A passionate marketer, CEO at iResearch Services, TechInformed & GivingforGood.
Thought leadership can be likened to a strategic game of chess. In chess, victory can sometimes be achieved with just a handful of decisive moves. Similarly, in thought leadership, you don’t need to embark on lengthy, expensive campaigns to earn credibility and influence your target audience. Making just seven pivotal adjustments can transform your approach to thought leadership and redefine your strategy’s trajectory.
1. Create a content calendar.
A content calendar is a schedule that outlines when and how you’ll publish thought leadership content across different channels. A calendar will help you track content publishing dates if you’re creating blog posts, whitepapers, videos, podcast episodes or other content types.
When driving thought leadership, your content calendar might include:
• Milestones for content production, such as outlines, first drafts and final edits.
• Dates for promoting content on social media platforms. For example, if you post new thought leadership podcast episodes on a Thursday, you might want to advertise that week’s broadcast on the previous Friday.
• Dates for measuring the success of your content. For example, if you post new thought leadership videos on a Monday, you might want to review engagement statistics the following Friday.
You can create physical content calendars and distribute them to team members or use cloud-based tools to host and edit your calendar.
2. Work closer with your senior team.
Working with senior marketing managers and your chief marketing officer can help you create more successful thought leadership content. Regular meetings with senior teams will help you learn about new methodologies and techniques for your strategy and gain insights into data-driven marketing, big data technology, research-based marketing, thought leadership pillars, the B2B marketing landscape and other topics.
Establishing closer relationships with senior teams can also allow you to disseminate your content to the right audiences. For example, a CMO with thousands of followers on Twitter can share links to blog posts, webinars, whitepapers, videos and podcasts. That can expose your content to a broader audience and attract industry influencers and authority figures.
3. Connect with influencers to build your strategy.
An influencer can spread a thought leader’s voice to thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of social media users and help that leader become one of the go-to resources in their subject area. There are various ways to connect with influencers and strengthen your thought leadership marketing plan:
• Start a relationship with an influencer by liking and sharing their posts on your social media channels.
• Ask the leader you create content for to like and share an influencer’s posts on their channels.
• You might want to connect with micro-influencers (people with 10,000 to 50,000 followers on social media) while building your thought leadership strategy. Once a leader has established themselves, move on to macro-influencers (people with 500,000 to 1 million followers).
If you doubt influencer value, consider that the influencer marketing economy was valued at $16.4 billion this year, according to McKinsey.
4. Consider social media intelligence.
Social media intelligence tools can tell you how well your content performs on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok and also what people think about the business leader you market for. (Full disclosure: A number of companies, my own included, provide these types of solutions.) These tools analyze social media conversations to reveal insights about customer perceptions and opinions, even if a social media user hasn’t tagged a leader’s or company’s accounts in their post.
Here are some ways you can consider incorporating social media intelligence into your marketing strategies:
• Assess customer behavior and opinions, and use this information to understand your target audience, drive thought leadership content and improve the leader’s reputation.
• Generate feedback about products and services offered by your leader’s company.
• Learn whether global events like the Covid-19 pandemic have had an impact on your marketing campaigns.
5. Talk to prospective customers.
Successful thought leadership can influence prospective customers to make a purchase or invest in a service. But what do these customers really want? Consider conducting a survey or hosting a focus group to discover more about prospects and leads in your marketing funnels. You can discover the following:
• Whether your audience prefers a particular thought leadership content type, such as videos, podcasts or blog posts.
• How your audience consumes content (e.g., on desktop computers, smartphones, mobile tablets, etc.).
• Why your audience enjoys reading, watching or listening to thought leadership content.
6. Talk to team members.
Creating thought leadership requires a team. Consult regularly with the following people for more successful thought leadership outcomes:
• Talk to your marketing team about new thought leadership techniques and technologies, as well as creating successful campaigns.
• Talk to your sales team about converting prospects and leads from thought leadership content into paying customers.
• Talk to your CMO to establish a budget for thought leadership content marketing.
• Talk to the C-suite about the benefits of thought leadership to inform whether they will invest more resources into this marketing method.
7. Talk to your leader.
You can’t create thought leadership content without a leader. This person’s name will be attached to blog posts, webinars, podcasts and other content types. Talking to the leader you market for can help you think in that thought leader’s voice. Regular meetings will help you establish:
• The insights the leader wants to reveal in content.
• The content types they’re most comfortable with.
• How to promote products and services in content.
Effective thought leadership doesn’t necessitate massive investments. You can enhance credibility with your target audience by using existing resources and implementing minor yet strategic changes to your approach. These alterations, such as closer collaboration with senior teams and engaging with influencers, can elevate a leader’s presence, positioning them as a foremost authority in their domain. In essence, impactful thought leadership can be achieved through thoughtful, calculated shifts in strategy.
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