How to Turn SME Brain Dumps into Client-Ready Content

If your subject matter experts are your biggest asset and your biggest content bottleneck, welcome to the club.

We hear it all the time:

“We have the knowledge, we just can’t get it out of their heads and onto the page.”

Engineers, scientists, developers, legal experts, and clinical leads are all busy, brilliant, and allergic to marketing speak. However, their insights are the heart of your brand. So how do you turn those late-night bullet dumps, 47-minute voice notes, and meeting transcripts into clear, polished, client-ready content?

Here’s how we do it:

Step 1: Find The Story

Your SME isn’t thinking about flow, structure, or audience. They’re thinking about precision. That means their content will usually:

• Start in the weeds

• Jump around chronologically

• Repeat themselves

• Include more than your client ever needed to know

• Your first job is to spot the core insight (the part that matters to your reader).

Ask:

• “What is this actually explaining?”

• “What’s the takeaway the client would care about?”

• “What’s the context the SME assumes, but the audience may not have?”

Then start building the structure around those answers.

Step 2: Don’t Edit, Curate

The first instinct is to clean up the whole thing as-is. You’ll lose time (and patience). Instead, skim for gems. Highlight 3–5 ideas worth developing, and set the rest aside. We call this “structured curation.” Curate the content, take the technical brain dump, and shape it into a 3-part outline:

• The problem

• The expert POV

• The outcome or recommendation

Once that’s in place, the rest becomes much easier to write.

Step 3: Translate, Don’t Dilute

SMEs don’t want their work oversimplified (and neither do their clients.) Your job isn’t to dumb it down. It’s to translate precision into clarity.

Do:

• Use visuals or analogies where helpful

• Break complex ideas into plain-language layers

• Retain technical terms where needed, but define them for mixed readers

Don’t:

• Remove all specificity

• Pad with fluff

• Lose the tone of confidence that your SME naturally brings

Step 4: Confirm Your Facts

Always run technical claims back by the SME. However, don’t give them back a Word doc and ask them to rewrite it. SMEs aren’t editors. Respect their time and expertise by:

• Providing summaries they can scan

• Asking yes/no clarifications

• Getting signoff, not rewrites

Confirmation keeps the process efficient and keeps you in control of the voice and flow.

Step 5: Build A Repeatable Process

Great content from SMEs shouldn’t be a fluke. We help clients build reusable templates like:

• Voice note conversion workflows

• SME interview questions

• Slide-to-post or deck-to-article frameworks

• Internal review routing to reduce bottlenecks

When SMEs know what you need and when, they’re more likely to give you what works.

Working with SMEs takes trust, structure, and a good translation layer. Done right, you get:

• Content that actually reflects your expertise

• Writing that makes sense to your clients

• A process your SMEs don’t hate

Want us to do this for you? We turn expert input into polished thought leadership, blog series, web pages, and more, without wasting your team’s time. Let’s talk.