In the digital age, the idea of thought leadership has evolved, expanding far beyond the traditional CEO opinion piece in trade magazines. 

By leveraging all the platforms that are available to share industry knowledge expertise – podcasts, speaking opportunities, sponsored reports, blogs, webinars and social media – anyone in your team can be a thought leader for your business. It’s also a strategy that can move through the entire Paid, Earned, Owned and Social (PESO) communications model to drive engagement and reach a wider audience. With a consistent thought leadership strategy as a tool in your arsenal you can build trust and authenticity in your company, cement your brand messaging and even drive sales. Here are a few reasons why. 

It supports your brand identity  

Many dismiss thought leadership as an external comms strategy and prioritise traditional business announcements such as new customer wins or awards as a way to spotlight company successes. This is still a valuable tool, but it only tells one part of your business story.   

Thought leadership is an excellent way to show your audience exactly what your business stands for. It can be used to clarify the values and initiatives at the heart of your business and showcase your mission and purpose. This holds a lot of value for prospective customers who are interested in working with companies that not only get the job done, but also align with their own goals and values. Proof of your alignment of values is often a requirement of tender applications, and thought leadership can be submitted alongside them as evidence.   

You can raise the profile of your top talent 

It’s easy for experts within your business to inadvertently hold onto their knowledge in a silo. Thought leadership offers senior members of your team the opportunity to share their expertise. This could be through leading a speaking opportunity at an event, a LinkedIn article or joining a podcast on their specific work interest area. This also goes a long way towards making your team members feel like their experience is valued and their voices are heard, supporting workforce retention. Profiling your talent also injects personality into your brand. At a time when authenticity is more important than ever to prospective customers, this can be invaluable. 

Sharing knowledge increases credibility and visibility  

When looking to improve services or products, many seek out knowledge-sharing content to help guide their decision-making process. While ‘who you know’ is still important, ‘what you know’ is increasingly valued. Knowledge-sharing through thought leadership gives you a competitive advantage. Industry leaders don’t keep their expertise a secret and will often be happy to share best practice and talk about the experiences that helped shape them as an expert in the field. It’s certainly a powerful way to build your reputation and cement your place as someone whose opinion that industry peers will value. By grasping these opportunities to share your knowledge, you give yourself a solid foundation to back up any claims you make to validate your expertise. 

Promote community engagement  

Thought leadership can spark important conversations within the wider industry. Peers and prospective customers alike will come across thought leadership articles within their areas of interest and, if the piece offers a new perspective, it can strike up interesting conversations in the publications comment section.  

Sharing different perspectives is how the digital narrative evolves. Often industry experts or suppliers will read opinion articles in publications like Computing or Digital Health to get an idea of what the industry perspective is on a certain topic. That’s where the power of these pieces lies. To engage the audiences, you want to influence and to be a prominent voice in the places where it matters – in the material they read for guidance. It’s also great content to drive social media engagement. Whether you share a link to articles and blogs you’ve written or create a specific LinkedIn article, your ideas can reach many more people, within and outside of your network.  

Implementing your strategy 

Increased lead generation, website traffic and SEO are signs of a healthy marketing and comms campaign, and a great thought leadership strategy can support these factors. Recognising the need for inclusion of thought leadership in your comms strategy is only the first step to seeing positive results. For it to be successful you need to identify your thought leaders, develop a robust ideas pipeline, make sure your content accurately reflects your mission statement and corporate messaging, place it on the right platforms across the PESO model to reach the right audience and above all maintain consistency. This requires time investment, the right knowledge and experience.

If you would like to speak to us about your PR and comms strategy contact: salesandmarketing@mantispr.co.uk