A Complete Guide to Creating Thought Leadership Content
In a hyper-competitive business landscape, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out. Customers are spoilt for choice in the businesses they can patronize, making brand differentiation essential to continued business success.
One effective method businesses use to set themselves apart is publishing thought leadership content. This article serves as a guide on what it is and how it’s done.
What Is Thought Leadership Content?
In the simplest terms, thought leadership content is content that aims to inform or educate a target audience. So, a leadership content piece may discuss industry trends or provide expert opinions, for example.
Common thought leadership content formats include:
- blog posts
- webinars
- white papers
- podcasts
- social media posts
- short-form videos
The aim of thought leadership content isn’t to market products to existing or potential customers. Rather, the goal is to position your brand as an industry leader.
What Is Thought Leadership Marketing?
Thought leadership marketing is the process of creating thought leadership content and promoting it. For this, you can use digital marketing strategies like SEO and social media.
Thought leadership marketing is just a component of content marketing. Content marketing is the use of content to generate interest in a brand, produce leads, and make sales. This content can include everything from thought leadership pieces to promotional emails and brochures.
Without high-quality content, content marketing, including thought leadership marketing, will prove difficult. An understanding of your audience’s needs is key to successful audience engagement.
Sources of Excellent Thought Leadership Content
There are several sources you can draw inspiration from when coming up with thought leadership content ideas. They include:
- Industry News – You can use the happenings and trends in your industry as the basis for your thought leadership ideas. As long as your opinion isn’t heavily biased, anything from innovations to disruptors is fair game for your analysis.
- Brand Data – Your brand’s proprietary data can be an excellent source for thought leadership content ideas. For example, the data gathered from your own survey could prove useful when creating comprehensive studies.
- Counter-Narrative Opinions – Thought leadership pieces that go against the grain of conventional industry wisdom can work, provided they’re not misleading. Rather than focusing on the way things are, this type of content envisions the way things should or could be (in your opinion). However, you’ll still need to rely on data from authoritative sources to bolster your opinion.
- Personal Anecdotes – If you’ve gathered plenty of industry experience, it can form the basis of your next thought leadership piece. Your audience may be interested in reading about your personal experiences, provided you include nuggets of wisdom they can learn from.
You don’t have to leverage all the sources above at the same time to create your different pieces of thought leadership content. Just choose one or more first, monitor how the final pieces do, then experiment with the remaining sources. The ones that lead to content with the best results (higher engagement, for example) should be made part of your final content marketing strategy.
How to Create Thought Leadership Content
It’s not enough to choose the right sources of thought leadership content ideas, though. You still need a good strategy to create this type of content, of course.
Follow the steps below to produce thought leadership content that yields excellent results:
Step One – Choose Your Goal
Think about the outcome you’d like to achieve with your thought leadership content. It’s a given you want to position your brand as a thought leader. But why exactly do you want to be perceived as an authority in the first place? Are you trying to create brand awareness? Perhaps you’d like to generate leads for future business?
The goals you establish must be SMART, or specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. An example of a SMART goal would be “to generate 50 leads by the end of the second quarter of the year.”
Once you’ve defined your goals, set the specific objectives needed to reach them. For example, for that goal above, one objective could be to generate 20 website leads through one short-form video. Another objective could be to produce 30 leads through your five LinkedIn articles.
Just make sure you have the right analytics tools to measure whether you’ve met these specific objectives and, therefore, your overall goal/s. For the objectives above, for instance, you’d need to make the shift to GA4 to gain granular insights into your site content engagement, like video playtime. You’d also need access to LinkedIn Analytics to determine how many engaged with your thought leadership articles on the platform.
Step Two – Identify Your Audience
Next, identify your target audience. Are they the direct consumers of your product/service or the decision-makers who hold the purse strings of an organization? When you know and understand your target audience, you can determine the language you’ll use for your thought leadership content and the specific topics to write about that resonate with them.
It helps to create a buyer persona when answering the question above. Research your proposed audience’s demographics (age, gender, geographical location, etc.) and psychographics (hopes, fears, interests) to get a clear picture of whom you’ll be talking to.
Step Three – Audit Your Existing Content
Perform a content audit on your brand. Look into what you’ve published so you’ll know what thought leadership ideas are worth pursuing later on. So, questions worth asking at this stage include:
- What’s the ratio of thought leadership content to promotional content?
