The best content doesn’t come from what you know. It comes from what you’re able to draw out of the people who do.
By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC · Published Wednesday, July 21, 2026
Interviewing subject matter experts for content marketing is the practice of conducting structured conversations with domain specialists like executives, practitioners, researchers, or clients to gather original insights, stories, and perspectives that form the foundation of high-quality written content.
Done well, the expert interview is the single most powerful tool available to content marketers for producing material that is genuinely authoritative and distinctively voiced.
And, it’s impossible for AI to replicate.
One of the most valuable things I brought from journalism to content marketing wasn’t a writing technique or a structural framework. It was the interview.
The ability to sit down with someone who knows something you don’t (a physician, an engineer, an executive, a researcher, a client who’s lived through something) and draw out the insight, the story, the specific observation that makes a piece of content worth reading: that skill is rarer than it should be. And it’s becoming more valuable every year.
Here’s why: AI can synthesize what already exists. It cannot conduct an interview. It cannot ask a follow-up question. It cannot notice when a source says something offhand that is actually more interesting than the prepared answer they were giving. The expert interview produces content that is genuinely new. It’s grounded in experience and perspective that has never been published anywhere in exactly that form. That’s the most powerful differentiator available in a content landscape flooded with AI output.
Prepare more than you think you need to
The worst interviews I’ve conducted were the ones where I went in underprepared and relied on the source to carry the conversation. The best ones were the ones where I arrived knowing enough about the topic to ask genuinely informed questions and to recognize when an answer opened a door worth walking through.
Before any expert interview, do the following: read everything the source has published or been quoted in. Understand their area of expertise well enough to ask specific questions, not just general ones. Identify the two or three things you most want to know that you couldn’t find out by reading. Those are your best questions.
Have more questions prepared than you’ll need. A 30-minute interview with 20 questions is better than one with 8, because it means you can abandon questions that get answered by earlier responses and still have plenty of material. The questions you don’t ask are invisible to the reader. The questions you didn’t prepare for but should have asked are not.
Ask the question behind the question
Most sources, especially experienced ones, give prepared answers to predictable questions. They’ve talked about their work before. They have well-worn explanations that are accurate but rarely surprising.
The journalist’s technique for breaking through this is to ask the question behind the question. Not ‘what does your company do differently?’ but ‘tell me about a time when doing it differently cost you something and what happened next.’ Not ‘what do you think the biggest challenge in your industry is?’ but ‘what’s the thing your peers are getting wrong that they don’t yet know they’re getting wrong?’
Specificity unlocks specificity. The more specific your question, the more specific the answer. ‘Tell me about your approach to content’ gives you a brochure answer. ‘Tell me about the last piece of content you published that surprised you, either because it performed better or worse than you expected’ gives you a story.
Listen more than you talk
This sounds obvious. It isn’t. The temptation in an interview is to demonstrate your knowledge, fill silences, and redirect when the conversation drifts. Resist all three.
Silence is one of the most productive tools in an interview. When a source finishes an answer and you don’t immediately ask the next question, they often keep talking. What comes out in those unplanned moments is frequently the best material in the interview: the aside, the caveat, the example they almost didn’t mention.
Follow the energy of the conversation, not just your question list. If a source lights up when they talk about something unexpected, that’s a signal. Stay there longer than your outline planned for. The outline is a starting point, not a script.
The follow-up question is where the real content lives
In my experience, the best content from any interview doesn’t come from the prepared answers to prepared questions. It comes from the follow-up question. The ‘what do you mean by that?’ The ‘can you give me an example?’ The ‘that’s interesting; what made you change your mind?’
Follow-up questions are the journalist’s core tool because they do something prepared questions can’t: they respond to what the source actually said rather than what you expected them to say. They signal that you’re listening. And they almost always produce more specific, more interesting, more usable material than the first answer.
As I noted in my post on what old-school journalism teaches content marketing, the five W’s discipline (who, what, when, where, why, how) is a research framework, not just a writing formula. The follow-up question is how you apply that framework in real time. Every answer a source gives should be evaluated against those six questions. If any of them haven’t been answered, you have your next question.
Translate expertise into content, not transcription
The interview is raw material, not finished content. The mistake many content marketers make is to treat their interview notes as a transcript to be lightly edited rather than a source to be transformed.
Your job after the interview is to identify the two or three most valuable insights the source shared, determine what story structure best serves those insights, and write content that uses the expert’s perspective as evidence rather than scaffolding. The expert’s voice appears in direct quotes that are specific, vivid, and attributed, but the content’s architecture is yours.
This is, not coincidentally, exactly what distinguishes a content strategist from a transcriptionist. As I argued in my post on why every business needs a content strategist, the strategic function is what gives individual pieces of content their purpose and shape. The interview is where that strategy meets lived experience—and where the most distinctive content is born.
Frequently asked questions about interviewing for content marketing
How do I prepare for a subject matter expert interview?
Research the expert thoroughly before the interview: read everything they’ve published, note their areas of expertise and known positions, and identify what you most want to know that you couldn’t learn from reading. Prepare more questions than you’ll need; a 30-minute interview warrants 15–20 prepared questions. Prioritize specific, experience-based questions over general or conceptual ones. The goal is to arrive knowing enough to ask genuinely informed questions and to recognize when an answer opens a door worth exploring further.
What questions work best in a subject matter expert interview?
The most productive interview questions are specific rather than general, experience-based rather than conceptual, and open-ended rather than yes/no. Ask about specific examples, specific decisions, specific failures and what they revealed. Questions that invite storytelling (‘tell me about a time when…’) consistently outperform questions that invite explanation (‘can you explain how…’). And follow-up questions: ‘what do you mean by that?’ ‘can you give me an example?’ ‘what happened next?,’ almost always produce the most valuable material in any interview.
How do I turn interview notes into content?
Treat interview notes as raw material to be transformed, not a transcript to be edited. After the interview, identify the two or three most valuable insights the source shared. Determine what narrative structure best serves those insights. Write content in which the expert’s voice appears as direct attribution (specific quotes, properly attributed) while the architecture of the piece is yours. The expert provides the evidence; you provide the argument. This distinction is what separates content marketing from transcription.
What’s the best interview question you’ve ever asked (or been asked)? I’d love to hear what questions have unlocked the most valuable conversations in your experience.
