Many businesses use marketing content to highlight their products and services, but there’s another way to demonstrate the value you provide: Adding thought leadership content into your posting mix and establishing your team as forward-thinking leaders in your niche.
By sparking dialogue with groundbreaking ideas, provocative opinions, and valuable data, thought leadership helps you break through to buyers and decision-makers. In fact, 90% of executives say they’re more likely to be receptive to a company that produces high-quality thought leadership, according to a study by Edelman and LinkedIn.
Read on to learn why thought leadership content is so impactful and how to use it to elevate your brand’s credibility and set it apart from others.
What Is Thought Leadership Content?
Thought leadership content explores the trends, challenges, and opportunities facing an industry and provides unique insights based on expertise and experience. Through articles, white papers, webinars, and podcasts, this type of strategic thinking helps audiences understand the landscape in which their companies operate. Your ideas could motivate them to embrace change, reconsider approaches, or capitalize on potential growth areas.
The most impactful thought leadership pieces:
- Generously share first-hand experiences, lessons, and knowledge.
- Explore topics relevant to audience needs or pain points.
- Offer viewpoints that may be new or unique.
- Present solid research and data to demonstrate authority and trustworthiness.
- Deliver insights and solutions that readers can take away and apply to their own ventures.
Differentiating Thought Leadership From Standard Content Marketing
Thought leadership content steps away from the specific benefits of your services and products to lead discussions about issues facing your industry or audience.
- SEO marketing content focuses on your brand, with the goal of improving search visibility, attracting customers, and driving conversions. Examples include product pages, landing pages, blog posts, case studies, how-to guides, and press releases.
- Thought leadership content focuses on your sector, with the goal of establishing your expertise and boosting brand awareness over time. Examples include keynote speeches, educational articles, opinion pieces, research reports, and interviews.
Does that mean these two things need to be segregated? Not exactly.
Thought leadership content marketing can include SEO — and in many cases, it should. Optimizing thought leadership articles makes it easier for your target audience to find them. It’s critical to focus on information gain
How Thought Leadership Drives Authority, Trust, and Brand Awareness
A thought leadership content strategy might not result in immediate conversions, but if well-executed, it benefits your brand long term. If you can open dialogue and shape conversations about relevant issues, you’re highlighting a deep understanding of the industry and carving out your company’s position as a leader. Share these kinds of interesting ideas consistently enough, and your brand earns a reputation as a trusted voice in the field.
How does this authority develop? Your content should spark light bulb moments and give audiences ideas they can use to inform their own strategies. They may bookmark your content and refer to it later, share it on social platforms, link to it in their blog posts, and distribute it to colleagues.
Each interaction builds faith in your brand and the perception of it as an authority. In fact, 65% of buyers say a thought leadership piece significantly changed their view of a company for the better. This lays the groundwork for your other marketing efforts. If you’re highly respected, it’s easier to expand your reach and generate leads.
Leveraging SEO and Unique Insights in Thought Leadership Content
Effective SEO thought leadership content lines up with both audience interests and search engine priorities. It fits perfectly into a search-first marketing strategy, where you leverage meaningful content to build online visibility and audience engagement.
Aligning Your Strategy With Audience Needs and Search Intent
First, think about who you want to reach with your products and services and the problems they’re trying to solve. Thought leadership content is audience-centric and relies on a deep understanding of the challenges your customers deal with and what they want to achieve.
Define your audience as precisely as possible by determining their:
- Basic demographics, such as age, job title, and location.
- Values, aspirations, and challenges.
- Preferred content formats and information sources.
You can gather information about demographics and user behaviors through your website and social media analytics. You can also approach customers directly — surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews with selected valued clients can provide a wealth of insight to guide your content.
For example, let’s say you do marketing for a private equity firm. You have multiple audiences you want to appeal to and thought leadership written for one may not be of interest to the others. You’ll want distinct strategies to appeal to institutional investors and another for potential portfolio companies.
How To Optimize Thought Leadership Content for Search Engines
Audiences should find your thought leadership pieces when they’re searching online for information. Fortunately, it’s easy to integrate quality content and SEO to drive traffic.
Follow best practices for on-page, off-page, and technical SEO to ensure Google can crawl and index your web pages. Then create exceptional content to propel your web pages higher in search engine rankings.
Search engines prioritize unique, helpful, and original ideas. Look for ways to build on your thought leadership ideas to enhance value. Do you have new data, real-life examples, or personal lessons learned that can enrich the topic and provide more satisfying user experiences? Try to fill in knowledge gaps and bring something fresh to the conversation — providing information gain can help you surface higher in the SERPs and capture your audience’s attention.
Recommended Reading
How To Develop a Thought Leadership Content Strategy
Now, let’s find thought leadership content ideas that are timely, relevant, and worth consuming, helping audiences take notice of your brand.
Identifying Key Topics and Trends in Your Industry
Before you can offer well-considered perspectives, you need to be up to date on developments in your field. Here are ways to surface topics that are of interest to your audience:
- Read authoritative publications and blogs.
- Stay current on the latest research and studies.
- Attend conferences and panels.
- Monitor opinions on social media and community forums.
- Speak with your customer success, sales, and service teams.
As you uncover possible themes, think about how your expertise can expand on what competitors have already published. Do you agree with what you’re reading and hearing about? Can you add another angle? Does your data or experience say something different?
For example, let’s say a new technology has burst onto the scene. You’ve seen different takes about its viability and how to use it. You can provide your own perspective on the tech with a unique use case that others haven’t shared.
