Thought leadership is a powerful way to showcase your expertise, build trust and credibility, and position yourself as a leader in your industry. But how can you create a thought leadership program that improves your PR strategy and helps you reach your target audience? Here are some tips to get you started.
Before you launch your thought leadership program, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and who you want to reach. Do you want to raise awareness, educate, influence, or inspire? Do you want to target existing customers, potential customers, partners, influencers, or media outlets? Having a specific and measurable goal and a well-defined audience will help you craft your messages, choose your channels, and evaluate your results.
1) Conduct research on the topics you plan to discuss in the media. Approach it strategically and pinpoint the content you wish to share to build your brand and raise awareness. 2) Create a comprehensive content calendar that identifies your stakeholders and media channels. Determine your strengths as a leader and how they can benefit your stakeholders. Utilize a 360-degree approach including press releases, articles, website updates, and social media handles. Also, craft a good recall strategy. 3) Clarify your objectives. For a customer story, for instance, decide whether you want to highlight the partnership or focus on the product end results. 4) Ensure clear goals and assess your progress at regular intervals.
Thought leadership can be tapped both for marketing and revenue gains. Additionally, thought leadership is an org asset just like other marketing collaterals are. Cherry pick an area of expertise that has both marketing and revenue potential and build a communication strategy around it. Choose channels, communication platforms, forums and target audience to gain visibility.
thought leadership program is about establishing authority, credibility, and visibility within your industry by providing value. 1/ Creating High-Quality Content even if it is controversial and will create waves in you industry, don't be afraid to stand for your thoughts . 2/Building Strong Relationships with experts and underdogs who often bring more values and insights than well know experts in the circuit !
More than anything else, while planning to create thought leadership programs, pay close attention to who you are writing for. How do they speak? What about? What gets them passionate? What gets them angry even? Once you have all of this pat down, then you can be certain to take a first good crack at speaking for them authentically while conveying their unique insights and expertise...
Identifying the medium that makes sense while reaching out to the customers. In this way, we can create maximum impact. While planning a PR strategy, the choice of the platform will matter the most
To establish yourself as a thought leader, you need to offer valuable insights, perspectives, and solutions on topics that matter to your audience and industry. You also need to back up your claims with credible sources, such as research, data, case studies, or testimonials. To identify your topics and sources, you can conduct a content audit, analyze your competitors, survey your customers, follow industry trends, or consult your internal experts.
The easiest-to-obtain sources are: 1. Statistics or data: they can be found online from industry-specific organizations and institutions. 2. Testimonials or quotes: they can be internal resources such as executives and experts, or external like partners and advisors.
Research competitors and other thought leaders in order to see what they talk about, and what their audiences are interested in. Another way to create great content is to look at what are the questions you get most asked about, and your unique perspective. Case studies, and testimonials will provide your brand authority, and help you warm leads.
Once you have your topics and sources, you need to decide how to present and distribute your content. You can use various formats, such as blogs, podcasts, webinars, white papers, ebooks, or infographics, depending on your goals, audience, and resources. You also need to choose the right channels to reach your audience, such as your website, social media, email, or third-party platforms. You can also leverage your existing relationships with media outlets, influencers, or partners to amplify your reach and credibility.
Choose a format you can commit to. The goal is consistent high-value content, therefore choose a marketing channel and format that you are comfortable with. Don't attempt to do it all at once, as this will get overwhelming and daunting, and you may just lose motivation and drop it all.
The next step is to create and share your content according to your plan. You need to ensure that your content is high-quality, relevant, engaging, and consistent with your brand voice and values. You also need to optimize your content for SEO, keywords, and hashtags to increase your visibility and discoverability. Moreover, you need to share your content regularly and strategically, using a content calendar and a social media scheduler to plan ahead and avoid gaps or overlaps.
Creating a personal brand while providing value is a great strategy for your brand's PR. This will promote both you as a founder and the brand itself. Use thought leadership as a marketing channel to position yourself, and your brand as a leader in the industry by providing high-value content consistency and network with other people within the industry.
Creating and sharing your content is not enough. You also need to engage and interact with your audience to build trust, loyalty, and advocacy. You can do this by responding to comments, questions, or feedback, joining online discussions or forums, hosting live events or Q&A sessions, or creating user-generated content campaigns. By engaging and interacting with your audience, you can also gain valuable insights, feedback, and testimonials that can improve your content and PR strategy.
Consistently posting high value content is not enough. It's important to engage with other thought leaders, both engaging with their content and directly via DM, email or Zoom calls. Your network is your biggest asset when it comes to business and creating a personal brand.
The last step is to measure and improve your results based on your goals and metrics. You can use various tools, such as Google Analytics, social media analytics, or media monitoring tools, to track and analyze your performance, reach, engagement, and impact. You can also use surveys, polls, or interviews to collect qualitative feedback from your audience or stakeholders. By measuring and improving your results, you can identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges, and adjust your thought leadership program accordingly.
To build your thought leadership strategy start with identifying the areas that your organisation has an edge over others in the market and your business objectives. Then identify platforms where you want to enhance your visibility. Work towards building topics that are going to be relevant in line with the business objectives and collect proof points, data, industry insights to add. Thought leadership can be built in many forms - op-ed article, blog, podcast, an editorial, panels and speaker opportunities. It is important to keep reiterating key narratives at a regular period of time to build visibility and recall.
Once you do everything the article says, also start reaching out to specific event organisers in industries that you are interested in and offer to be a speaker at their events. Since you are just starting out, be ready to spend on commute. Over time, this approach will begin to give compounding effect towards your business.