Opening Doors With Thought Leadership

Sharing Your Knowledge Demonstrates Your Leadership

The first critical step in delivering a successful thought leadership strategy is to define what thought leadership means for your organization.

A thought leadership strategy can open doors, allow your organization to make more effective sales calls, differentiate yourself by demonstrating true leadership, and deliver trusted insights, resulting in continued customer engagement.   The first critical step in delivering a successful thought leadership strategy is defining thought leadership for your organization. There are as many definitions for thought leadership as the number of people you ask but simply put; thought leadership is about sharing insights and ideas. More specifically, having a unique perspective that initiates new ways of thinking, provokes discussions, and inspires action.

Most successful organizations have a wealth of intellectual property and subject matter expertise. The problem arises when companies don’t know how to leverage those assets to drive business. True thought leaders are product or industry experts. They thoroughly understand the topic at hand and often challenge the status quo. A mistake frequently made by organizations is endorsing a single voice as their thought leader. The more voices an organization promotes, the more credible they become by covering a broader spectrum of topics and resonating with a wider audience base.

A strategic thought leadership program will keep your organization ‘top-of-mind’ by regularly providing relevant content to a targeted audience. Remember, what is more important here is quality, not quantity. Providing thought-provoking positions and delivering unique perspectives and original ideas will engage an audience and keep them coming back for more. Consistently delivering value to the right audience will encourage endorsement and result in others sharing your content and becoming your ambassadors.

As you develop your thought leadership program, ensure alignment with your communication and overall growth strategy. The more you understand what your customers and prospects believe-in, their challenges, and pain points, the more adept you’ll be at framing a story in terms of the value delivered that helps them see new possibilities. Begin by identifying key topic areas that provide real solutions to the market and align with your product and service offering. Secondly, designate an expert or experts within your organization to generate thoughtful and well-informed content that intersects with your target audiences’ concerns. Several key criteria in generating value-add content include:

Relevant

Presenting and addressing topics that are meaningful and solutions that are practical to your audience.

Fresh

Taking an approach that is not only new but also different or distinctive to solving a problem.

Accurate

Asserting hard to argue logic or indisputable facts about the problem and the most effective way to solve it.

Clear

Communicating viewpoints in words that express and articulate concerns that are understood and other’s perspectives respected.

Valid

Proving solutions work through displaying real examples of case studies or success stories utilizing your methodologies that demonstrate measurable benefits.

And finally, choose the appropriate venue or channels to communicate and disseminate this content effectively. In thought leadership, you cannot be all things to all people. Instead, being really consistent at reaching a target audience will attract and appeal to a broader market spectrum. This is not a ‘one shoe fits all’ scenario. Some channels will appeal to one set of customers while another is better for attracting prospects. Start small and expand as you gain momentum. Select the channels that are easy to maintain and grow as your viewership expands.