Sharing Your Unique Voice and Perspective
The way you communicate to your audience influences how they relate to your content. For example, it’s hard to connect with readers using a generic voice that could be from any brand. Infuse some personality to bring your content alive and appeal to your human audience. A consistent, authentic voice helps build a sense of familiarity and trust and makes your brand more relatable.
Similarly, consider what distinguishes you from competitors. You don’t always have to challenge the status quo to stand out from the crowd, but perhaps your company took an unusual path to success or has a unique philosophy that informs your day-to-day work. By integrating these perspectives into your thought leadership, you can offer distinctive viewpoints that audiences come back for.
How To Promote Thought Leadership Content
When publishing thought leadership content, make a plan for sharing pieces widely throughout your network. This should include repurposing content so that a deep-dive blog post, for example, is also presented as a LinkedIn carousel or a newsletter. Maximize your investment by transforming useful nuggets into graphics, videos, and more. This will allow you to share your piece more widely and link back to the original content.
Create Thought Leadership Content: Ideas for Your Brand
Once you have your ideas, choose an appropriate format to explore the subject matter and back up your content with solid research. Below are common types of thought leadership pieces.
Educational Articles and White Papers
Blog posts and articles are a popular format for educating and informing audiences. You can optimize them with keywords for search engines and share them on various channels, including email and social media. They’re also well-suited for guest posts on other websites to expand your reach.
Define a clear purpose for your piece and craft a compelling introduction that pulls readers into the material. Write concisely and let your voice shine through. Articles can be as long or short as needed, but don’t get caught up in word count — focus on providing quality insights.
White papers also tackle well-defined topics but take a more formal approach. Delving into complex subjects, they’re typically organized into chapters and sections and feature graphics to visualize information. Many businesses gate white papers to generate leads, but for the purposes of thought leadership, they should be freely accessible to build authority and brand awareness.
Industry Reports and Original Research
One way to stand out as an industry authority is to deliver original research. You might commission an industry report that provides benchmarks, measures growth, and assesses market share. You could also conduct surveys to gather insights on critical issues — for example, find out how respondents are dealing with regulatory changes, handling an economic downturn, or managing the impact of new technologies. This type of first-hand knowledge can be extremely valuable to industry stakeholders.
Performing research, conducting analyses, and coming up with data-based findings takes significant resources, but you’ll end up with coveted business intelligence. If you choose the topic well, your data may be shared, cited, and linked to, expanding your brand influence exponentially.
Expert Opinion Pieces and Interviews
Opinion pieces are commentaries on industry issues and are useful for developing personal brands and positioning a CEO, founder, or executive as a visionary. You can use opinion pieces to introduce novel ideas, take a stand on issues, or advocate for change. Remember that the best opinion pieces don’t simply recap what’s commonly known. Aim to bring something new to the conversation and back up your arguments.
Opinion pieces can be distributed through respected publications, blogs, and websites, as well as your own channels. You can also use these pieces to network with journalists and influencers. Pitch story ideas based on your thought leadership and offer your brand as an expert or resource for interviews.
Webinars and Speaking Engagements
Thought leadership isn’t only in written form. You can put a personal face on your brand and boost your profile through public speaking. Look for opportunities to share insights at trade shows and conferences as a keynote speaker, workshop leader, moderator, or panelist. Webinars, which may include roundtables, one-on-one discussions, and audience Q&As, are another excellent option. Your company could host a series of webinars or participate in online events hosted by others.
If you do arrange speaking opportunities, try to provide video of the sessions on your website to reach a wider audience. Include a transcript so search engines can index the content and further promote the page through social media and email marketing channels.
Social Posts
Creating thought leadership content doesn’t have to be a time-consuming process. LinkedIn can be a great place to share shorter insights or even a personal story related to your career, work ethos, or industry.
Not all social media accounts are ideal for sharing thought leadership content. You’ll likely find your posts resonate more on personal accounts rather than a brand account.
Driving Business Growth With Thought Leadership and SEO
While the ultimate goal of thought leadership is to develop brand authority, it can also help stimulate long-term business growth. Studies estimate the ROI of thought leadership to be 14 times (The Harris Poll) to 16 times (IBM Institute for Business Value) the original investment.
Lead Generation, Customer Trust, and Organic Traffic
An effective thought leadership piece starts by piquing your audience’s interest. If you provide enough value, you begin building customer interest and curiosity in what else you have to say. Your content can drive traffic to your website, encourage social media follows, generate subscriptions to your mailing list, and inspire other forms of engagement. More importantly, you foster trust among stakeholders who may share your content among their network and champion your brand.
Long-Term Impact on Brand Reputation and Authority
A consistent output of quality thought leadership cements your brand at the forefront of your industry, where you can offer a confident, guiding hand. Audiences start looking to your company for insights on market trends, staying competitive, and positioning their businesses for success. This paves the way for more traditional forms of marketing content that can lead audiences along their path to purchase.
When you cultivate this level of brand awareness, it’s easier to entice audiences into your sales funnel and generate leads. In fact, thought leadership can be so powerful that the Edelman-LinkedIn study found that 73% of decision-makers believe it’s more trustworthy than traditional marketing for assessing a brand’s competencies.
I’ll share a word of caution here. To generate this kind of impact, your content must be impeccable. And unfortunately, a majority of decision-makers say that more than half the thought leadership they encounter doesn’t share valuable insights.
Start Building Your Thought Leadership Strategy Today
Tap into our content writing services at Victorious and develop a content marketing strategy that truly elevates your authority. Using proven approaches, our content specialists tailor pieces based on your target audience and industry. We’ll help you build trust and engagement and lift your brand’s visibility. Schedule a free consultation to learn more.
