Thought leadership is not just about sharing your expertise or opinions on a topic. It is also about creating new value and insights for your audience, challenging the status quo, and inspiring change. But how can you test and validate new ideas for thought leadership before you publish them? Here are some tips to help you experiment and refine your thought leadership content.
Before you start generating new ideas, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with your thought leadership. What is the problem you want to solve, the opportunity you want to seize, or the change you want to drive? Who is your target audience and what are their needs, pain points, and goals? How do you want to position yourself or your brand as a trusted authority, a visionary, or a catalyst? Having a clear purpose and audience will help you focus your ideation and evaluation process.
It really helps conversations to have lived experience within area/topic before embarking on becoming a ‘thought leader’. It can often mean the difference between value and noise.
Start with people. Always. Interview 100 people and really build empathy and a deep understanding of what their experience across work and life is like. Go deep. Look at their pain and pleasure points. And only then are you in a position to make a difference and build your expertise and thought leadership. After all, our thought leadership has to be in service of something or someone. Start there first. It’s worked well for me.
Once you have your goals, you can start brainstorming and researching potential ideas for your thought leadership content. You can use various techniques, such as mind mapping, SWOT analysis, or the SCAMPER method, to generate and expand your ideas. You can also look for inspiration from other thought leaders, industry trends, customer feedback, or your own experiences. The key is to be creative and curious, but also critical and realistic. You want to find ideas that are relevant, original, and valuable for your audience and your goals.
As thought leaders, the validation of our ideas is crucial, and brainstorming sessions serve as an effective tool for this purpose. Because brainstorming helps us identify the problem, and then coming up with as many fresh ideas to help us solve the problem, we still need to focus more time on the questioning part as well. That’s why we need to put brainstorming into practice, by making it structured to be useful. We can achieve that by employing certain effective techniques, here are few methods: ?The 5 whys ?Starbursting ?Concept mapping ?Brain writing
After you have a list of possible ideas, you need to validate and prioritize them according to your criteria. You can use tools, such as surveys, interviews, or social media polls, to test your ideas with your target audience and get their feedback. You can also use metrics, such as search volume, keyword difficulty, or social media engagement, to assess the demand and competition for your ideas. You want to select the ideas that have the most potential to resonate with your audience, generate interest, and achieve your goals.
Once you have chosen your top ideas, you need to prototype and iterate them before you finalize and publish them. You can use formats, such as blog posts, podcasts, videos, or infographics, to create and test different versions of your ideas. You can also use platforms, such as Medium, LinkedIn, or YouTube, to share and promote your prototypes with your audience and get their feedback. You want to measure and analyze the performance of your prototypes, such as views, likes, comments, or shares, and use the data to improve and refine your ideas.
The last step is to learn and improve from your experiments and results. You can use tools, such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, or BuzzSumo, to track and evaluate the impact of your thought leadership content. You can also use methods, such as A/B testing, split testing, or multivariate testing, to compare and optimize different elements of your content. You want to identify and replicate what works well, and eliminate or modify what does not. You also want to keep learning and updating your knowledge and skills to generate new and better ideas for your thought leadership.