How To Write Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership content is good for business, especially when that business sells to other businesses. When your ideal customer reads, on average, 11 pieces of content from a business before making a decision, getting that content right is crucial. More importantly, 90% of people start their search for their next service online long before they decide to get in touch with someone.

Which is all to say that effective thought leadership content should be a crucial part of your marketing, and in this blog, I’m going to walk you through how to write thought leadership content that makes an impact.

Why founders need thought leadership

We’ve seen the inspirational quotes from the titans of industry plastered across Instagram and LinkedIn. We know that having an original thought is becoming less and less common in the days of AI, and more important to stand out as a trusted source of information.

Founders are uniquely positioned to deliver on top-quality thought leadership because you’ve already proven yourself against the odds by creating a successful business. Now you want to reach more people and take it further, which is why you want to know how to write thought leadership.

Plus, if you’re running a B Corp or a business with an embedded purpose, then thought leadership content definitely helps get your message across. So let’s walk through the steps of how to write thought leadership content.

Step 1: Start with your core argument

You need to develop a core argument that is unique to you and your expertise. For example, you might own an HR company. There is a lot of competition out there, and people are saying much of the same thing. In which case, you need to say something that is at the core of your beliefs but that makes you stand out. This would need to go much further than “people need more training and development” because most people know that personal development solves many of the HR issues, but there tends to lack the enthusiasm to invest.

Instead, your core argument could be that communication does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to issues at work. You might even develop better ways for people to communicate. You may then go a step further and see a way to get conflict-avoidant, people-pleasers to actually step up and say what they think.

It’s a bit like developing a niche, but with all the things that make you slightly exasperated. You might also want to think of this as pulling an argument from your zone of genius. If you’re not sure what you’re zone of genius is, it’s that thing which you find super easy, really enjoy doing and that people have some level of curiosity about.

Step 2: Pick your subject

Once you know what your core argument is, you then need to pick a subject which relates to it, which is juicy enough to be interesting for your target audience and can give you plenty to talk about.

If we’re using our HR example, it might be that you look into how people-pleasers at work are actually the secret disruptors, and if they’re not managed, they can explode even the simplest of projects.

This gives you a chance to go into psychology, communication, leadership, team management, productivity and also tackle one of the big problems that organisations face, which is projects going wonky.

So, you’re not an HR person? You need to think about what subjects you can go deeper into from your core argument.

Recommendation:

Go and have a look at what your peers are talking about, and then go and talk to your customers. Where is there an overlap? And where is there a gap?

A lot of the businesses that I work with really care about creating a positive difference. They want to have a strong impact on their customers, but they are also insanely short on time. The marketing managers that I support are slammed and just want to hand off the content to me.

That was the start of how I started finding subjects that, at the time, no one else was talking about, but I knew people wanted to hear answers. It’s easy for me to simply tell you to “pick a subject,” but the reality of mapping your core argument to a subject that sparks curiosity is much harder.

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Step 3: Understand your angle

One of the best tips for thought leadership is to take a subject that someone is already talking about and tell it from your unique angle. Think of it this way, we can all go see the exact same band perform live and have very different experiences. Were we to write reviews and then read each other’s, we’d wonder if we were all at the same show.

It’s the same with your thought leadership content. You have a subject that’s related to your core argument and that you know your readers will be curious about. So now, you need to put your angle on it.

This is the point at which AI cannot help you. Sorry. Your lived experience is what makes a difference right now. Your upbringing, where you live, your work experience, where you spend your holidays and who you hang around with all influence the unique angle you will take when telling this story.

An example for you. I had the absolute pleasure of working in the music industry in the early 00s. I caught the tail end of the good times, but also coincided with the iPod, Napster and the digitisation of music. So when I see the impact of AI on the demand for creatives, I see it through the lens of my early career.

I can tell that story from a unique angle which not many others can do. What can you dig out of your background that will help tell your story in a way no one else can? I promise you there is something.

Step 4: Research

Okay, thought-leadership isn’t just about you and your opinions. If it were, then we’d all be sitting here as thought-leaders. Also, go scroll LinkedIn and see how many opinions float past your feed that will be meaningless by tomorrow.

The whole point of this is to create something deep and lasting. That means you need research. You have two choices: create your own or use what is out there. Original research is the best because then people will come to you to use it in their content. Yet, this takes time. You need to do surveys, collect data, and encourage responses.

That’s not such a bad thing because thought leadership shouldn’t be something that you churn out.

Now, while you’re gathering your original data, you can also use other people’s to back up your arguments. Again, this is a good thing because it’s showing that you’re looking at all possibilities and sharing expertise. You might even want to interview other experts in adjacent fields. It all adds to the authority that you’re trying to achieve with good thought leadership writing.

Step 5: The actual writing

If you’ve done all of the above, then you’re ready to sit down and write your thought leadership article. Now, unless you are writing for print, where there will be a house style, there are some basic rules for writing online.

• Break up chunks of text with meaningful headers
• Short, active sentences are better than long, rambling ones
• Don’t be afraid of using page furniture like pull quotes and lists
• Use images to illustrate a point, not decorate
• Consider how people might absorb the information. Does it need video or diagrams?
• Make sure the text you use to link out from the blog tells someone where they are going
• Put the most important information at the top. Don’t make your reader work hard
• Remember to put in a call-to-action. It doesn’t even have to be at the end.

What about SEO?

