Corporate communicators are often looking for a process to follow in creating a thought leadership strategy. B2's 4-step process for creating a thought leadership strategy can help.
Thought leadership strategies increase awareness for your company, build trust for your current and potential customers, and establishes brand credibility with your target audiences.
Thought leadership can help you position the company in the marketplace, and increase its potential for sales. Your experts are the key.
Now that you've decided to develop a thought leadership strategy, it's time to follow four steps to create an effective campaign:
- Assess
- Build
- Implement
- Evaluate
This four-step process is a guide for creating your company's successful thought leadership strategy.
Step 1: Research & Assess
The first step requires reflection and research. Look outside the organization to assess your company's market position. Evaluate your competitors to determine what particular niche they occupy, and on what topics they're a go-to authority. It may be time to benchmark your company's brand reputation with a brand tracker study.
Then, look inside the company to asses its strengths. The process will differ based on company, but it could include conversations with executives or audits of existing marketing and communications efforts.
Throughout the assessment phase, you'll be working to determine the unique insights that your company can share in its thought leadership content. Explore the complex subjects that your leaders can explain and provide commentary to key audiences.
It's also important to evaluate the available resources for creating thought leadership content. Resources like time, money and personnel will be required to establish brand credibility.
With this knowledge, you can determine the topics and positioning that will be used to develop your goals for the campaign.
Step 2: Build your plan
Once you assess your company's position and opportunities, it's time to build the plan. We recommend creating a thought leadership matrix, which outlines all components of the thought leadership campaign.
This matrix is an essential tool for gaining company buy-in on your thought leadership program. It's also helpful when communicating expectations to leaders who will be serving as thought leaders.
Subject matter experts
Make a list of the subject matter experts who will participate in creating thought leadership content.
Topics
Identify the subjects and topics on which each expert will focus their thought leadership content. These topics should be unique to your company or area of expertise.
As your thought leaders observe industry trends and other competitors’ insights, challenge them to explore alternative approaches and new perspectives. As long as you have the information and research to back up your claim, it’s ok to go against the grain.
Audiences
Once you identify thought leaders and track topics, it's time to layer in the target audiences who will receive the innovative ideas and market predictions. Identifying the target audience for each topic is an important step in creating a powerful thought leadership strategy.
Communications Channels
Then, outline the communications channels that will be used to carry your high-quality content. The channels might include speaking engagements, blog post opportunities, or valuable content on social media platforms.
For success, the communications channels must be where your audience already consumes relevant content. As you're considering thought leadership activation, consider the content marketing platforms that will be most comfortable for your thought leaders. Maybe one thought leader is most comfortable sharing insights with their social media followers, but another one is most comfortable creating content that's written.
Provide training
It’s a rare instance where you have a subject matter expert who has incredible insights and strong writing and public speaking skills -- plus a winning personality.
Your thought leaders will most likely benefit from training and coaching. Most often, they can benefit from media training or presentation training feel comfortable and confident in serving as a spokesperson.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Goals and key performance indicators allow you to measure your campaign results, and over time, advocate for additional resources.
If your company is new at producing thought leadership content, you can start with aiming to secure three speaking opportunities per year. If your team is able to achieve that goal, you can increase your goal frequency to one or two speaking opportunities per quarter.
Goals allow you to display the campaign's impact and chart progress as your experts become industry influencers.
Step 3: Implement Your Thought Leadership Strategy
You’ve built a fantastic plan for your thought leadership efforts with a solid thought leadership matrix. Now, it’s time to implement it.
Share your plan with other team members to communicate their role in a successful campaign. It's integral to get their support of your thought leadership campaign.
Roles
Content strategy is a key part of a thought leadership campaign. They are responsible for audience engagement on many different channels and platforms.
Content creation teams should be informed and engaged in the thought leadership strategy, as they'll be developing content marketing materials, such as white papers, blog posts and executive commentary. Ideally, your SEO experts will recommend strategies for attracting search engines, too.
Don’t forget about your social media team! They create content that engages your audiences and reach new audiences. Through social media content, you can see topics that generate engagement (or not), and how your target audience is reacting through likes, reactions or comments.
Step 4: Evaluate & Adjust Your Thought Leadership Strategy
Your thought leadership campaign will change over time, and that’s ok. In fact, we recommend that you evaluate and adjust your strategy. This is an opportunity to make sure you’re presenting your thought leaders on the best platforms and that their topics remain relevant.
An example of a strategy adjustment can be pursuing industry conferences or podcasts instead of media commentary if your SME is great with long-form content. Additionally, if you find that your audience is interested in more written content, you could produce more whitepapers or blogs instead of podcasts. This is a constant process to ensure you’re meeting your audience where they consume content.
Keep in mind that you need to keep your thought leader informed. As you adjust your strategy, let your thought leader know the what and why behind the changes. These full circle conversations help make the needed adjustments to optimize visibility.
Expectations
Establishing credibility isn't an overnight victory. It takes months of consistent content, insights and positioning. Thought leadership requires continuous adjustments and optimization to see success over six to twelve months.
This is not to say you will not see short-term wins. You will see increased engagement and brand visibility relatively quickly.
Free Training on Thought Leadership
B2 Communications CEO Missy Hurley and Account Director Shannon Burch recently presented a free PR training course on thought leadership campaigns. In the replay, you'll learn to become a recognized thought leader and use thought leadership to build credibility, increase trust and raise awareness.
More Resources on Thought Leadership
Read additional blog posts to see examples of thought leadership in action and how to identify a thought leader. Need customized advice? Reach out to our team of communications experts for tailored PR advice.