5 Questions to Ask for Your Thought Leadership Strategy
The best B2B thought leadership content helps to solve business problems. By sharing your expertise and ideas, you help your audience advance their own position by taking a fresh approach to the challenges they face.
Yet many organizations dive into creating marketing content without thinking through some of the basic questions that can increase the effectiveness of their thought leadership strategy.
5 Questions to Ask for a More Effective Thought Leadership Strategy
#1 How will we measure the value of our thought leadership?
This is often an afterthought, but we ask this question first. We recommend a combination of measures, tuned to your stage of growth and the overall goals for the business. For example, an established leadership development organization may see speaking engagements and media coverage as critical for holding its industry leadership position. While a growing, mid-size edtech company may have goals for webinar sign-ups and downloads from the website. And qualitative feedback – like hearing from an SVP that they read and appreciated an article or live feedback at a speaking engagement is as valuable as quantitative metrics.
#2 Who am I trying to reach?
It’s tempting to begin thought leadership planning with your corporate and marketing strategy, but it’s essential that thought leadership starts with your target audience. And get specific! To create thought leadership that resonates, take the time to determine exactly who your audience is – industry, role, region, buying behavior, and interests. Find ways to listen to them and study their business needs and pain points. Map out the issues that you’ve identified.
Client Example
One nonprofit we work with creates content for parents, educators, and lawmakers, but we partner with them on writing to influence key industry players. This requires a distinctive tone, style and level of detail from their content for other audiences. Understanding the issues they care about–and what they don’t– is crucial for a successful thought leadership plan.
#3 Where are the gaps?
Examine your own content and audit your competitors. When you think about the core issues for your audience, what’s missing? Identify what’s causing the most frustration for your potential customers. Map out ideas you have in mind that you don’t see in your marketplace.
Client Example
A nonprofit CEO community is working to close the AI-skilled talent gap in their region. We help them educate and influence businesses and community leaders to engage in programs. Scans of local media coverage and events helped pinpoint pain points to highlight in thought leadership, such as designing less resource intensive internships, how to stop the “brain drain” of rising tech talent, and how to connect youth with hands-on AI learning.
#4 What issues can we uniquely address?
Once you identify what hasn't been covered, think critically about where your expertise can best help. Plan content to answer key questions and solve problems based on your team’s specialized knowledge and experience. We typically identify and interview internal subject matter experts (SMEs) as part of this step. Connect the burning issues and ideas that your SMEs want to champion with audience challenges, and you will have a jump start on your thought leadership plan.
Related Content: How to Be a LinkedIn Thought Leader When You Have a Day Job
#5 What content performed the best for us in the past 6 months?
Quickly scanning analytics on your existing content should flag some areas to build into your plan. Focus on engagement measures. Identify what email content drove the most click-throughs, which content pages had the highest average duration, which social media posts had the most comments and shares. Plan to expand on these topic areas as part of your plan or to repackage and repurpose existing high-traction content.
Client Example
A lean mental health non-profit we support always repurposes its top-performing content when building out the annual marketing plan. Highest performing blog posts are flagged so we can create new media graphics and sometimes a series of related posts to drive new audiences to the content. Recording a video intro or creating a related tool is also a way to resurface high-performing material.
Building a Strategic Thought Leadership Plan
Once you’ve identified 3-5 umbrella themes for the next 6 (or 12 months), you can map out more specific topics under each. We often develop several article headlines or create a list of questions to address with their content. A simple set of platform topics and a high-level calendar that includes seasonal happenings in your industry will help keep your team on track. Once you have your core topics, they can be applied across writing, speaking, events, and social media.
By taking a more intentional and “outside-in” approach to thought leadership planning, you will more consistently deliver content that’s engaging for your audience AND aligned with your business strategy.