You don't need to prove you know your stuff

You take your car to a mechanic because something is wrong. You expect them to tell you what happened, what needs fixing and what it will cost. Instead, they spend ten minutes explaining how the engine works, walking you through the different parts and giving you a detailed account of everything that could possibly go wrong.

By the time they're finished, you're impressed. They clearly know what they're talking about.

You still don't know whether your car is going to be fixed.

There is a version of this that happens in business all the time.

A business knows its subject well. It knows the terminology, the process, the history, the exceptions and all the details that someone unfamiliar with the work would never think to ask about. When that knowledge finds its way into the marketing, it can be tempting to show as much of it as possible.

The articles get denser. The explanations get longer. Industry language starts appearing everywhere. A business explains how the work happens, why its approach is different and all the things it has considered along the way.

There is usually nothing wrong with the information itself. The expertise is real. The problem is that expertise can become a performance.

A customer isn't sitting there trying to measure how much you know. They're trying to work out whether you understand the problem they're dealing with and whether you're the person they should trust to handle it.

That difference matters.

When marketing becomes a way of proving expertise, the business can end up answering a question nobody asked. It is busy demonstrating its knowledge while the person reading is still trying to understand what any of it has to do with them.

This happens particularly easily in industries where the work is complicated. Professionals spend years learning things their customers don't know, so the language of the profession begins to feel natural. Before long, terms that once required explanation seem perfectly ordinary.

The customer hasn't changed. The business has simply forgotten how much it knows.

We wrote about something similar in Issue 002, Your Business Knows Too Much About Itself: the longer you live with an idea, the harder it becomes to remember what it feels like to encounter it for the first time. The same thing can happen with expertise. Once you know a subject deeply, leaving things out can feel like leaving out proof that you know what you're doing.

But leaving things out is often part of knowing what you're doing.

A good mechanic doesn't need to turn a repair into an engineering lesson. They understand the complicated part so that you don't have to. The value of their knowledge is partly in their ability to decide what you actually need to know.

Marketing benefits from the same judgement.

There will always be a place for detailed explanations, technical content and deeper conversations. Some customers want them, particularly when they're comparing providers or making an important decision. But depth is most useful when it serves the person reading it, rather than the business's need to demonstrate its expertise.

That's an important distinction for us at Fastora when we're working on content and communication for a business. We want the knowledge behind the business to come through, but we don't need to put every piece of it on display. The audience should be able to understand why the expertise matters without having to sit through a demonstration of it.

Your knowledge is part of what makes your business valuable. Your marketing doesn't have to contain all of it.

Sometimes the strongest evidence that you know your stuff is how easily you can explain the part that matters.

This article is part of Fastora's Journal on branding, communication and the way people make decisions.