Digital thought leadership is the practice of using digital media to share ideas and insights that influence or inspire audiences. This type of marketing has become increasingly important over the last decade, especially in the age of social media.
The Internet has changed the way consumers shop, communicate, and interact with brands. If you want to stay competitive, you need to embrace these changes.
A digital thought leadership strategy is a comprehensive approach to building your brand, generating leads, and increasing sales. In this guide, you’ll learn how to develop a plan for your business.
What Is Digital Thought Leadership?
Digital thought leadership is a strategy content marketers use to establish trust for themselves or corporate executives. The primary purpose of thought leadership is to be acknowledged as an authority in your industry and to be used as a go-to resource.
Creating and promoting informative, helpful content and becoming involved in the business community, blogs, and social media is the gateway to becoming a digital thought leader.
Thought leadership may be used as a content marketing technique because offering value to the audience shows that the business is worthwhile.
A good digital thought leader will raise awareness among their target audience, create more inquiries, promote social proof, and promote online engagement.
What Is the Goal of Digital Thought Leadership?
Digital thought leadership aims to help organizations and their directors, personnel, and stakeholders make beneficial changes.
Nevertheless, making thought leadership a race to see who can be larger, better, and quicker glosses over the fact that quality is what generates growth. In fact, it’s about assisting people in finding significance, success, and contentment.
2022 Strategy for Digital Thought Leadership
The thought leadership approach is a multi-executive, multi-topic plan that integrates and exploits the skills of each team member to support a unified whole.
Before you go into leadership, you’ll need a method and a new strategy for how you’ll get started.
Here’s a simple process procedure.
Set a SMART Objective
SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Have a plan for what you want to accomplish out of thought leadership before working on it, whether more traffic to your website or lead creation.
Before doing anything, figure out what you want your thought leadership approach to accomplish: “What do I want potential readers to take away from this?” Is there anything specific I’d like to impart to them?” You’re just contributing to the volume if you don’t know why you speak. Your digital thought leadership will fade into obscurity if you don’t have a clear objective.
Furthermore, by establishing the aim of your thought leadership approach, you provide yourself with governing boundaries to work inside – every piece of information should come under your mission’s scope.
Three Questions When Creating Content
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- Who is the target market?
- What issues do they have that you can help them with?
- What is your main message to assist them in resolving these issues on their own?
Suppose you’re a tech or software company leader trying to solve the problem of intelligibly organizing data so that it applies to your users. In that case, your overarching signal will be helpful, logical, systematic, and ethical.
Individuals with specific industry-related qualifications could solve the problem of a considerable volume of misleading data. Such thought-leading content wouldn’t need any brand promotion.
Blend the Brand’s Essential Pillars
Identify the necessary skills, formulas, mentality, and procedures required to achieve the goal you set in step one.
What is your brand’s distinguishing pillars, and how do they work together to create a unified, well-functioning structure that allows you to achieve greatness?
Remember that a single person did not build your company; it took a team.
We miss out on important information when we rely entirely on one pillar. Every element you publish should build on the one before and pass the torch on to the next. Without integrated information, any thought leadership will fail to affect and provide a global understanding.
To have a comprehensive and robust thought leadership strategy in 2022, each niche must be combined into a unified brand vision. Although each pillar has its own swimming lane, you must demonstrate to your viewers how each route fits into the big pool.
These elements of greatness will please one or more of your target audiences individually. Furthermore, they will instil trust in your executives and the company as a whole, when combined.
Come Up With Content Ideas
Consider your personas. Is your content strategic and focused on what they want to watch or read? What are they looking for and posing questions about on social media? During your brainstorming session, answer these questions.
Determine the Prominent Executives and Research Rivals
Choose the executives with the most knowledge and experience in each pillar to serve as the campaign’s front-facing spokesperson. Choose a dependable executive with a plethora of experience to lead each bit of thought leadership you publish.
Furthermore, ensure that the executives understand they are all on the same project and can benefit from each other’s knowledge as they develop content.
