Video Transcript

Hi. Today, I want to talk to you about thought leadership. Thought leadership is a term that gets branded about all the time when it comes to content that people are trying to create. And I think as an industry, marketers have used this term, thought leadership, to describe anything and everything that gets published because they want it to have weight.

And most of the time, when somebody says, we’ve produced some piece of thought leadership, it really lacks clarity on what thought leadership is. When I think about great, true thought leadership content, it really falls into one of three buckets. Have you done some form of proprietary research where you’ve studied a market, studied your trend, studied your audience, and pulled some insights that are truly new to the market that you can share?

There’s a lot of different things that it could be, but it’s your data it’s proprietary. It’s things that you learned that you’re sharing with the marketplace. Another one is surveys. If you’re in a position to be able to attract multiple conversations with trusted leaders in your space, to be able to offer an opinion or some statistics around things that are going on in the market.

Some of the large consulting firms and large technology firms, like IBM and Salesforce, they do this incredibly well, right? They publish the 2022 Survey of CMO, CMO’s spending habits for next year. Pull a large group of individuals, ask them several questions, and then publish the results of that survey. That qualifies as thought leadership.

And the third bucket is really what is your unique opinion on trends that are happening in the marketplace? So from your experiences, from the things that you see going on, you’re willing to give an opinion on what that is. So if you’re in a manufacturing space or something where perhaps you don’t see as much consumer interaction, there’s still an incredible value of thought leadership. Particularly when it comes to things like your supply chain.

What’s happening in the market, aside from maybe just marketing and sales, what’s going on with shipping? What’s going on with production scheduling, talent migration? How are you staffing? There’s so many things that you could talk about. Either from a data perspective in what you’re seeing in your production and your supply chain, or what you’re seeing from a trends perspective with things like talent, with locations even in the political landscape and taxes and things like that, legislation that’s changing, those are the type of things that, even as a manufacturer, your expertise and your voice in that area, would really qualify as true thought leadership.

So when you think about that, you think, okay, if not everything is thought leadership, if my blog isn’t thought leadership or this white paper, how do I really make it thought leadership? If it’s coming from a true expert in your industry, that opinion could have weight — that’s that third category, this is what we have to say about what going on — that’s thought leadership.

Otherwise think about is your data unique and is it new? If you can combine that uniqueness with your own insights and data, or you can do that survey approach where you’re getting the opinions of other experts, but it’s new information that you’re putting out into the world, that’s what really qualifies as thought leadership.