Thought leadership marketing offers unique advantages that other marketing channels can’t: by establishing your company as a thought leader, you generate leads who are willing to pay higher prices, receive more press exposure and business development opportunities, and attract talented employees who value working for an industry leader. Becoming known as a thought leader is easier said than done, however, and effectively doing so begins with building a strategy tailored to your specific needs.
The process of developing your thought leadership strategy can be broken down into 4 steps:
- Assessing your current industry position
- Determining your audience and creating personas
- Identifying topics and mapping out your campaign
- Creating thought leadership content
We’ll examine each in turn below.
Assessing Your Current Industry Position
The first step in developing your thought leadership strategy is to understand how your company is positioned. Thought leadership marketing is not for everyone—if your company sells commodity products and competes mainly on price, for instance, then being known as an industry leader does little for your business. To determine if thought leadership marketing is a good fit for your company, first ask:
- Do we have a clearly defined brand and voice?
- Do we have something unique to say about your industry or niche?
- Do we have the resources to create and effectively distribute thought leadership content so that people will read it?
The first two points are essential; you cannot conduct an effective thought leadership marketing campaign without having a unique point of view. Companies without an established brand are effectively trying to hit above their weight class, attempting to effectively lead their industry before they’ve established their place within it. Similarly, companies without a unique or original perspective are attempting to use a roll of duct tape to hammer a nail; it’s the wrong tool for the job, and any success you get with it could be much more easily achieved with a different one.
The question of resources is more mixed. Some smaller companies can struggle to benefit from thought leadership because they lack the funds to sustain the campaign until they receive recognition for their work, but at the same time, becoming known as a thought leader gives them a unique competitive advantage that larger, more established companies won’t be able to nullify through sheer marketing spend. As a result, smaller companies may still want to consider developing a thought leadership strategy for its long term benefits, while relying on other channels such as SEO and PPC to generate leads in the interim.
Determining Your Audience and Creating Personas
While other marketing channels like advertising and paid search seek to target the largest audience possible, thought leadership marketing instead speaks to a much more specific subset. The most ideal target audience for thought leadership marketing consists of other industry leaders and senior staff that can strongly influence decision makers at their companies, or are decision makers in their own right. Examine your existing client pool to identity who these people are, and then ask:
- What problems do they face?
- What are common practices in their industry? Do these practices work?
- What are common solutions that they use for industry problems? Are those solutions efficient?
- Most importantly, do you have a unique perspective on these practices or solutions?
Then, use the answers to this question to to create an audience persona—a mockup representing the average person that your thought leadership content will target. These personas can be as detailed as you like, but should include answers to the questions above. Below is an example of what a customer persona might look like:
| Barry Gordon |  |
| Senior Network Engineer | |
| Barry Gordon is an experienced network engineer who has 10+ years of experience working at midsize and enterprise companies. His success is determined by how quickly issues are resolved, as well as the overall resiliency of his company’s networks. Because of systems that rely on legacy software, he has difficulty keeping his company’s infrastructure updated in order to address newly found vulnerabilities—a problem he discusses regularly with his friends and colleagues who are also network engineers. Barry is both concerned and excited about the impact of generative AI technology on his job. He is skeptical of new software that offers vague promises, but receptive to adopting new tools that demonstrate a clear use case. As a result, he responds better to content that addresses “automation” rather than “AI.” |
Audience personas are not perfect; they need to be revisited and adjusted multiple times over the course of your campaign, but are nonetheless important tools that help your team hone in on the exact tone and language that they’ll use when creating content. Your audience personas will also inform what topics you target over the course of your campaign, which brings us to the next step in the thought leadership strategy development process.
Identifying Topics and Mapping Out Your Campaign
During the course of creating an audience persona, you will learn a great deal about the problems they face on a regular basis. Each of these problems presents an opportunity to connect with them, provide them with help, and establish trust while elevating your company in their eyes. In other words, they are each an excellent topic to address in your thought leadership. Take note of each of these, and then group them into clusters of related topics that will interconnect and be in conversation with each other. Each of these will form a topical pillar for your campaign. Below is an example of a potential pillar that an M&A firm might target, along with its related topics:
Grouping topics into pillars is key to establishing your reputation as a thought leader because it gives focus to your content. By building up a complete and interrelated body of work, a reader, listener, or viewer has many potential avenues to continue exploring your expertise and answer any additional questions they might have. This builds significantly more authority for your brand than if you were to publish content targeting many different but ultimately unrelated topics—even if each piece of content is excellent by itself. Organizing your campaign around a single pillar also provides the opportunity to build a full conversion funnel centered around that pillar—with related landing pages and case studies that can push readers to convert should they wish to engage with your products or services.
Creating Thought Leadership Content
The last step in thought leadership marketing is knowing how to actually create thought leadership content. This process can be distilled into three main practices:
- Provide a clear answer to reader questions right away. Good thought leadership content will provide answers right away, establishing trust with your audience. Tangentially related topics can be brought into the discussion, but a full exploration should be kept to related content that the audience engages with based on their own interest.
- Create information-driven content. The audience for your thought leadership is there to learn from your expert knowledge, not be sold a product. Likewise, your audience isn’t interested in being told how impressive your company’s achievements are: the quality of your content should speak for itself.
- Keep things simple and to the point. One hallmark of a true expert is their ability to bring their audience with them through complex topics, fully explaining how their technology or process works. Don’t try to confuse your audience into thinking that you have more knowledge
Creating effective thought leadership is an in-depth topic in its own right, however, and we discuss it in far more detail in our article, How To Write Thought Leadership Content.
Working with a Thought Leadership Marketing Agency
Thought leadership marketing is a powerful tool but can be difficult to use well. Developing a strategy is time consuming and requires not only possessing expert knowledge of your own industry, but deep familiarity with the challenges faced by your audience. Executing on that strategy and creating content is a challenge in its own right, with many companies finding that their subject matter experts are too busy to regularly contribute to a marketing campaign.
Another option is to work with an experienced agency to develop a customized thought leadership strategy for you. If you’d like to learn more about our thought leadership marketing services, you can contact us here.
