From know-how to leads

Many small and mid sized businesses are rich in expertise but light on enquiries. Your team is solving real problems every week, yet most of that value lives in meetings, email threads and project folders. Prospective clients never see it, so they do not realise how well you could help them.

The good news is you do not need clever campaign ideas to change this. Your best content topics are already in your day-to-day work. The questions clients and prospects keep asking are exactly the ones your future ideal clients are typing into search bars, debating in internal meetings and quietly worrying about on the commute home.

This article looks at how to catch those questions, turn them into clear themes, and shape them into content that makes it easier for the right people to find you and start a conversation.

Why everyday questions are your best topics

When someone asks a question, they are doing more than seeking information. They are revealing what they are unsure about, where they feel exposed in front of their own stakeholders, and how they actually describe their challenges in their own words.

Compare a typical “marketing topic” such as “Why Our Solution Is Best In Class” with a real-world question such as “What does a realistic timeline look like for a project like this?” One feels like a brochure. The other feels like you are helping.

You will recognise some of these:

  • “What’s the difference between X and Y – and which should we choose?”
  • “How long does this usually take, honestly?”
  • “What do other businesses our size do in this situation?”
  • “What do we need in place before we start?”
  • “How do we know if this has worked?”

If you hear a question more than a couple of times, that is a signal. Turning those questions into clear, honest content does two important jobs: it helps new people discover you, and it builds trust with those who are already considering you.

Capture the questions you are already answering

The first step is simply to stop letting good questions disappear.

You do not need a new platform to begin. A shared document or board is enough. For a couple of weeks, ask everyone who talks to clients – sales, account managers, consultants, support – to jot down the questions they hear. The only rules are:

  • Write the question in the client’s own words, not tidied up into jargon.
  • Add a brief note about the context: what kind of client, and roughly where they were in the process.

Do not overthink it. You are just listening.

After a short time, you will see patterns appear. The same worries surface again and again, sometimes phrased slightly differently. You might notice a cluster around cost and value, another around timelines and process, and another around risk and “what if this goes wrong?”.

That emerging list is far more valuable than a brainstormed list of generic topics. It comes directly from the people you want to reach.

Group them into themes that make sense to buyers

Once you have a list of real questions, step back and look for themes that would make sense from a buyer’s point of view.

Questions like “What does a typical project look like?”, “How involved do we need to be?” and “Who will we be working with?” naturally sit together. They are all really about how it feels to work with you. That could become a theme such as “What it is like to work with us” or “How our projects run in practice”.

Other themes may form around:

  • Getting started – what needs to be in place, how quickly things can move
  • Cost and value – how you price, what affects cost, typical returns
  • Risk and disruption – what might go wrong, and how you reduce disruption
  • Fit – when you are a good match and when you are not

Each theme can eventually support more than one piece of content. You might have a main explainer article, a short FAQ, and one or two social posts all orbiting the same core concern. The important point is that the way you organise topics mirrors how your buyers think, not how your internal org chart looks.

Decide where to start

You will almost certainly end up with more potential themes than you can tackle at once. That is not a problem – it is a sign you are listening well. The next step is to choose where to invest your effort first.

A simple way to prioritise is to ask three questions about each theme:

  • Does answering this help someone move closer to a decision?
  • Does it come up frequently enough that more than one client would benefit?
  • Do we have a clear, honest point of view on this, rather than a vague answer?

The themes that sit closest to buying decisions – cost, risk, process, “how it really works” – are often good starting points. They tend to make sales conversations easier and can be used immediately by your team.

Pick one theme and commit to turning it into a useful piece of content before you move on to the next. That keeps things realistic and stops this becoming yet another “we should really do content” list.

Turn a theme into something genuinely useful

Let’s take a common theme: “How we work with you in the first 90 days.” How do you turn that into a piece of content that attracts and reassures, rather than reads like a brochure?

One simple pattern works well for many B2B topics:

Start by naming the concern plainly, in your client’s language. For example:

“A lot of teams worry that bringing in external support will create extra work or disrupt what is already in motion.”

Then offer a clear overview of what happens. That might be a high-level outline of the first few weeks or months.

Next, break that overview into a handful of stages. For each stage, explain what you do, what the client does and what the outcome is. Short, practical paragraphs are enough.

Finally, address the specific questions you know people ask. Use subheadings that mirror their wording – “How much of your time does this take?”, “Who will be in the room?”, “What happens if we need to pause?”.

Close with a straightforward sense of next steps: what a first conversation usually covers, and how someone can get in touch if they are not sure where to start.

You can adapt this same pattern to other themes such as “What does this cost?”, “What do we need ready before we begin?” or “How do we measure if this has worked?”.

Make it a joint effort, not a marketing project on its own

Content that turns expertise into enquiries is rarely written in isolation. It works best when sales, delivery and marketing shape it together.

Rather than asking a busy specialist to write an article from scratch, try recording a short conversation with them. Ask the questions your clients ask, draw out examples, and let them talk the way they talk to real people. From a 20–30 minute chat, you can usually pull enough material for a solid first draft.

Once there is a draft, share it with the people who spend the most time in front of clients. Ask them two simple questions: “Does this sound like us?” and “Would you be comfortable sending this to a prospect?” Their feedback will help you land on something that feels both accurate and usable.

When the piece is live, make it easy for the team to use. Give sales a short link they can drop into follow-up emails. Add it to your website in a place where it makes sense. Mention it in introductory calls. The aim is for this content to feel like a helpful tool, not an extra task.

A realistic way to get started

If you like the idea but feel stretched, it may help to think in terms of a short, focused cycle rather than an open-ended project.

Over the space of a month you might:

  • Spend the first week simply collecting questions.
  • Use the second week to group them into themes and pick one to focus on.
  • In the third week, record a conversation on that theme and draft an article or explainer page.
  • In the fourth week, publish it and start using it in real conversations.

After that, you can decide whether to repeat the cycle with a new theme, or adjust based on what you have learnt.

Where Spark can help

Turning know-how into leads is not about producing more noise. It is about making the way you already think and work easier for the right people to see, understand and act on.

At Spark Interact, we help small and mid sized businesses identify the themes that matter most, shape real-world questions into clear, on-brand content, and join that content up across website, email and sales materials.

If you would like a fresh pair of eyes on how your expertise could translate into enquiries – or support to turn a handful of recurring questions into assets your team can actually use – we would be happy to explore that with you.