6 Essential Elements Of A Thought Leadership Strategy

[Purvi Dalvi]

Every piece of content you create boosts brand awareness and loyalty by attracting customers with educational information that they want to read. It opens up the conversations to drive engagements with existing and potential customers. Meanwhile, pushing out reputable content helps you recruit top talent that identifies with your company culture and vision.

An effective thought leadership strategy is deeper than the overarching content strategy. It is an aspect of the strategy that focuses on building the author’s reputation through guest-contributed articles. Here are the elements associated with it:

Ask yourself why

Ask yourself why you want to create thought leadership content. It is a long-term strategy, with the sales funnel taking time, too. To decide the return on investment, you need every content outlet working together and the human resources to analyse and qualify leads over time. Once you establish specific goals, every topic and content ties back to your overall strategy.

Business goals

It is a valuable part of any strategy. Hence, spend much time on it with your clients. During a kick off call, learn about your clients’ business initiatives and determine the right audience, article topics, and strategic placements to help achieve those goals.

Target personas

Define your target audience as narrowly as possible to identify their specific pain points and develop articles around them. You have more than one persona to ensure each content specifically targets one group.

Polished content

Providing your audience with thoughtful and educational content is central to building trust. Deliver fresh ideas to enrich the readers’ lives and advance industry conversations with research and unique insights. Crisis communication planning also prepares you to share information with your target audience, stakeholders, customers, etc., before a crisis hits while managing it effectively.

Effective call-to-action

The action upon each content stems specifically from your goals. For example, to start conversations and spur engagement with your target audience, end your article with a question. If you are trying to establish your brand, put a link in your bio inviting people to contact you on LinkedIn. The content should never be the end of the story.

Article engagement

Before writing anything, plan to expand your content’s reach. If you have a social thought leadership strategy, consider promoting them on social channels such as paid advertisements, identifying thought leaders, and starting conversations once it gets published.