Everything You Need to Know About Thought Leadership
PREFACE: This blog post will explain thought leadership in-depth, clarify common misconceptions, and walk you through the basics of creating a powerful thought leadership strategy. It’s a long one, but it’s worth it.
“Thought Leadership” is a communications strategy that has become increasingly popular among B2B companies in recent years. In spite of its growing popularity, many people (including communications professionals) are often misinformed about what thought leadership is.
Thought leadership refers to content that offers unique insight or valuable expertise on a specific topic with the primary goal of establishing yourself or your organization as a leader within your field. This content can include blog posts, articles, e-books, research reports, social media posts, articles, presentations, webinars, and more.
WHY THOUGHT LEADERSHIP?
What makes thought leadership so special?
When done correctly, thought leadership can bolster trust in your brand, indirectly demonstrate the value of your services to consumers, and serve as a key differentiator between you and your competitors.
The 2022 Edelman-LinkedIn Thought Leadership Impact Report found that thought leadership is “one of the most effective tools an organization can use to demonstrate its value to customers during a tough economy - even more so than traditional advertising or product marketing, according to B2B buyers.”
With consumers growing increasingly uncertain about their financial stability, and therefore much more likely to cut back on discretionary spending, thought leadership is one of the best investments you can make in your business right now.
WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP?
The primary goal of thought leadership is to position yourself or your organization as a leader within your field of expertise (or what I call your “sphere of desired influence”). You do this by engaging in conversations with, and creating relevant content for, the people within that sphere. This is an outside-in approach to content creation.
Target Audience: Industry peers and competitors, or your “sphere of desired influence.”
Approach: Outside-in. First looking outside to identify trending topics, then looking inwards to identify what you can contribute to the conversation.
Content Focus: Trending issues and topics that your peers, competitors, and industry (sphere of desired influence) are already talking about.
Though thought leadership is often (mistakenly) seen as another spoke in the marketing strategy wheel, it actually serves more of a brand strategy function.
After all, thought leadership aims to influence the overall perception of your brand; not market your services.
I love this graphic from The Power MBA. It perfectly captures the difference between branding (which houses thought leadership) and marketing (which houses content marketing).
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP VS CONTENT MARKETING
Even communications professionals often conflate content marketing and thought leadership content. Both strategies produce content, but they do so for entirely different reasons.
The primary goal of content marketing is to establish trust and authority with your consumers through free content that is relevant and useful to them.
Target Audience: Consumers (potential or returning clients and customers).
Approach: Inside-out. First deciding what you want to talk about (based on what you want to sell), and then infusing your key messages into content that is relevant to your consumers. You may take current trends and topics into consideration, but your approach is driven primarily by your marketing goals.
Content Focus: Educational information and insight on issues and topics that are relevant to your consumers.
Content marketing is like being the professor of a sought-after class. Thought leadership is like being the faculty member that regularly contributes to and supports your department’s activities and goals. Both strategies can contribute to the success of your academic career, but each works in entirely different ways to achieve it.
In practice, your thought leadership strategy is most effective when it functions entirely separately from your marketing strategy.
HOW TO BUILD A THOUGHT LEADERSHIP STRATEGY
Okay, so you’ve decided to incorporate thought leadership into your overarching communications strategy. Woohoo!
Now, let’s walk through the basic components of building a comprehensive thought leadership strategy.
1. DEFINE YOUR SPHERE (target audience).
Your thought leadership audience is different than your consumer audience. In thought leadership, your “sphere of desired influence” is considered your target audience.
Your sphere is, generally, comprised of your peers and competitors. A sphere is often a subset of an industry, and can sometimes exist across multiple industries, depending on the nature of your business.
How narrowly you define your sphere depends on how targeted you want your messaging to be. This decision should align with your overall branding strategy.
For example, OffScript Copywriting exists within the sphere of “Healthcare Communications.” Therefore, fellow healthcare communicators are my target audience.
OffScript is part of the communications industry. My sphere, healthcare communications, is a smaller subset of that industry. If I wanted, I could narrow that sphere even further, to just “Private Practice Healthcare Communications.” This doesn’t align with my business goals, however, so I choose not to.
Remember, clients are rarely part of your sphere. One of OffScript Copywriting’s ideal client types are dermatologists. I am not a dermatologist and I do not wish to establish myself as a leader among dermatologists. Therefore, dermatologists are not the target audience in my thought leadership strategy.
When it comes to thought leadership, the space you occupy is where you will find your target audience. Your content should cater mostly to your peers and competitors, because you are seeking to be perceived by your peers and competitors in a specific way.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to get to know them.
2. IDENTIFY YOUR SPHERE’S DIGITAL HOME
Does your target audience mostly chat on Twitter? LinkedIn? Do they go back and forth researching and producing white papers? Do they meet in-person at conferences? Where are the conversations happening?
You have to go to where the party is to be a part of the conversation.
3. IDENTIFY YOUR SPHERE’S PRIORITY TOPICS
Listen to the conversations taking place in your sphere. What does your target audience talk about? What media do they consume? What’s the current hot topic?