Thought leadership contributions would most likely come from the CIO, CEO, Chief People Officer, CMO, Chief Procurement Officer, or variations. For each pillar, consider who has the broadest range of knowledge.
Examine what your competitors are doing in terms of thought leadership content. How frequently do they post? What are their posting locations? Don’t be scared to look to your competition for ideas.
On the other hand, you might examine what your competitors are missing. Perhaps you can help them fill up the holes in their content.
Develop a New Library
A user coming across your work isn’t just by chance or a boost from search algorithms. The conventional strategy of trying to be noticed will no longer suffice in 2022. A new approach is required.
Aggregate all existing content into an accessible and user-friendly library as you implement your digital thought leadership approach.
Create a plan for your audience to follow so they may progress through content at their leisure. As they move from rookie to experienced, provide them with a central repository of knowledge to which they can return when they want to learn more.
Create and Share Content
Make sure you have a viewpoint and personality once you’ve determined what content to create. It should be simple to consume and distribute your material. You must develop valuable material to thrive in thought leadership.
Show that you’re an industry specialist by speaking intelligently about relevant industry challenges. It’s critical to go deep and demonstrate your knowledge in one topic area at a time.
For example, being an expert in marketing in general (at least at first) can be difficult. Still, you can have your company’s SEO director generate blog content or LinkedIn content to establish your brand’s unique knowledge in SEO.
Evaluate the Outcomes
Keep track of your results to discover if your thought-leadership content was successful. Determine which metrics you’re tracking using your SMART goals. You’re only hacking if you’re not following.
Precise and timely analytics are required to measure your marketing objectives. For example, LinkedIn includes built-in analytics that can tell you the fundamentals, but Hootsuite Analytics can save you time and help you learn much more.
Analytics can help you track your most exciting material, how users discover your page, traffic to each component of your page, as well as any showcase pages you might have. In addition, you can target information on demographics and how well your page is performing.
Three Essential LinkedIn Thought Leadership Advice
Objectives will determine the LinkedIn thought leadership strategy. These are the three general pieces of advice for anyone looking to work on self-promotion.
Optimize Articles
On LinkedIn, relevance takes precedence above recentness. Like many platforms, their algorithm strives to show consumers more about what they want to view and less about what they don’t.
To boost your content, make sure you include an image or other asset whenever possible. According to HubSpot, posts with images get 98 per cent more comments than posts with mere text. Include a photo, infographics, SlideShare presentation, or video.
In addition, to elicit responses, start with a question. A good way to get feedback and engagement is by creating polls on LinkedIn. Further optimization steps include using 2 to 3 relevant hashtags and responding to questions as soon as possible to promote additional participation.
The Ideal Time for Thought Leadership Posts
When is the optimum time to publish a LinkedIn thought leadership post? Well, there is no perfect time. It all relies on how active your target group is on LinkedIn at the time. This is dependent on a variety of circumstances, including their time zone and job schedule.
Success in content marketing depends on knowing who your target audience is.
This is where social media management tools like Hootsuite come in handy. Social media management tools help schedule all of your posts ahead of time. In addition, some tools can examine your previous performance to determine when your audience is most engaged.
Get to Know Your Target Audience
Knowing your target demographic is crucial to any marketing approach, and digital thought leadership is no exception.
Your buyer persona is the starting point. What inspires or motivates your audience? Do they have problems? What are the questions they’re posing? Check on social media or do consumer interviews to find out.
You can start answering their questions with thought leadership articles once you know this information. It’s also critical to revisit and reassess your customer profile regularly.
People change, and your audience will as well.
Interact on Social Media
Social networking may help you establish your brand and credibility. For starters, social networking keeps you connected to your community. Second, you may use it to respond to industry developments and ensure that your brand is heard in discussions about relevant industry trends.
Furthermore, you can utilize social media to spread digital thought leadership in a natural, non-promotional approach.
Finally, thought leadership content should be available to your audience wherever they are. However, being too promotional will alienate your audience, especially on Linkedin.
You should create content that is honest and true to your brand. You also want to make sure your material is understandable to everyone, provides context, and is backed up by market-based data. It will help if you provide examples, facts, and quotes.
