how aggressively you want to dive into content marketing (or it’s inbound and SEO siblings).

The ratio may be higher at the bottom end of company size. For example, even with only 10 employees, you may still want ~2-3 SMEs contributing to content, depending on each SMEs availability, knowledge base, etc.

The ratio can be smaller as company size increases. For example, for a company of 100 employees, I’d probably be comfortable if you told me you could only identify ~6-8 SMEs. If you had 200 employees, I might be fine if you only could identify ~10 SMEs.

Next Steps

If you’re a founder or marketing leader looking for someone to work with your SMEs to help them get the wonderful raw nuggets that they’ve got locked up in their brain, to turn that into something your potential customers want to engage with, which, when working well, results in sales ready leads, feel free to reach out for a chat.

Yes, let’s chat

A few comments from RocLogic’s clients:

I was talking to a potential customer today in our intro call and they literally started reading excerpts from our website to me! LOL. I guess we are doing something right with these pages!!!

President, a Software Development company

Thank you for helping me think about how to approach writing articles. I’ve learned a lot from you on this process. I would definitely like to work on more articles as my schedule permits.

Senior Software Engineer / Content Author / SME

I accepted all your changes (you are good at this, like I said earlier).

Content Author

Wonderful editorial revisions! Nice job.

Content Author

Thanks for helping me clarify my thoughts – you are good at doing that :)

Director, An Engineering Company

I feel really good about what you did here. It’s certainly better the way you laid it out than my “academic paper” 😊

Principal Engineer, an Engineering Services Company

The long delay (a year?!) between content creation and web traffic for that article was impressive. It’s no wonder so many companies don’t stick with it.