You can’t join the conversation without first knowing the topic of discussion.
4. IDENTIFY PROMINENT VOICES AND FAVORABLE RESOURCES
Who gets the most RTs on Twitter? Who is leading the discussion on LinkedIn? Who does everyone look to for insight? These are the current thought leaders in your space. It’s important to identify these prominent voices and understand their unique perspectives when developing your own strategy.
An oft-overlooked aspect of thought leadership is identifying what I like to call “favorable resources” (more on that here).
If your sphere keeps mentioning a specific research paper, take note of the organization that produced it. If certain news articles come up in conversation, take note of the publication and even the journalists behind the pieces.
You might notice that all of your thought leadership work, up until this point, is simply listening. This emphasis on listening to the existing landscape and interacting on a reactionary basis is why thought leadership is considered an outside-in communications approach.
Armed with knowledge about your sphere, its preferred platforms, its most prominent inhabitants, its current trending topics, and its favored resources, you can now make a plan.
5. DEFINE YOUR MEASURABLE OBJECTIVES
Communications should always be strategic and measurable. A solid communications strategy consists of goals, objectives, and tactics.
It’s important to note that thought leadership is a long-term strategy and its impact can be difficult to quantify.
Let’s again compare thought leadership to content marketing. Traditional content marketing can be measured with things like reach, engagement, and even conversion (sales), because the goals of content marketing are to find, engage, and convert the organization’s consumers.
Thought leadership, on the other hand, seeks to attain a specific perception from its peers, which then positively impacts its status within its sphere of influence, which then positively impacts the organization’s perception by consumers and others outside its sphere, which then positively impacts the organization’s business goals. Thought leadership is a powerful but indirect communications strategy, and is therefore much more difficult to measure.
This is, again, why I consider thought leadership to be a function of brand strategy that is expressed through content creation, and not a marketing strategy. Nonetheless, even branding strategies are strategic, and should be implemented with objectives in mind.
This is a good time to double check that a thought leadership strategy truly supports at least one of your organization’s overall communications goals. If it does, then proceed with developing supporting objectives that are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
6. IDENTIFY YOUR THOUGHT LEADER
This process is highly specific to your organization and its goals. Relevant information to consider includes: the nature of your target audience, the tangible role a person plays in the organization, existing perceptions of that person, their personality, and their availability (or commitment to this strategy).
Selecting the right person for the job is crucial. A thought leader does not have to be the CEO, or even a c-suite executive; but they should fit the mold for the perception you are trying to communicate.
It is widely known that Elon Musk regularly works 80-hour weeks at Tesla; this portrays Tesla as a company that is working tirelessly towards innovation in exciting new frontiers. It also portrays Tesla as not prioritizing the health or happiness of its employees.
Study the true thoughts of your thought leader, and be sure that they align with the image you are striving for.
7. DEFINE YOUR CONTENT PILLARS
Traditionally, content pillars define the topics you want to discuss as part of a content marketing plan, and those topics relate to the products or services you’re trying to sell.
Content pillars in a thought leadership strategy work differently. They should be flexible and ever-evolving, and they should be entirely informed by the interests and current discussions of your target audience. Write out all the topics that are of interest to your target audience, and select the ones that are most aligned with your communications objectives. Again, this is an outside-in approach.
Content pillars in this setting essentially just work to keep your conversations and content both relevant to your audience and aligned with your objectives.
8. ARRIVE WITH VALUE.
You’ve studied your target audience and identified the best person to interact with them. Now, it’s time to join the conversation.
Organizations often want to dominate the conversation with their products and their services. That is, in fact, the worst thing you can do. It’s poor conversation etiquette. It’s also not thought leadership - it’s marketing.
At its core, thought leadership is simply an act of engaging in conversation. It is best to approach thought leadership like you would conversations in your day-to-day life.
Consider this: let’s say you and some of your colleagues go out for drinks every week. You’re all in the same industry, so industry topics naturally come up. If you jump into every conversation with the attitude of “I’m doing this” and “I'm doing that,” your colleagues will likely get annoyed. The conversation turns flat because you’re centering the conversation on you. You might think you are showcasing all your talents and skills, but you’re really just ruining the party - and you may not get invited back.
Let’s say instead, you approach the conversation like an interested participant who is listening to learn. Your colleague might mention a topic, and a few people provide their perspectives and opinions. You listen, and then add on to their insights with some of your own. If you are truly an expert in that topic, the depth of your knowledge will become obvious through the thoughtfulness and relevancy of your insights.
Later, when your manager asks a question on that topic in your monthly team meeting, your colleagues will look to you to answer it. People might start coming up to you to ask questions on that topic. Your boss may ask you to give a short presentation on the topic so your colleagues can stay up to speed on any changes.
This is what it means to be seen as a thought leader, and it requires the same skills of any talented conversationalist: humility, wit, and truly useful insights.
CONCLUSION
There are many additional components that play into a successful thought leadership strategy; this is simply an overview. But if you start with authentic conversation and engaging content, you may one day find yourself on a stage, mic in hand, captive audience hanging on your every word.
