As a business, it’s not enough to just talk about your products and try to win sales. To gain a larger audience and make a name for yourself within your industry, you’ll need to become a trusted source in that space. In fact, according to recent thought leadership statistics, 65% of buyers say thought leadership significantly changed the perception of a company for the better, due to a piece of thought leadership.
So what exactly is a thought leader?
A thought leader is an industry expert who shares their expertise with a large audience to gain trust and credibility.
In a nutshell, thought leadership is about addressing your audience’s pain points, providing ongoing education and adding value, while building credibility within your niche. However, it’s important to understand that you cannot call yourself a thought leader, this is a term that you must earn from others. Thought leaders completely immerse themselves in their industry, and they are perfect resources for understanding the inner workings of their business, their audience and their competitors.
Sharing your industry experience through thought leadership content is a smart way to reach and engage with both new and returning customers. But not all content is created equal — it takes much more than a helpful blog post or infographic to earn the title of thought leader.
Let’s dive right into seven ways you can demonstrate thought leadership at your organization.
How to Demonstrate Thought Leadership: 7 Simple Steps
While each business will have its own goals regarding thought leadership and what they wish to achieve, here are some steps we recommend to get started.
1. Blog About Industry Trends
News travels extremely fast nowadays, so it’s important to stay on top of the latest industry trends as they happen, when they happen. With so many other competitors on the internet you’re racing against, waiting to share information puts you at risk of looking outdated or like a non-reputable source, whereas blogging and posting about industry trends in a timely manner shows that you have a deep understanding of what’s going on in your world and why your audience should care.
Sharing this kind of information allows people to naturally trust you and your products. Plus, if you get into the pattern of sharing news, your reader base will start to develop the habit of using you as a source of truth when new information comes out.
Industry leaders know the value of sharing news content from trusted sources. Fidelity showcases financial news on its site, curating these news articles by topic area. They combine news from world-renowned publications with high-quality content from their in-house team to keep their customers up to date on best practices for retirement and investing.
2. Address Your Audience’s Pain Points
Your target audience wants to feel like their pain points are being addressed and problems are being heard. If they don’t think they’re being listened to, they can easily jump ship and go to one of your competitors for the information they crave. In fact, 71% of decision makers say only half or less of the thought leadership they consume provides valuable insights.
Don’t risk this; make a conscious effort to produce content that directly acknowledges and answers your audience’s most common questions.
3. Create Videos
Thought leadership content doesn’t have to be all about blogs.
No two customers consume information the same way, so you’ll want to produce content in a variety of different formats. The idea is to appeal to as many people as you can, and informational videos are a great way to create an authentic connection with your audience, while sharing information that educates.
Since videos are so versatile, they can be about whatever you’d like. You can create a series on giving tips, a behind-the-scenes look at your business or show a news event that pertains to your products and/or services.
According to Wistia, 2 minutes is the ideal length of time for a video to drive engagement. However, due to the popularity of webinars and longer-form versions of content like podcasts, your team may also want to experiment with longer-form videos. Consider leveraging insights from shorter videos before creating longer ones to understand what your audience cares about. Wistia also notes that there is not a significant drop-off for viewers between 6 to 12 minutes, making this an ideal length of time for videos that require more detail or depth.
Additionally, these longer-form pieces of content will need to be informative instead of promotional to drive engagement. Consider working with an industry expert when diving into longer videos.
4. Utilize SMEs at Your Company
Subject matter experts (SMEs) can provide more detailed information for all of your content formats. They are known within your industry and help to build credibility and establish trust with your audience.
Consider leveraging these thought leaders when building out your editorial calendar. They may have insights into topics that are important to your target audience that you can leverage for webinars, blog articles and bylines.
5. Don’t Forget About Your Social Media Profiles
This may seem like a no-brainer to you, but you’d be surprised at the number of businesses that totally ignore their social media presence.
Social media is exceptionally powerful, not only for brand awareness, but to communicate withpotential customers. There’s no easier way to engage with your readers, so why not take advantage?
6. Produce Content Consistently
Becoming a thought leader requires consistent content production, as you’ll certainly fall behind your competitors if you’re not producing content regularly. Although quality content is important, quantity also matters. In fact, according to a Financial Advisor Magazine survey, failing to communicate is one of the Top 5 reasons people fire their advisers.
