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Planning and putting together an expert interview is not easy.
It can feel overwhelming having to secure expert guests, ask the right questions, and edit together the recordings. What’s more, marketing your expert interview is a key part of maximizing the value and traction you get out of it.
We’re here to help with our comprehensive guide to conducting expert interviews like the pro you are.
What is an expert interview?
An expert interview involves sitting down with a thought-leader – someone who is extremely knowledgeable in their field or industry – and asking them questions that share their insights.
There are a few different styles of expert interviews:
- Audio interviews
- Video-based interviews
- In-person interviews
- Remote interview
- With or without a live audience
They can also be published as stand-alone pieces of content on your website or as a branded podcast, for example.
Why should you conduct expert interviews?
There are so many different reasons why it’s worth conducting expert interviews. For starters 65% of people say that thought leadership or expert content sways their perception of an orgamization.
Benefits of expert interviews for your marketing content
Expand your scope
Interviewing experts both within your field and in different areas is a great way of expanding the scope of your own content. You get the chance to shed light on different perspectives and engage in interesting dialogues that will keep your audience hooked.
Offer value to your audience
It goes without saying that having an expert on your show offers a huge amount of value to your listeners. You’re likely to gain more traction if you capitalize on your guest’s expertise, experience, and knowledge to draw out the unique insights that they are able to share with your audience.
Gain credibility for your content
Associating your podcast or content with experts’ names is an effective way of establishing your platform as a credible source of information. This should in turn strengthen your brand’s reputation as a general thought leader in your field.
Tap into their network
Finally, as we touched on before, harnessing an expert’s following and fans can be a great way to expand your reach and ensure your interviews get more views.
10 Steps to recording and conducting effective expert interviews
As long as you allocate sufficient time to thoroughly prepare for your interview and choose the right tools, the rest of your workflow should fall right into place:
Identify your ideal guest list
Before you even think about recording or doing an interview, you need to have an expert to interview. And not all experts in your field will necessarily fulfill your criteria. This is why it’s important to draft a guest list and do a bit of research to understand which people you want to have associated with your brand, business or show. It’s also important to have a whole list prepared because you may not get a 100% response rate when you’re doing outreach.
You can identify potential guests by:
- Using social media
- Looking at who your competitors or similar channels have interviewed
- Networking effectively
- Asking your audience who they want to hear from
- Browsing guest directories
Conduct outreach
Next, you should start reaching out to your top-choice experts. Again, don’t bank on getting a response from every single person. You can move down your list if you’re not successful in connecting with your ideal interviewees.
Depending on how and where you come across the guest, the initial contact might look a little different. For instance, for some experts the best way to get in touch might be through a direct message on social media.
If you’ve met them through in-person networking, you should definitely use the contact details they shared with you. Whereas if you’re using a guest directory, they’ll likely have a set protocol for how to put you in touch.
In your initial message, you should lay out expectations: what you’d like from them and what kind of format the interview will take.
Set the date
When and if you get a response, you should jump straight on setting a time and date. Depending on how you’ve decided to record your interview (remote vs in-person), different logistical considerations will be at play.
Research question preparation:
With the date booked-in, you need to start doing your research and preparation. This should involve looking into your expert’s background, publications, work, and experience and reviewing any previous interviews they’ve given. This should give you a good idea of what questions have been asked before and give you some inspiration for new angles that you can introduce during your conversation.
At this stage, you also want to think about the purpose of this interview:
- What kind of content do you want to be producing?
- Who is your audience?
- What do they want to get out of watching (or listening to) this interview?
These prompts should help you refine your ideas for the kinds of questions you want to ask.
Set up your recording platform
If you’re going to be recording remotely, it’s a good idea to get your recording software set up ahead of time. This is super easy with platforms like Riverside where you can create and schedule your browser-based recording studio before the actual session.
Riverside offers you high-quality recordings with up to 4K video resolution from anywhere. You can invite up to 9 guests to join on any desktop or mobile device. The host and guest workflow is easy to use, and when you finish recording you’ve got a full AI editor suite to polish your interview.
