Are you guilty of suffering under the Curse of Knowledge without even realizing it? If you’re affected by it and you’re responsible for any amount of communicaton with your audience, you’re likely causing confusion.
If you’re a credentialed or experienced professional in your field, you have extensive knowledge that goes deep. You may easily lose people in conversation when you over-explain something about work to a friend, or perhaps you have a habit of apologising in the same situation because you know your listener is out of their depth (which is okay, most people don’t know what you do).
That’s the “curse of knowledge.” You know so much that it’s quite difficult to simplify things down for your target audience.
Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the curse of knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.”
– Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, one of my favorite books on communication
When the curse of knowledge shows up in content marketing this way, your audience tunes out, overwhelmed by complex technical terms, tricky concepts, and a whole of of context and explanation they can’t keep up with. This disconnect isn’t just about conveying information. It’s a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge, and it ensnares a lot of people. The good news is, you aren’t alone, and undoing this tangle could improve how you connect with your audience.
Before we get into the rest of it: if you’re in northeast Georgia and need social media videos that get your expertise across to your audience, our Expert Interview Clips are specifically designed to break the curse of knowledge and deliver you a bunch of high-quality clips with a minimum of effort from you.
What’s In This Post
- The curse of knowledge blocks effective communication between experts and their audiences
- Professionals risk audience alienation when they use too many terms specific to their expertise
- Experts often assume their audience understands complex terms, or don’t consider the audience’s level of understanding
- Specific strategies can help overcome the curse in content marketing
- Success is achieved through continuous learning and communication simplification
Watch Zach’s video on this topic on YouTube:
Understanding the Curse of Knowledge
Anyone who’s really good at something grapples with the curse of knowledge. This issues causes knowledgeable individuals who assume others share their depth of understanding, and causes them to expand on knowledge gaps where clarity should exist instead.
Has a child ever attempted to explain to you what’s happening in their Minecraft server? Or why the latest new set of Pokemon cards is a total bummer – and you have know idea what they mean by energy accelleration and BDIF (while I am a card game nerd, I did have to Google those)?
That’s the curse of knowledge, and you might be doing the same thing in your content marketing.
It’s like being fluent in a language that your audience doesn’t understand. Would you speak French in your content if your audience was homebuyers in the American Midwest?
Experts might inadvertently communicate as if their audience possesses the same level of smarts as they do. Then the audiences becomes frustrated when they don’t understand what you’re saying. This gap isn’t from a mismatch between you and the folks you serve, but instead comes from the gap between how they understand things and how you’re saying them.
Among my friends who don’t own small businesses, sometimes I’ll say something like “Yeah, I’ve been working on my website’s SEO for the past month. It’s hard work but rewarding because the KPIs are so easy to measure, and since I learned it myself the ROI should be good.” (Okay, I don’t lay it on THAT thick, but stick with me.)
And my friend responds, “…what?” and we talk about how cute my kid is instead.
Understanding that this issue is likely to affect you too is the first step in bridging this communication gap. Asking the question “Does everyone really know this?” could shift how you share your expertise.
Implications for Content Marketing
When creating content for your business or organization, the actual intent of your can vanish in a bunch of misunderstood technical terms. Content falls flat when the audience’s perspective is overlooked.
This miscommunication diminishes engagement rates in your content marketing (by the way, this is the key difference between content marketing and other kinds of content: content marketing strategies should be optimized for conversions, while content like YouTubers make is opitmized for getting out to as many people as possible).
On top of this, crafting educational content becomes an uphill battle when you simple know too much and can’t simply. The curse of knowledge’s effect on your content marketing process is usually confusion; you have too many topics to choose from, and when you do pick one, you beging to over-explain and suddenly your Instagram Reel draft is eight minutes long.
Recognizing and grasping your audience’s knowledge level is the key to simplifying correctly.
Real-life Examples of the Curse of Knowledge
The last time you read a medical article, did intricate medical technical terms confuse or enlighten you? Doctors often write with an assumed understanding in mind. Medical terms like “lymphadenopathy” (even I don’t know what that means. I’ll link to a good explainer) are just going to confuse the reader, if that doctor’s target audience is normal folks.
Legal professionals face a similar dilemma, especially since much of their craft invovles knowing how to wield specific, strange-sounding phrases (I learned that “time is of the essense” has a specific legal meaning recently. Who knew?!) (Lawyers. Lawyers knew.) Engrossed in producing complex texts, they create documents that baffle laypeople, but that are hopefully airtight when put under actual legal pressure. These technical terms might be second nature to them, but to a non-lawyer, terms like “nunc pro tunc” bring confusion.