Think of yourself like the news. If you don’t have a constant stream of new information, then why would your readers keep coming back to see what you have to say? It’s important to showcase your ongoing expertise and dedication to being a reliable source within the industry. A well thought out content marketing editorial calendar can help you achieve this.
7. License Content From Reputable Publications and Experts
Producing high-quality, consistent content can take up a lot of time and resources that you may not be able to spare. Licensing content can take some of the work off your plate, as you will supplement your content marketing strategy with world-renowned content creators. Licensing content is completely customizable depending on your needs; so whether you need to supplement what you are writing now, or if you need to build an entire content strategy from scratch, this is the option for you.
By associating yourself with publications like The New York Times, you’ll also be able to continue establishing yourself as a thought leader and a trusted voice in the space.
How Do You Use Thought Leadership?
So how exactly do you use thought leadership in your everyday marketing strategy? Here are some examples.
Content Creation
This one is pretty simple — thought leadership can be used across a wide variety of content types, including:
- Webinars
- Blog Posts
- Email Newsletters
- White Papers
- eBooks
By developing content that your target audience is interested in you can better connect with them and cultivate brand loyalty. To facilitate content production, consider licensing content from reputable news sources or outsourcing some of your content development efforts.
Lead Generation
Thought leadership is an important component of any marketing strategy and can help your organization generate more leads. When you are seen as a trusted resource in your industry, consumers are much more likely to be interested in your products and are more likely to convert.
Nurture Campaigns
Any marketer needs to appeal to customers in all stages of the marketing funnel. Creating a nurture campaign is the easiest way to do this, as you’ll be encouraging your consumer to convert, no matter where they are in their customer journey.
Thought leadership can be powerful in this aspect. Consider this: Approximately 54% of thought leaders bought a product from an organization they had not previously considered after engaging with thought leadership. You don’t want to miss out on this huge chunk of your potential client base!
Customer Retention
It is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. You have already done a lot of work to get your customers, so why not nurture them to the best of your ability? Thought leadership can keep current customers engaged and further develop those long-term relationships.
What are Examples of Thought Leadership?
AdvisorStream
AdvisorStream is an award-winning digital marketing platform that uses licensed content from reputable publications to help financial advisers turn clicks into conversions. Their goal was to use compelling, relevant content to build trust and credibility with their consumers and eventually become thought leaders in their space.
AdvisorStream was looking to expand its content offerings through editorial content and licensed content from NYTLicensing. Through one copyright license, AdvisorStream was able to deliver high-quality content to improve relationships with customers, while increasing lead generation and boosting conversions. Since creating and writing content can be a costly expense, working with NYTLicensing was the best option for AdvisorStream. The platform used content from both The New York Times and the Harvard Business Review to curate for advisers’ needs.
As a result, the use of licensed content helped AdvisorStream’s clients stand out as authoritative among the clutter and noise of other brands in the financial industry. From January 2020 to June 2020, AdvisorStream experienced a 200% increase in views from its licensed content and a 260% increase in lead capture from its platform.
ESPN
NYTLicensing worked with ESPN to retell the story of the 1927 Yankees baseball season. By using content from the Times archive, NYTLicensing could proudly showcase a historical event through modern content.
Via ESPN digital, Twitter and Medium, ESPN and NYTLicensing created a groundbreaking retelling of the full 1927 season. The story was published along the same timeline the events took place nearly 90 years ago, allowing readers to “follow” the on-screen exploits of the Yankees throughout their 154-game season. More than 3,000 tweets were used to tell the story.
NYTLicensing provided access to TimesMachine, which is a browser-based digital replica of every edition of The New York Times published between 1851 and 1980. ESPN and NYTLicensing worked together to merge the stories found in the Times archive with the necessary fictional storytelling components with precise historical detail of events both on and off the field.
Final Thoughts
Becoming a thought leader is a slow and steady journey. If you stay consistent in producing quality content, you’ll be sure to create a trusted name for yourself in your industry.
If you need content to bolster your content marketing strategy, look to the The New York Times Licensing Group. With plenty of content options available, you will be able to harness the power of world-class journalism to tell your brand’s story.
