When you think of people like Dave Ramsey, Oprah, or Seth Godin, what do they all have in common? They’re all highly successful business people, but they’re also thought of as thought leaders. These are experts in their respective industries. So, being able to claim that you’re an expert in your field is critical.
This is where thought leadership comes into play. When you are positioned as a thought leader, you’ll drive more traffic to your site, generate more leads, more conversions, and build your brand’s reputation and authority.
Defining Thought Leadership
In broad terms, this is a tactic that many content marketers use to help build credibility either for the company leaders or themselves. Thought leadership’s overreaching goal is to set yourself up as an expert and go-to resource in your niche. In order to get this status, you could create and promote helpful and educational content while becoming active in your industry’s community. This is particularly vital on social sites.
A company or business entity could use thought leadership as their main content marketing strategy because it works to demonstrate how helpful your brand can be while providing value to the audience. The goal is for when someone is looking for a service or product you offer down the road, and they’ll turn to your company first because they see you as an expert.
If you’re good at the concept of thought leadership, you’ll increase your target audience’s awareness, improve your social proof, generate more leads, and boost your company’s online value.
Take Brian Dean, for example. In the SEO space, he’s a thought leader. He routinely posts content related to the SEO sector, which proves his value as someone worth keeping an eye on. With this in mind, how do you incorporate it into your own marketing strategy?
Three Thought Leadership Practices
If you’re ready to dive into thought leadership for your own business, there are a few best practices you should follow. We’re sharing the biggest ones here.
1. Never Stop Learning About Your Audience
Learning about your audience and what motivates them is a key to having a successful marketing strategy. Take a close look at your buyer persona. What inspires, motivates, or causes pain to your audience? What types of questions do they ask? Start doing interviews with your customers or look on social media. Once you understand these things, you can use thought leadership content to answer their questions and engage them.
2. Get Active On Social Media Channels
You can use social media to build your expertise and brand. Social media is a great way to stay engaged and active in your chosen community. You can use these channels to comment on any industry news to get your brand’s voice into conversations regarding any current industry trends.
3. Produce Valuable Content
You must produce valuable content to show that you’re an industry expert that can speak intelligently on industry-specific issues. This can be challenging initially. You may want to reach out to a company, like Market Ascent to help you put together a plan.
Build a Thought Leadership Strategy in Five Steps
It’s essential that you get a strategy in place for how you’re going to use thought leadership to move forward. You can use the following as a solid starting point:
- SMART Goal Setting – SMART goals stand for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals. Set a goal for what you want to get out of your thought leadership first, like lead generation or increased traffic.
- Brainstorm Content – Which persona do you want to focus your content on? Of these personas, does your content focus on what they want to watch or read? What are they asking on social media or searching for? Answer all of these questions in this step.
- Look at Your Competition – Look and see who your audience is going to for an answer currently. The goal is to fill in any gaps they leave and take about subjects they’re missing.
- Produce and Distribute Your Content – Once you settle on content ideas, solidify a personality and a point of view. The content should be easy to share and understand.
- Measure Your Results – Track your results to see if you successfully implemented thought leadership content. The SMART goals will help you choose your metrics to track.
Contact Six Degrees Digital Media
We threw a lot of information at you, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. This is why we invite you to reach out and get in touch with our staff if you’d like to come up with a viable thought leadership strategy for your business.