Once you’ve decided to include thought leadership in your digital marketing plan, you’ll need to figure out what kind of content you’ll need to produce.
Coming Up With Thought Leadership Topic Ideas
First, conduct some research to determine what questions people are asking. This is related to knowing your audience and creating material that addresses their concerns. Leaders should keep up with industry news. For example, if there is something urgent or controversial happening, digital thought leaders should address it using online media.
Three ways to develop thought leadership content:
- Industry thought leadership – Your perspective on recent industry changes.
- Organizational thought leadership is a reflection of your company’s mission and ethos.
- Position yourself as the superb option for your target customers’ problems through product thought leadership.
Make sure your material isn’t overtly self-promotional, regardless of the type of material you publish. This could jeopardize your digital thought leadership strategy.
You should share helpful and engaging information from other pages and post and promote your own. It gives your company page fresh vitality and aids in developing ties with other brands.
As a result, your digital thought leadership plan will become even more effective. Furthermore, publications such as tips, how-tos, or practice guidelines can rarely go wrong.
Examples of Effective Digital Thought Leadership
KPMG
Client-facing consulting businesses like KPMG, PwC, and McKinsey rely heavily on thought leadership. They can draw on a vast network of SMEs inside their business teams, depending not only on the personal networks of those executives but also on the richness of primary data and information held by those firms.
Its blog is a beautiful example of how to do thought leadership, with senior individuals from across the firm giving written insight on several relevant themes. Most of these pieces are backed by company surveys and data, giving the content more weight and legitimacy.
Seed
The health and wellness industry may be a minefield when it comes to digital thought leadership, as all statements must be credible, reputable, and backed by trustworthy resources.
However, probiotics brand Seed uses this in their favour, concentrating on how bacteria influence our overall health. Rather than focusing on product advertising, they choose to educate consumers (and, by extension, its influencers) about the science and sustainability of probiotics and how their product fits into this.
Instead of merely peddling another questionable health product, the business has embraced thought leadership to set itself apart from the competition and establish itself as an authoritative voice in its field.
The Kings Chambers
Thought leadership can lack inspiration and engagement in companies that rely on more conventional — and, in some circumstances, obsolete — marketing tactics.
A few years ago, Kings Chambers, a medical negligence litigation company based in the United Kingdom, chose to discuss this by launching a highly effective podcast. It gives a range of insights and perspectives on the legal sector (especially the clinical negligence industry).
Kings Chambers has demonstrated various methods to draw people using your thought leadership material by trying something different from outdated industry norms.
YouTube
Susan Wojcicki’s ability to express her thought leadership visually comes as no surprise as the world’s most prominent video content platform CEO.
Wojcicki narrates a series of custom animated movies for her “Creator Letters,” She discusses not only YouTube’s objectives but also video content and vlogging in general.
These animations provide a more profound emotional touch to thought leadership by arranging it as a story instead of a seminar. While you may not have access to animators and illustrators, YouTube’s approach demonstrates that you shouldn’t be scared to get creative when communicating thought leadership messaging.
Digital Thought Leadership’s Risk
It’s impossible to imitate thought leadership. Therefore, it would be best to have a thorough understanding of the issues and advancements affecting your industry.
Thought leadership is about increasing your visibility by educating people, providing expert perspectives, and displaying trustworthiness.
However, striving thought leaders should be very careful not to make any false claims or offer unoriginal information.
Everything you say and write should demonstrate your authority on a subject.
If the thought leadership is perceived as nothing more than flashy marketing, it will fail, and you will have squandered a deal of time and resources.
To Sum Up
Authenticity, deep experience, and ideas that seek to question the status quo are required for digital thought leadership.
To properly communicate all of this, you’ll need high-quality content on relevant issues to your audience.
It is crucial to produce value to dominate the crowded thought leadership field. Purpose, strategy, and teamwork are the established strategies for defeating the competition.
We don’t know what the next chapter of 2022 will bring, but we understand that people will always have questions and authorities to look to.
So assemble your group, go back to the basics, and begin with the procedures.