You can learn more or sign up to start creating expert interviews.
Pre-interview conversation
Some people like to schedule a pre-interview conversation to create an opportunity to meet their guests, build rapport, and answer any general questions about what they should expect. This is by no means necessary, but if you have the time available, it can be a nice touch.
On the day: Recording & editing
When the interview day arrives, you should factor in time to welcome your guest and deal with any technical issues. Again, depending on if you’re recording in-person or remotely, you’ll likely face different kinds of hiccups along the way.
Marketing
You’ll likely post your expert interview on an online platform, but it’s always a good idea to promote your interview to maximize your reach.
Ask yourself:
- What kinds of marketing materials are you going to use?
- How and when will you publicize the interviews, and on which platforms?
Having the answers to these questions will help you to implement an effective marketing cadence later down the line.
Its a good idea to post promotional materials such as short clips from the interview to get your audience excited for when it actually goes live.
Luckily with our AI clips creator, you can do this at the tap of a button. This feature automatically identifies key moments from your full-length video and cuts them into short-form clips perfect for social media.
Editing & post-production
Alongside your marketing preparations, you should be editing your interview and getting it ready for publication. This might involve:
- Trimming your video and creating a smooth narrative
- Framing your video, adding b-roll and video effects
- Touching up audio, mixing in music or other sound effects
- Repurposing your video into clips (or blogs)
- Creating captions or downloading transcripts for quick subtitles
You can do all the above using Riverside’s editor. Our AI tools cut your editing time in half so you can create a polished video effortlessly.
Publication
Finally, when you’re ready, you can launch and publish the interview. You should coordinate with your guest to make sure they are proactively promoting the interview when it goes out. To maximize your reach and exposure, there are a few things you should be doing:
- Try to integrate SEO best practices into your content production by including keywords in your video description and any related content.
- Keep tabs on current trends on various platforms – this could relate to video formats or trending audios that you might be able to use.
- Engage with your audience members in the comments section
- Create an eye-catching thumbnail
4 Tips for making the most out of your expert interviews
It’s one thing to get an expert in the room and another to conduct a really compelling interview. Here are a few tips:
Thorough research
Good and thorough research is absolutely central to an interview’s success. Informing yourself about your guest and the broader field is the only way to craft incisive and interesting questions that will make for interesting content.
Interviewer who is also well-versed in the expert’s field
If you don’t think you’re the right interviewer for the job, it’s worth enlisting someone else. The interviewer is almost as important as the guest. If you can find someone with some deep knowledge of the field or industry, this will probably make for a far more compelling interview.
Effective marketing
Creating a strong and punchy marketing strategy is essential to getting the maximum value out of your interview. You should consider which platforms you want to market on and figure out what kinds of marketing assets you’ll need. For example, short-form video is taking social media by storm. Which is why it’s definitely worth creating short-form teaser clips from your full-length recording to promote the interview.
Diversify your publication formats
With all the time and effort that goes into creating these interviews, you should be looking to get the maximum exposure you can. Diversifying the formats in which you publish it is one effective way of doing this — upload it to a number of different platforms as a video interview, short-form clips, audio-only, and as a written interview.
FAQs on Conducting Expert Interviews
How do you conduct an expert interview call?
You shouldn’t treat an expert interview any differently to any other kind of interview. Using Riverside, you can easily record high-quality remote interviews from wherever you are. Both you and your guest’s workflow will be simple and intuitive, and you never have to worry about wifi impacting the recording quality since Riverside records locally (on each of your devices).
What questions should you ask in an expert interview?
This really depends on the angle and purpose of your expert interview. However, generally speaking, you want to try and ask questions that bring out
How do you find guests for an expert interview?
First, you should narrow down your field of interest. This should be easy if you’re looking to host an expert interview as part of a branded podcast or for your business’s marketing efforts. Once you’ve done that, you want to identify the key figures and voices in that area – ask yourself: who is defining and shaping your industry, and who are the best-known thought leaders? Once you’ve landed on a few names, you simply need to draft an outreach email, send it, and wait for their response.
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