Ah, thought leadership. Such a buzzy marketing term with only an ambiguous link to driving your company’s KPIs. The catch-all phrase has come to represent the impression a founder or company spokesperson makes with a mix of bylines, public events, webinars, podcast interviews, and Twitter threads. But done right, it’s actually something much more foundational. Successful thought leaders use ideas to drive an agenda forward.
Once you get past the jargon, thought leadership can be quite an effective tool in your marketing arsenal. It can position you and your company as credible leaders in your industry, open doors to new opportunities, build brand awareness, and engender trust with your company’s various constituents - customers, employees, partners, and investors. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s not as simple as composing a few tweets, publishing last night’s brilliant epiphany on Medium, or answering questions on a panel. Doing it right requires some reflection up front. Before you can come up with a thought leadership strategy, you’ll need to be able to answer these questions:
Am I clear-eyed on the nature of thought leadership?
Thought leadership is a big investment for any company because it’s fueled by one of your most finite resources - the time of your founder and other key leaders. Having the budget to work with consultants, ghostwriters, and PR firms helps, but there’s no way around the fact that a thought leadership program requires the attention of someone in your company who doesn’t have a lot of it to spare. Effective thought leadership comes with an endless stream of homework - tracking trends and analysis, fielding inbound, interacting with other experts, producing content with regular frequency, and taking time to reflect and further evolve your ideas. Returns on thought leadership take a long time to come, and there aren’t many useful things to measure in the meantime. Unlike performance marketing, there won’t be clear data to inform your decisions. Success is typically measured by the uptick in quality inbounds you get - invites, media inquiries, partner and investor engagement, and positive feedback. Can you get comfortable with dedicating key resources to something that can’t be easily measured?
What are my primary objectives?
If you can get comfortable with the nature of running a thought leadership program, it’s time to reflect on what you’ll get out of it. Many people utilize thought leadership to boost their own platform, hoping for a halo effect that will bolster the company. Others see an opportunity to cultivate authority and expertise in a particular industry or domain. Still more people have other goals in mind - such as driving recruitment, generating press interest, and raising brand equity. Before developing a thought leadership strategy, you should have a clear understanding of your top objectives - try force ranking no more than three.
What conversations do I want to be having?
Examine the external conversations (ones that are already being had) that are relevant to the work you do and the company you are building. How would those conversations need to change to be more relevant to your company’s vision and value props? What conversations do you not want to be a part of? If you could wave a magic wand and shift the existing conversations to your preferred topic, framework, or opinion - what would change? Which conversation would better serve your brand? Now consider the broader contextual landscape - from universal forces like the market, pandemic, and political realities to industry-specific concerns. How do those relevant factors contribute to shaping your desired conversation? This reflective step isn’t about yielding a position (that comes later), it’s about identifying your ideal field of play.
What do I have to contribute?
Think about your areas of expertise, your passion projects, and the unique insights and perspectives you bring to the table. Now examine which data, anecdotes, and unique insights your company can contribute to the conversation. Then, pull back a little further and consider the industry or vertical in which you operate - what trends, questions, and themes are you naturally drawn to? Find the through lines connecting you, your company, and your industry with the conversation you want to be having. You should start to see some themes emerge. Go through the same exercise with anyone else on your team who will participate in your company’s thought leadership program. Are your themes all rowing in the same direction toward your objectives? Do you want to divide and conquer or tag-team on the same topics?
Who am I speaking to?
Every company has multiple audiences to keep in mind. Your community of current and potential customers, employees, partners, and investors to start. Then there’s the broader business and tech industry, and the specific industry or vertical you operate in. Don’t forget your field of expertise - the audiences of engineers, marketers, managers, designers, and other professionals. To have a clear idea about which audiences you should prioritize, revisit your force ranked objectives and ask yourself which audiences can play a part in achieving them.
Which channels are right for me?
Now that you have a clear idea of your objectives, what you want to say, and who you want to say it to, you can finally take a look at the channels that are right for you. Publishing long-format written works on a channel controlled entirely by you (such as Medium, your own blog, the company blog, or Substack) is the best option for getting started right away and establishing a track record. Contributed content opportunities abound (think Fast Company, Forbes, CNN, and HBR), but you’ll have to pitch or pay for them - these are a more realistic option if you have a PR person on your team to help with placement. Another good option is to participate in the owned channels of other thought leaders in the space - this looks like doing a Q&A, event, podcast interview, or webinar for another individual or company engaging in thought leadership activity. Whatever channels you intend to prioritize, you’ll still need to bolster your social media presence to amplify your thought leadership efforts and engage with other participants in the conversation. Unsurprisingly, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Instagram remain the best channels for this.
What resources do I have?
Now that you’ve reflected on the elements that will inform your strategic direction, it’s time to think about how you’ll actually execute. To do this, consider the resources you yourself possess - are you an especially good writer? Public speaker? Are you empathetic enough to be great at interviewing people? Are you a natural networker? Do you have the AV chops to run a podcast from your dining room? Evaluate your strengths and skill gaps. Now, what type of help do you need? Most effective thought leadership strategies involve two types of support players - someone to help generate your content and someone to pitch you. For help generating content, you can bring in a ghost writer as a thought partner, editor, and pen-for-hire. Or, look for someone already on your team who can write well and push back on your ideas to help whip them into shape. For placement, look to whomever handles your PR to help gain contributed byline opportunities, speaking invitations, accolades, and guest commentator spots.
If you’ve genuinely engaged with each of these questions, you’re ready to start pulling together your thought leadership strategy. We’ll be back with a guide to how to do just that soon!
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me at jamie@fuelcapital.com.