Thought leadership is an aspiration for many people in business, but often for the wrong reasons. It often gets muddled up with a desire to be famous, and build a personal business brand that can make money. Or a way to increase the volume of your business voice and your website traffic.
If you really want thought leadership to play a role in helping you build momentum in your B2B business, ❌forget these ambitions:
►Striding the stage in front of rapt fans who hang on your every word
►Being quoted left right and centre as a business guru
►Simply striving to show how much smarter you are than everybody else
Too many in the digital marketing and content space have also co-opted it to suggest anyone/any firm can achieve thought leadership if they:
►Pick a topic and bang on until people figure you must be ‘the’ expert
►Find fresh twists on an idea already in circulation - and even ‘brand’ it
►Churn out volumes of click-bait blogs and unsurprising ebooks
To actually gain some thought leadership in your space, you can certainly learn from how others have succeeded - but you can’t simply model your communications on somebody else.
You need to create a position on which to stand and know the most essential messages to get across. You must have true faith in its value and the need of audiences to hear, understand and be helped by what you have to say.
It should be far more rooted in your ✔️mission, vision and values than it is in your ❌sales targeting and growth plans, with the aim of creating real change or unequivocal authority, not fame. Do that well, and the business gains will come too.
Authority only flows by leveraging some unique knowledge, perspective, opinions or ideas to provide eye-opening insights and deliver thought-provoking commentary in a way which is engaging.
If ‘gaining thought leadership’ is on your personal or your company’s marketing to-do list, then please take the time to stop, really think, and above all be patient.
First, work at identifing the subject areas and themes around which you can truly contribute to the thinking and understanding of your audiences – then shape your content and communication plans from there.
Last, let someone like me be a critical and brutally honest friend. I can help you weed out the gold, and discard the rest, from your early ideas, before building a communication strategy which can create audience impact and business results.
📨 DM me if you want some fresh and unbiased thinking on whether and how you can ACTUALLY develop thought leadership – or 👆 click the "book an appointment" button in my profile.
✨ Thought leadership is about inspiration, not pizazz. ✨
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