Okay, you want your audience to read your thought-leadership article, especially after so much work has gone into it. It makes sense to try to get some traffic from search terms. This would fall into the editing, which you need to do next. No one writes a perfect article on their first attempt. Not even me. You can read editing tips here.

While thought leadership may not obviously go hand-in-hand with SEO, it does support your SEO efforts because it’s hitting those EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, trust) criteria for search. It also helps if you’re trying to get AI citations because AI uses search engines to produce its results, meaning hitting those EEAT criteria is more important than ever. Plus, when you say what others are not, and can back it up, that adds more emphasis to your content.

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Does thought leadership need to be an article?

Absolutely not. This blog is about how to write a thought leadership article, but you can do a video or podcast instead. The point is that you get one format which really digs deep into the subject, and then you use that to create content so people know it exists.

However, I would love for you to have a testing ground for ideas. For example, if a post does particularly well on LinkedIn, could it be expanded into a blog? If it can, could you then use that to create a workshop or a talk? What you are really doing with your thought leadership article is seeing what resonates so that you can expand on it further until you become known for that thing. When you become known for it, it then helps draw people towards you.

Thought Leadership Formats

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Industry Trends and Predictions

The beginning and end of the year are full of these, so if you see a trend happening, you can write about it outside of December and January. In fact, if you want to stand out, I recommend doing so outside of these months.

It’s also a good opportunity to share your annual report and any original research that you’ve pulled together. Reflecting on what’s happened through the lens of your experience will make your predictions grounded and carry more authority.

Trends and predictions are also a good opportunity to create impact assessments of emerging technologies on your clients’ businesses or to create a maturity model that they can benchmark themselves against. By doing this, you are also giving away helpful tools they can use alongside your insights.

Zig when they zag

If your peers are all chirping the same advice, what can you say that goes against the grain? In the world of content marketing, there is a rule that more is more. This is not something I subscribe to, and I believe that it’s having a negative impact on people and the planet. That goes against the common thinking, but it is backed up with data and case studies, which demonstrate that it is possible to achieve more with less when done right.

How you zig when they all zag comes down to your thinking through complex problems. It gets back to understanding what lies underneath the customer problem that your product or service solves.

Let’s say you’re a SaaS company that streamlines production. The problem may well be that there are seven different apps in use, and people have to switch between them all to keep a project on track. You solve the problem by replacing all those apps (or bringing them together). The problem might seem like people want the process streamlined, but sitting underneath that is a greater problem of time management and communication.

So, if you have a unique angle on why communication is key for smoother workflows, then that will set you apart when everyone else is still talking about streamlining.

Original data

Original data that your business has gathered should be central to any thought leadership strategy. The key here is to understand what story you are telling with that data. You need to know this before you start gathering it so that you can ask the right people the right questions. This isn’t about trying to influence answers to prove your hypothesis, but to make sure you’re uncovering what is really happening.

For example, you might want to know how effective communication is between teams when creating content and if better processes help that. You then need to make sure you’re talking to the right people. This goes beyond those creating the content and looking at the subject experts within the business; anyone who needs to be a part of the approval process and those who are directly impacted by the content, such as the sales team.

If you were simply looking at how communication works in the marketing department, you would get a different outcome than if you looked across a wider view.

Original data for thought leadership not only works to show your expertise and authority, but it also works well for SEO. It goes back to that EEAT criteria. With original research, you are demonstrating experience, expertise, authority and trust, which others will backlink to as we all want data to back up our arguments.

Your personal journey

Sharing your story can also contribute to your thought leadership plan. Framing how you got to where you are today through the narrative arc makes you more relatable to your customers. Think about that hero’s journey, going from rags to riches or getting a calling to go on an adventure.

There is a reason why narrative structure is so powerful when it comes to connecting with people. It is because we innately create stories to make sense of a complex world and an overload of information. We connect dots that are not there because otherwise, getting through the day would be overwhelming.

The stories we tell help others form a view of us and our businesses that helps them relate to what we do, and often see themselves in it.

Measure the impact of your article

Once you’ve researched, written and edited your article (or podcast or video), then it’s time to measure its success and see what you can learn and improve on next time. As thought-leadership is a long-term strategy, you will want to keep coming back to the data to see how it’s helping you reach your goals.

Remember, one article is not the whole story. It is the building blocks you create from your idea that really form the full thought-leadership picture. These long-term actions can do far more for your business and brand awareness than fast social media content, but it does take time.

Here are some ideas of what you can track:

• Page hits and source of traffic
• Time on page
• Any downloads that you have connected to your article
• Engagement rate, especially if sharing content snippets on social media
• Video plays or podcast downloads
• Speaker pitches accepted
• Podcast interviews accepted
• Increase in backlinks
• Citations by peers or competitors
• Brand mentions
• Increase in leads or clients

This list is a suggestion. What you measure needs to be directly linked to your business goal and your thought leadership strategy goals. Your metrics should be telling you if you’re heading in the right direction for those areas, and may look very different to the list above.

Are you ready to write thought leadership content?

Thought leadership content is not a blog that you can chuck out in a couple of days. They can often take weeks or months of work and research to get right. However, if you have a core argument that runs throughout all of your thought leadership, then it can help speed up the process.

You also want your efforts to pay off, which means making sure you have the content processes in place to build on your article once it’s published. This is different for everyone, but it could mean leveraging the article for talks, interviews, panels and a book.