You spend a significant amount of your marketing budget on content marketing, working on white papers, blog posts, social media messages, and more. You have a web content writer who nails your message and your voice every time, but you want more than talking about your industry trends. You want to be the one making the trends, driving the conversation, and being the authority figure everyone thinks about when they mention your industry. What you need is thought leadership content.
Thought leadership, at its most basic level, is utilizing your visionary viewpoint in your industry to attract attention from customers, clients, and colleagues. You aren’t parroting industry news or information from other thought leaders. You are the one creating the waves for other people to follow. Crafting thought leadership content is more time intensive than your typical content marketing project, but you reap significant benefits.
Building Your Authority
Authority and trust is everything in a business world where you’re competing with a global marketplace. You don’t have one or two major companies to worry about — you have hundreds or thousands. How do customers choose where to go when they make their purchasing decisions? They look for companies that project competency, innovation, and trust.
Thought leadership content establishes your company as an authority in your specialized field. Other companies look to you and reference your content, customers hear your name whenever your industry is mentioned, and before long you’re the Kleenex of the widget world. You get there with compelling content derived from your own innovative viewpoint and company mission. Your brand awareness and overall trustworthiness established by quality thought leadership content drives customers and clients to your company.
Increasing Engagement
You have many engagement venues with your potential and current customer base. Social media sites and forums give you direct access to your audience. A few decades ago, you’d have to spend a massive part of your marketing budget on market research and still not get the same kind of engagement from your customers.
Thought leadership content gives your audience something unique to talk to you about. Your competition isn’t pioneering the same kind of ideas, so you bring something entirely new to the table. Fostering healthy and insightful conversations with your customers and colleagues helps create even more topics for thought leadership pieces in the future.
Expand Your Opportunities
You start with thought leadership content, but that’s not your end goal. Other industry leaders are going to sit up and wonder whether they could benefit from your thought processes. You get invites to run workshops, write books, or even be a keynote speaker at major industry conferences. Depending on how big of an impact your views make, you may even position yourself to run your own convention.
Tiffany G has geared up as a wordsmith for the past 12 years, frequenting the technical and business copywriting battleground for most of it. When she’s not slaying the beasts of boring content and replacing them with thought-provoking pieces, she can be found tinkering with computer builds and creating jewelry.
