How To Get Started Creating Thought Leadership Content

What do Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, and Laura Goodrich have in common? They’ve all established themselves as an authority in their field. In other words, they’re thought leaders.

Establishing yourself as a leader in your field is the holy grail.

And it’s no small feat. You’ll first have to create thought leadership content, lead qualified traffic to this content, nurture your leads, create trust and build your brand reputation. Sound complex?

Well, the great news is that it doesn’t have to be.

In this episode, I share my best tips on what you need to consider to create thought leadership content and drive your sales.

What Is Thought Leadership?

Thought leadership is a technique marketers use to establish themselves as experts and leaders in their industry.

To become a thought leader, you need to create content to share your expertise and insights with your target market. And not only does your content need to be new, fresh, original, disruptive, educational, and thought-provoking, but it also needs to be unique. It can’t be based on others’ ideas and regurgitated in a different way. You need to create the content from scratch, based on your own thoughts, and be the person leading the direction in which it’s going.

This will allow you to build credibility and trust with your audience and become the go-to person or resource in your field.

For instance, Neil Patel is an SEO expert. By regularly publishing high-quality content around SEO and sharing innovative marketing strategies to help his audience increase their sales, he has become the go-to person for marketers and business owners who need help with their SEO strategy.

Thought leadership content includes:

Webinars Blog posts Podcasts Social media Ebooks Guest posts When creating thought leadership content, remember that you’re playing the long game.

You won’t be able to establish yourself as an expert and leader in your niche overnight. It will take time, patience, hard work, and dedication. But if you invest the time, effort, and resources into your thought leadership strategy, you’ll eventually reap the rewards and become unstoppable!

Effective thought leadership content marketing will help you increase brand awareness, generate qualified leads, and increase your sales.

Best Practices For Creating Thought Leadership Content

Before getting started creating and publishing content, let’s review some of the best practices for creating thought leadership content:

1. Know Your Audience

Sure, you’re excited to share your knowledge with the world and want to get started ASAP. Yet, knowing who your audience is, their pain point, what language they use, and where they hang out is key if you want to succeed.

That’s why before creating thought leadership content, you should create buyer personas so that you can adapt your content to your audience’s needs. To find what inspires your target market and what questions they have, scour forums, and social media pages, including Facebook groups in your field.

This will help you uncover their pain points.

2. Leverage The Power Of Social Media

What we mean by that is that you need to be active and engaged on social media if you want to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

Of course, you need to publish fresh, innovative, and unique content regularly across social media. But you should also comment and answer users’ questions on relevant accounts and pages.

For instance, let’s say your audience is on LinkedIn. Regularly commenting on industry news will make you appear as an expert in the industry, and you’ll start building trust with people who read your comments.

The more you engage on feed, comment, and answer questions, the more authority you’ll build, and the more people will come to you when they need help.

3. Be Versatile

Posting on your blog is great. Commenting on social media and linking your blog posts so that users can refer to them and share them is fantastic. But only publishing on your blog can only get you so far. To increase your reach and visibility, you need to publish various forms of content in various places.

One way you could do this is by repurposing your content. For instance, you could turn one blog post into a series of social media posts, a newsletter, and a YouTube video. Another great way to maximize your reach and visibility is to speak at conferences or events, guest post, be a guest on a well-established podcast in your industry, and collaborate with other thought leaders on social media.

4. Analyze Your Competition

The idea isn’t to copy content from your competitors. As mentioned before, if you want to become a thought leader, your inspiration must come from your own experience and thoughts. You need to share something valuable with your audience no one else shares.

However, you can get inspiration from your competitor when it comes to their marketing strategy. How often do they post? Where do they post? Where do they seem to get the most traction when they post?

Analyzing your competitors’ content strategy will help you fine-tune yours and maximize your results.

5. Be Genuine

This is perhaps the most important piece of advice. Establishing yourself as an expert means creating a bond with your audience and showing them who you are as a person and not just as an expert.

Also, part of being successful as a thought leader is sharing highly valuable educational content and avoiding being too promotional. What we mean by that is that genuinely helping your audience with valuable, relevant, and free pieces of content will go a long way in making people feel appreciated and valued. On the other hand, being too salesy can deter them from regarding you as their favorite expert because they’ll feel you’re only sharing content to sell them something instead of trying to help them.

How To Pick Thought Leadership Topics?

Now that you have a better idea of what you need to do before drafting your thought leadership strategy, here are a few tips on how to brainstorm through leadership topics:

• Use listening and monitoring tools such as BuzzSumo to understand what your audience is looking for.
• Ask your prospects or existing customers what they need.
• If one of your competitors published an interesting thought leadership piece and you have a different opinion on the matter, share your opinion and explain your position in detail.
• Create thought leadership pieces based on your most successful social media content posts.
• As mentioned before, forums like Reddit or Quora are a great place to get inspiration and see what questions aren’t easily answered.
• Conduct in-depth research (or partner with a research firm) to produce detailed reports others will use as a reference in their own content pieces and marketing or sales pitches.

And that’s a wrap!

Now that you know exactly what it takes to establish your business as an authority in your field, time to get working! And if you need help promoting your thought leadership content and cutting through the noise, don’t hesitate to get in touch. At New Evolution Video, we specialize in helping clients like you turn their thought leadership content into high-converting videos to improve their reach, brand awareness, and sales. Believe us, thought leadership content combined with high-quality video production is the formula for success!

About Richard Tiland As an expert in high-quality video production and President of New Evolution Video + dk3 Studios, Richard Tiland specializes in brand positioning for companies in any industry internationally. His team helps businesses of all sizes leverage the power of video to generate a positive ROI on their marketing efforts.