How to create high-impact thought leadership
CHALLENGE YOUR THINKING
Asking hard questions at the outset of planning your thought leadership strategy will ensure that the content you publish elevates your brand in the eyes of your target audience.
Here are six ways we encourage clients to build a great thought leadership campaign:
Successful thought leadership relies on skilfully navigating a path through a number of challenging factors.
Consider the following actions to ensure that your thought leadership achieves maximum impact.
- Agree the commercial rationale
- Know your audience
- Choose the right topic
- Optimise your content mix and activation plan
- Phase your campaign
- Focus on what’s new
- Surface the “so what”
- Create a sense of urgency
Many companies want to write about the same topics, and there are sound commercial reasons to want to associate your brand with the biggest business themes of the day. But that doesn’t mean you have to say the same things as everyone else.
By definition, thought leadership content should say something new and add to the debate. Repeating what others have said or jumping on content bandwagons will put you at the bottom of the pile in a C-suite executive’s inbox.
Sharing genuinely new insight, gained from original research, helps your content to stand out.
- Original research
- Intelligent surveys
- Journalistic interviews
- Other data sources
A provocative or counterintuitive point of view also helps. All too often, companies are scared of expressing a strong point of view in their thought leadership, but without taking a stand, they will find that their content simply does not resonate.
Our Think, Feel, Do model is a simple guiding principle we use to help shape our clients’ thought leadership programmes and links directly back to their overall objectives.
The model encourages the marketer to think about how they want audiences to respond to their content:
- Make it eye-catching
- Be human
- Think multi-channel
- Cater to preferences
The way brands present their content can make or break a campaign. Our research shows that, for campaigns to succeed, thought leadership activation must be a top priority.
Brands that are successful at thought leadership are increasingly taking a campaign-focused approach to activating their content assets. Promoting insights in a way that engages an audience requires investment in delivery methods that capture interest and inspire creative thought.