Getting noticed gets attention, and attention leads to business. That’s marketing in a nutshell.

It’s the getting noticed part that presents a range of interpretations. We’ve all experienced delightful attempts and cringe-worthy ones.

A paradox of our age is that people with significant expertise are often the most severely allergic to marketing their expertise through self-promotion. As a result, it’s hard for these experts to get noticed and make a go at selling their expertise.

So what’s an expert to do?

I find it’s much more palatable to reframe the getting noticed part as just being helpful.

Being helpful gets noticed.

Here are a few ways to make the shift from promo-y to helpful:

Be a fiduciary

In the financial advising world, a fiduciary is someone who is legally bound to act in your best interest. They establish this trust by taking no commissions or kickbacks on their recommended funds or products. Instead, they get paid a flat fee for their service.

It’s not that you shouldn’t get paid from your client’s Fullscript order. But you should be transparent about it and point them to wherever the supplement is most affordable—even if it’s not through your Fullscript.

Thanks to Kevin Whelan for bringing my attention to this concept.

Share your expertise

For the expert allergic to self-promotion, this is a hump to get over. But you need to be contributing your perspective, voice, and protocols to the world. You do that through writing and speaking.

It takes time for it to feel worth it. At first, you’ll spend a bunch of time creating content that is dripping with your insights—and it’ll be largely ignored or missed. But as you keep going, you’ll find the tone that resonates with a few. Those few will dig deep into what you’ve created and give you fodder to create more.

Focus on your clients, not your peers

Experts can get caught up in the advanced-level topics of their field. The things of conferences and journals. But a singular focus on your clients’ worlds will be far more helpful to them (and more interesting).

Your clients aren’t looking to become an expert in your field. They just want to understand enough to solve their problem…and even then, there are limits.

Let this guide the resources, articles, and webinars you produce.

Be generous with complementary experts

Who else serves your clients in ways that you don’t? Pay less attention to your so-called competition and more attention to these complementary experts.

• Comment and share their posts
• Reply to their emails and ask questions
• Refer clients to them
• Form relationships with them

These cross-pollinations will expand your clients’ worlds by exposing them to complementary experts. And it works in the other direction, too.

Solve whole problems

Everyone wants to check tasks off their list. The easier you make that, the higher the satisfaction, the more remarkable. Solve whole problems through your own service offerings. But where you can’t solve a whole problem, work with other providers so your clients have a seamless service.

Providers that don’t work well with other related services make it hard for clients to do what they need to. Unfortunately, this is all too common in healthcare services and why so many opt for functional care in the first place!

Genuinely helpful

Experts don’t have to be self-promotional to get noticed. With a firm grasp of your knowledge area and a generous posture toward your clients’ challenges, people will take note of you and bring you business.

It may be a slower approach (at times), but a reputation for being a fiduciary, approachable to clients, and solving whole problems snowballs into an unstoppable marketing strategy.