Business executives, driven to relay their insights, might employ industry-specific terms that inadvertently alienate. Suppose a CEO talks about “leveraging synergies.” In their mind, they used this term after spending significant time understanding their company’s problems, capabilities, and what’s going on with their customers and competitors. But then they say “leverage synergies!” and their employees’ eyes roll into the back of their head out of boredom and their customers have no idea if they even need their synergies leveraged.
Since one of our specialities at Rooster High is podcasts, we’re deeply familiar with a podcast host’s need to simplify for their audience on their show (especially when the show is content marketing for a business). “Advocating for the audience” is one tactic that we coach our podcast clients in to help them deliver great podcast content.
Overcoming the Curse of Knowledge in Content Marketing
Knowledge (heh) is half the battle when creating effective content. It’s one thing to recognize the curse of knowledge; it’s another to beat it. By merging awareness with action (like you’re Goku and Vegeta), anyone creating content marketing can improve their approach. When you tailor your language to ensure broader understanding, your audience can actually understand what’s powerfully different about you, your organization, and how you can help them. Then they’re ready to take action.
Simplifying terms is crucial in this kind of improvement. Knowing the exact phrases your audience uses (“keywords”) are the building blocks you’ll use to be understood, and findable by that ideal audience.
Practical Tips for Breaking the Curse of Knowledge
Put yourself in your ideal client’s shoes. Does your content still make sense? A little imagination goes a long way. If you have someone in your life who can provide feedback as you try to simplify, who is outside your expertise, that could help a lot to figure it out.
Telling a story is a GREAT way to keep things simple. Often when I’m interview busines owners as a part of our Expert Interview Clips, they’ll list all the specific benefits of working with them, and mention offhand someone who they helped. I ask about the person who was helped, and the business owner ends up telling a gripping story of how someone’s life changed because of their services. That’s an easy technique to help get across the benefits of working with you.
Measuring Success in Breaking the Curse of Knowledge
How do you gauge success? The most basic answer is to look for improvements in your content’s performance over time.
If you’re organization is suffering from communication overcomplication, you’ll usually see it in your engagement rates. That’s anything from email opens and click-throughs to shares on Instagram and comments on YouTube. If your engagement is trash, there’s a silver lining: nowhere to go but up!
Once you create a plan to simplify and being doing it, give it at least 3 months of coordinated effort then review your analytics; everything from website visits, how long folks spend on your website, comments / likes / shares on social, and anything else you have access to. Are the numbers going up? Why are they going up? Were their more conversions (new clients, email list signsups) during that time?
Success manifests not just in numbers, but in an audience that learns and engages more and more. As engagement grows, more and more people will be ready to buy from you.
Continuous Improvement and Learning to Avoid the Curse of Knowledge
Staying informed about audience trends helps you create content that folks will understand, and revisiting older content to update it in this spirit really helps too (and this changes depending on the medium; blog posts can be updated, but for a YouTube video or podcast episode, you’ll need to record a new one).
When you really take on this commitment to simplifying and refining your content marketing, you should start seeing different in your metrics within a few weeks (even if they’re small at first). This is, however, primarily a long-term strategy.
Never forget that your audience craves clarity. When they are presented a message they uderstand, it’s much easier for them to like it, especially if it’s entertaining, educational, or memorable in some way.
By following these strategies, you can steer clear of the worst bits of the curse of knowledge and help your audience truly understand.
The next time you write or create a content marketing piece, ask yourself: Am I inviting my audience to understanding, or just recounting what’s known to me? It’s going to take some work.
How Rooster High Can Help
Taking on the curse of knowledge is a lot of work. If your organizion needs clarity in your messaging, there’s a bunch of ways Rooster High can help.
- A podcast is a fantastic strategic media asset to use for a variety of purposes, from being a content marketing generation machine to a cultivating community and connections in an industry that lacks it.
- If you’re in northeast Georgia, our video production services include Expert Interview clips which are built completely around creating clear, authentic, understandable social media videos for you. Check out our two case studies, one for an indpendent medical professional and one for a speech coach.
- If you run an established non-profit, our Brand Differentiators create real messagings tools from the real experiences of your stakeholders and partners. Check out the case study when we did these for the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce.