Thought leadership marketing is poorly understood: many agencies offer it, but their services are very different in practice. To better understand what thought leadership really consists of, let’s start with a definition:
| Thought leadership marketing is the art of positioning a company as a leader in its field, most often through original, best-in-class content. By publishing articles, videos, research, or any other form of original content regularly, potential clients and other industry members will begin associating a brand with insight and authority. |
Think of names like Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, Malcolm Gladwell, or Seth Godin. These names are known because of their published ideas rather than their business accomplishments. They have gained authority in their respective business niches, causing people to trust their recommendations. Any brand or company can be viewed in the same way by creating content that resonates with its customers as well as members of its industry.
As a marketing strategy, thought leadership can have a remarkable long-term impact—potentially higher than any other online marketing activity—because it changes the company’s brand perception, giving customers the impression that the company is the best in its industry. Businesses with a strong thought leadership presence tend to receive more sales leads, experience shorter sales cycles, and attract customers who are willing to pay higher prices.
While growing revenues is the primary benefit of thought leadership marketing, there are several other major advantages. In addition to attracting leads, here are the benefits of thought leadership marketing:
- Attracting new talent. Talented people gravitate to organizations whose ideas are well-known and respected. And when potential employees perceive a company to be the best in its field, they are far more interested in working there.
- Getting more press exposure. When the website’s content is truly interesting, people – journalists included – tend to perceive the author of that content as an expert. Websites replete with thought leadership get more press attention due to their perceived authority.
- Receiving business development opportunities. With a strong reputation comes interest from potential partners who can help grow a company. The best biz dev is the type that comes to a company based on their authoritative presence.
- Being asked to do speaking engagements. Thought leadership can also take the form of public speaking at conferences and private events. Companies and individuals that are known for their ideas tend to get these coveted keynote invitations.
Thought Leadership Marketing’s Relationship with SEO
Another benefit of thought leadership marketing is in its relationship with SEO. Effective SEO requires content—content that a thought leadership approach provides—and also serves as an additional distribution channel for thought leadership content (particularly when combined with a modular content strategy). While certain industries are poorly suited for SEO, and some types of content are better suited for gated materials (e.g. white papers and case studies), the majority of content created during a thought leadership campaign can be repurposed into search-optimized blog posts. Thought leadership content is also excellent for attracting links from high domain rating websites, which leads to higher SERPs overall.
Note that some content types such as comparison blogs are less suited to thought leadership, but are extremely valuable for SEO. In this sense, thought leadership is often a critical part of a successful SEO campaign, but rarely the entirety.
How to Create Thought Leadership Content
No matter what form your thought leadership takes, creating it should be a three step process:
- Identify your target audience’s questions and concerns in an area where you have a unique perspective
- Provide a clear and succinct answer to the question quickly—ideally in the introduction—in order to establish trust with your readers
- Present thorough information explaining and expanding on your answer, but keep it simple and easily digestible
The central tenant of thought leadership writing is to be direct. Whatever the thesis of a piece is, have it clearly laid out in the introduction. Take a look at one of our own guides, “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Explanation & Algorithm Breakdown:
Immediately, we explain what GEO is, establish why we’re authorities on the subject, and then provide a breakdown of the algorithms used by the most common generative AI chatbots. We then go on to explain explain each algorithm factor and each AI chatbot’s recommendation engine in more detail. At no point, however, do we hide information or asking rhetorical questions to “keep the reader guessing”—instead, we rely on the content and our unique perspective to inspire the reader to want to discover more themselves.
By the same token, the piece follows the third rule of thought leadership writing by speaking as plainly and simply as possible, despite its more technical subject matter. Look at how the following passages from the same article break down complex ideas without trying to speak over the audience:
Again, the active principle of thought leadership is that the content and perspective of the article are truly unique. As a result, there is no need for the language to overuse jargon to try to sound authoritative. Rather, the tone strives to make the concept discussed as digestible as possible, so as to make learning a new idea easier, inspiring more trust in readers.
Measuring the Success of a Thought Leadership Marketing Campaign
Because the ultimate goal of thought leadership marketing is growing the business, it is not enough to create really interesting content and assume it’s working. It’s important to track the number of new visitors landing on newly produced content, track how much time they’re spending with it, and follow their path after they leave the content page to see if they end up converting.
By “converting,” I mean taking some action that gets them closer to becoming a customer. These actions can also include microconversions, in addition to the more clear conversion examples such as filling out a contact form, calling your company, or just downloading a white paper or joining your email list.
To make sure visitors are converting, it is best to map out the typical paths visitors take on your website and see where they end up. Are they reading your thought leadership content and then promptly leaving, never to return? That would mean something needs to be adjusted. Or, are they going on to read case studies and your site’s About page, ultimately filling out your Contact form as a potential new customer? That’s what you’re looking for. These visitor paths I’m describing are sometimes called funnels. The visitor enters the site at the top of the funnel.
The point of funnels is try to “push” visitors from one page to the next until they come out the bottom as sales leads (or new employee applications, or whatever the goal is). As analytics and tracking gets more accurate, teams can predict the path visitors take to become sales leads with high accuracy, which allows them to craft the funnel to do the best possible job at moving visitors from one page to the next, maximizing conversion rates.
Of course, the funnel always starts with “sticky” content to draw visitors in and cause Google to direct potential customers to the site in the first place. That “sticky” content is thought leadership.
Getting Started On Thought Leadership Marketing
There are two ways to start reaping the benefits of thought leadership: building or buying. Building thought leadership means hiring a content producer, editor, graphic designer, outreach person (to share the content with media), and analytics person. This can be done slowly over time. Buying thought leadership doesn’t mean purchasing already-produced content; Google actually penalizes sites that publish content that has appeared elsewhere on the Internet. It means outsourcing your thought leadership production, including the writing, editing, design, outreach, and analytics, to a professional firm that specializes in ghostwriting thought leadership content such as ours. If you found this article useful and would like to know more about our thought leadership marketing services, you can learn more here or contact us directly.