- What current thought leadership content pieces engage your target audience?
- What current thought leadership content pieces aren’t performing well?
Also, don’t forget to analyze your competitors’ offerings when auditing your content. Doing so not only helps you identify gaps but also provides a benchmark against which you can measure your marketing efforts.
Step Four – Brainstorm Ideas
The content audit you did in the previous step should help you decide which thought leadership content ideas to pursue. Does your current blog post on new email marketing statistics yield a high engagement? Then, you might want to create a follow-up article on email marketing trends, for instance. You can also explore the earlier-mentioned thought leadership content idea sources to come up with other ideas.
Consider, too, the knowledge you’ve gathered about your audience. This will help you to determine whether your ideas will translate into content they’ll deem valuable.
Step Five – Create a Thought Leadership Content Calendar
Once you’ve generated a list of thought leadership content ideas, create a calendar. If you don’t have the time to create one from scratch, look for templates online and just customize them. Here’s a template from Hubspot you can use:
The calendar will help you stay organized as you implement your thought leadership content strategy. It will help you track the content being produced and published.
Your calendar will also help you determine whether you’re on track to reaching the thought leadership objectives and goals you set out to achieve.
Step Six – Write and Publish Content
Once you have a content plan in place, start producing and publishing content. If you decide to do the production in-house, consider using AI templates to speed up the writing process. Another option is to outsource the writing to a content marketing agency, although there are challenges to consider for this, as we shall see later on.
Whatever strategy you opt for, remember to avoid publishing self-serving content. Your aim should be to share information your audience considers to be helpful.
Challenges to Creating Thought Leadership Content
There are a couple of challenges involved in creating thought leadership content that you should know. They are:
- Difficulty Level: Thought leadership articles can be challenging to create. The unique content has to provide valuable insights. Thus, it needs to be well-written and thoroughly researched.
- Time Commitment: Like other forms of content marketing, you’ll need to create thought leadership on a consistent basis. Therefore, it requires a significant time commitment on your part.
- Expense and Quality: If you decide to outsource writing your thought leadership content for lack of time, expect to shell out a substantial amount. You can spend anywhere from $5001 to $10000 every month if you leverage the services of content marketing agencies. There might also be an issue with the quality of the content produced. What might be quality content for them may not be quality content for you.
To address the possible expense and content quality challenge above, you can opt to write the thought leadership content yourself. Then just address the difficulty level and time commitment challenges by using technology like AI. As mentioned above, you can use AI templates to fast-track content creation. You can also use AI technology to automate the analysis of the data you gathered to create your thought leadership content.
Thought Leadership Content Examples
Here are a few thought leadership content examples from brands you can get inspiration from. The brands are leveraging the thought leadership marketing strategy the right way to position themselves as an authority in their respective industries:
Semrush
Semrush is one of the best-known SaaS companies in the SEO industry. To position itself as a thought leader in its field, the company periodically publishes studies and reports.
One such study is the one on ranking factors above.
After analyzing 16,298 English keywords, Semrush gave its own assessment of what it thinks are the factors Google relies on when ranking content. It also provides this information via a downloadable PDF document.
Open AI
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the company Open AI, you’ve likely heard of its flagship product Chat GPT. This company has been a leader in generative content and large language models and has published widely-read research.
The above picture shows one such research paper. It talks about its InstructGPT models it now deploys as a default language model. Through the paper, the company continues to demonstrate its expertise and leadership in the field of artificial intelligence.
Wise
Transborder payments company, Wise, operates in the crowded fintech space. To position itself as a thought leader, the company regularly posts informative content on its social media accounts.
In the picture above, for instance, Wise demonstrates its knowledge of currencies by providing facts about the euro in an Instagram carousel post. The post covers a brief history of the euro and countries that use it.
Conclusion
Thought leadership marketing can be an excellent way to position your brand as a leader in its field.
To create good thought leadership content, though, you need a good strategy. Make sure you define your goal and identify your audience. Next, perform a content audit to determine audience preferences and where your content marketing strategy stands. Brainstorm thought leadership content ideas. Some great sources for content ideas include industry news, personal anecdotes, brand data, and counter-narrative opinions. Then, create a content calendar to stay organized. Finally, publish your content.
If you follow these steps, you’ll set your brand up for leadership success. Best of luck!
