Does Your Thought Leadership Need A Strategy Document?
Better Planning Can Lead To Better Execution
Whether you’re engaging in thought leadership marketing for yourself or for your business, you may have thought about whether you need a strategy to coordinate the effort of producing and distributing your upcoming thought leadership campaign.
There are a few reasons why it’s usually advisable to have a thought leadership strategy in place rather than producing the material ad-hoc. This applies even if you have other strategy documents guiding your marketing efforts such as a public relations (PR) strategy, an overall marketing strategy or a content marketing plan. Ideally, thought leadership should have its strategy or at least a section within the overall plan.
Of course, you may be wondering ‘why’.
This blog post will cover why you should produce a thought leadership strategy, what you should include in it, and how it should be used in conjunction with other important marketing strategy documents that your team may have already drafted.
Why Strategy Matters in Thought Leadership Marketing
Effective thought leadership leverages the power of compelling and original ideas to influence target audiences and position the authoring party as a subject matter expert (SME) regarding the topic being discussed.
Research has demonstrated that poor thought leadership can not only fail to resonate with target audiences but that it can actually damage brand perception and lead to withdrawn offers of business. Presumably those are not your objectives!
In light of that fact, it’s imperative that those producing thought leadership get organized and clear in their own minds about:
- What insights they are going to share
- When they are going to share them
- What the target audience is for each communication
The process of authoring a separate strategy document for your thought leadership campaign is both a great way to get around to this and to put yourself through a thinking exercise that should help you get clear on why you’re sharing these insights in the first place.
It’s also important that your thought leadership strategy should set down some broad parameters about how your approach to thought leadership is going to be different from what you’re doing in the realm of content marketing. It should describe the audience(s) you’re hoping to reach through this marketing channel. Finally, it should also clarify messaging objectives.
You’ve probably heard the expression “failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” That applies to all aspects of your marketing mix, including thought leadership. Make sure that your approach to this important form of communication receives the same level of planning and attention that your other channels of communications do.
What Should A Thought Leadership Strategy Plan Contain?
Your thought leadership plan should include the following:
- Key messaging: Thought leadership is all about interjecting big ideas into industry debates — or sharing your company’s vision (or your own) with the world. For that reason, it’s important to get clear on what those meta narratives that you wish to share with the world are. Often, less is more. One key message can be broken up into several communications and each message can be communicated over the course of, say, a business quarter through various media markets. If your organization has a PR strategy in place, then you might be able to directly use -or borrow inspiration from-the material contained here.
- Target audience(s): Thought leadership differs from content marketing in several important respects including the stage of the marketing funnel which it is typically designed to target. Before putting pen to paper, it’s worth getting clear on who exactly this thought leadership is supposed to reach.
- Distribution: Thought leadership can be conveyed to market through both on-site and off-site (and managed and non-managed) communications channels. These are relevant insofar as the selection of channels will dictate how much PR resources (or those of other teams) need to be allocated to the thought leadership marketing program. While getting down to the planning, don’t forget social media which can overlap with thought leadership marketing when it shares thought leadership messaging and resources. Setting a high level plan for distribution can help ensure that the right team resources are made available to enable the program’s success.
In addition to clarifying the core objectives and messaging of the thought leadership campaign, a thought leadership editorial calendar can be used to keep the whole program on track. This doesn’t need to look any different from any other editorial calendar, such as the one you might already be using for content marketing.
What’s The Difference Between Thought Leadership Strategy And Content Marketing?
I’ve talked, in another blog post, about some of the fundamental differences between thought leadership and content marketing:
- Thought leadership leverages authority to build trust. Content marketing provides value to kindle relationships.
- Thought leadership is often a top of funnel awareness-building initiative whereas content marketing often sits closer to the middle and bottom of the funnel and thus is more focused on driving short-term conversions.
For this reason, it’s worth creating separate or parallel strategies for content marketing and thought leadership. Thought leadership, in general, is closely allied with public relations (PR) and it would be prudent to coordinate messaging (although not all PR activities fall under the remit of a thought leadership campaign).
Small teams don’t need to create three or four separate strategy documents. But thought leadership merits at least its own section in a broader plan.
Good Planning Leads To Great Results
Not all marketing teams love getting immersed in the fine detail of planning strategies, but thought leadership is truly an area of marketing where such efforts are likely to be rewarded. Thought leadership and content marketing often differ in terms of objectives, messaging, and target audiences. Give your next thought leadership campaign its own strategy and editorial calendar in order to give it the best chance of resonating with your target audience.
