George B. Thomas
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OK, quick poll, everybody! By a show of virtual hands, how many of you right now want to be considered "thought leaders" in your respective space or industry? My guess is almost every single one of you.
Now, here's a follow-up question for you — do you know how to make that thought leadership dream of yours a reality?
See, this is where a lot of folks get tripped up. We know we want to be thought leaders (and we know content plays a central role in it), but we lack the clear roadmap of how to make it happen. This is especially true since so many of us look at our content strategies through a 90-day lens.
- What content can we create in the next 90 days to drive quick wins?
- What content can we create in the next 90 days to drive more closed deals?
Don't get me wrong, you should be building a robust content strategy for your company that drives traffic, leads, and sales — and seeing upticks in content metrics like qualified lead conversions and revenue attribution are absolutely essential to your success. But you can't always look at content for the short-term gains, particularly with the goal of thought leadership in your sights.
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Thought leadership isn't a trophy you're awarded one time for saying something super smart; it's a long-game, showing up consistently as the trusted voice in your industry for the humans you selflessly serve.
Although internet trophies for thought leadership would be cool!
And this is at the heart of my exclusive conversation with Ashley Faus on the Marketing Smarts podcast. When you think about how you measure and manage your content and inbound efforts, thought leadership is a horse of a different color. You can't measure it the same way.
I encourage you to listen to Ashley's entire Marketing Smarts episode with me. That said, if you want to get serious about developing a thought leadership strategy through your content — and what it takes to execute one well — here are a few of my favorite highlights from our chat that I think you'll enjoy!
1. Educate, entertain, and empower (stop strong-arming)
Ashley encouraged me to think about a playground. On a playground, there are only a set number of attractions. You’ve got your swings, a slide or two, some monkey bars, a few types of climbers, and a merry-go-round — only if it’s a really good playground.
Sure, your options are limited. But you can go wherever you want, whenever you want. You can spend a whole entire day hanging out on the swings. You can spend five minutes on each activity, or equally divide your time between the monkey bars and the merry-go-round if that suits your fancy.
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And that’s why we don’t get bored on playgrounds. We can go in any order, for any length of time, whenever we want. We get to be creative and color outside the lines.
When it comes to your content, your audience wants to be able to consume it however they want, whenever they want, based on their preferences — and that's true for all of your content, thought leadership or otherwise.
Ashley shared:
“I think that’s a problem that as adults, especially as B2B marketers, we have this objective. ‘I’m going to force you down this funnel and I’m going to get you to buy my thing.’ But your audience doesn’t have that same objective.
Your audience wants to learn. Your audience wants to be inspired. Your audience wants to use something that they’ve already bought. Your audience wants to make a recommendation to somebody else to buy something. They have so many other things that they want to do.”
Instead of wasting all your energy trying to develop new forms of content, focus your efforts on creating really good content (again, including thought leadership) in the formats you know your audience actually wants.
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Think of ways you can educate, entertain, and empower the humans you serve with information through your thought leadership and content. Brute force approaches of forcing your audience to behave a certain way (consumption, conversion, and so on), will only create more barriers to your success.
2. Humans are lazy, and platforms are greedy
Yes, humans are lazy
I wish I could take credit for that, but that line is all Ashley, and she's not wrong! The people you're trying so desperately to reach won't come back to you (or your content) just for the heck of it. They'll come back because you created content that gave them something they wanted wholly for themselves.
You've built a destination for them, built out of genuinely helpful knowledge and information and thought leadership.
Thought leadership isn’t meant to drive short-term sales. It’s to attract the right people to your brand and to really connect with your audience. It’s the picnic table you and your friends always sit at to eat your ice cream on hot summer days, forming friendships that will connect you for years to come.
And eventually, those friends are going to realize that what you’re selling is great.
Now, let's talk about greedy platforms
Look, we all know every platform out there is trying to keep you engaged as long as possible. The more time Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and others can keep you on their platform, the more money they'll make. But something we need to consider is that we’re not just fighting other humans for attention.
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- How to sell like a human (sales strategy with Zach Basner)
- How to set goals you'll actually keep in 2023
- What is a content strategy? Not what you think ...
Keep this in mind, because you're not only directly competing with your known competitors for attention; we're also fighting with the very platforms we use to scale and amplify our thought leadership reach.
So platforms aren’t just penalizing content that drives users off-platform. They’re actively using other creators’ content to keep your audience where they are – on their platform.
This is an important distinction to make. It’s not only our responsibility to produce content that keeps our audience engaged on the platform. We also have to create content that’s better than others are creating on the platform.
According to Ashley:
“That’s where you start thinking about that strategy. First is focus on that audience, what do they want, what do they need, how can you serve them? Second is how am I going to win against all of the other things on the platform that are going to keep their attention on the platform and not on my content?”
3. You've gotta adjust your goals with thought leadership
What's the goal of thought leadership? Building a relationship between your brand and those you serve. It's all about trust and affinity. It's the long game. That means we shouldn't look at a thought leadership piece and say:
“Well it didn’t convert to $25,000 in sales in the first 30 days. It’s a dud.”
We have to look at that piece of thought leadership through the lens of those reading it who thought, “Wow, that CEO really knows a lot about playground equipment and child development. I want to know more about his company." Then they subscribe to your newsletter, read your blog, attend a conference your CEO is speaking at, and so on.
We have to look at the relationship side of the equation.
Ashley notes:
“Thought leadership is meant to attract the right people to the brand and the company. That could be talent, that could be strategic partners, that could be for comarketing opportunities, that could be for investor relations or to improve analyst relations. There are a variety of things that you need to build from a trust perspective."
We can't get stuck on attribution models with thought leadership. You have to take the whole picture into account. Just as with life and workflows, the goal-setting process matters — your goals will dictate how you measure success.
4. Involve your fellow humans
Everything in your marketing can’t come from within marketing. Everything you create for the masses through your marketing should be an authentic reflection of what's happening within the walls of your organization, across every team.
That means, sometimes, you’ve gotta get the CEO involved. Sometimes, you’ve gotta get that really smart and passionate dude down in product development involved.
Because Ashley really was on fire in this interview, I’ll share one more quote from her:
“The marketing team may be the architects of the playground, but you would bring in specific craftspeople for each piece of equipment to make sure that it’s sturdy and behaves in the way that it is expected to behave.”
Marketing can’t connect to CEOs the way that CEOs connect with CEOs.
If you want to connect with people who really love merry-go-rounds, you need to have people who also really love merry-go-rounds to talk to them.
5. Finally, fall in love with the humans
OK, I lied. I have one more gem from Ashley for you:
“If you can fall in love with the audience, and fall in love with the humans behind the screen, that is where you start to really get the magic. Yes, there’s numbers, there’s revenue, all of the things, but if you can fall in love with the humans, you’re going to continue to see those other outcomes for years to come.”
If you know me, you know how much this speaks to me at a soul-level. How do you maximize HubSpot to its fullest ROI potential? Start with the humans. How do you create great content? Start with the humans. How do you do your best marketing? Start with the humans ... and act like one, too.
Listen to Ashley! Fall in love with the humans you serve and see how that influences what choices you make with your thought leadership playground. What destination will you build? How will you rethink what success looks like? Who else can you involve from your team? Your answers will be your pathway to success.
Hungry for more from this paradigm-shifting conversation about thought leadership? Listen to the entire Marketing Smarts episode.
