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The Unspoken Goals of Thought Leadership

This is what we want to happen

When we intentionally embark on thought leadership, what are we hoping will happen? We’re clearly hoping for something, but we don’t really talk about it much – the value of thought leadership is unspoken. We all just assume that there’s value.

Let’s talk about the professional value, in concrete terms. What are we hoping will actually happen?

Here are some scenarios, in descending order of obvious value.

1. Direct Sales Opportunities

Clearly, this is the dream scenario – someone sees something you did and thinks, “They might be able to do that for me too!” and they get in touch.

This isn’t a pipe dream – this actually happened to me at Blend on multiple occasions. And this was… acute. Someone would read one specific thing, and write to me. We could trace hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue to this.

2. Brand Perception

If you can’t have the above, then it’s nice to start to building the perception as someone who does smart things and thinks deeply about a particular industry or discipline. This is less acute and more… chronic (don’t love that word). The idea is that your content becomes this background drum beat in an audience’s head, and, over time, they come to believe you have a lot of knowledge about a particular subject area.

In advertising, they call this “top of mind awareness,” and there’s an entire genre of ad placement around it. These are ads that don’t make a specific offer or call to action, but just serve as a… reminder, that a company exists and offers services in some capacity.

This is what a steady stream of thought leadership content does for the individual or the organization. They start to become “top of mind” around a particular topic.

3. Professional Networking

The audience for thought leadership might be peers, not customers. In this scenario, other people who work in your same industry come to believe you are a competent member of the that community. This opens up communication and networking opportunities that wouldn’t normally exist. (See below for a concrete example.)

4. Personal Development

Analyzing and preparing something for publication really forces you to examine it. You have to consider it from an outside perspective – can someone with no inside knowledge understand and make sense of it? In doing this, you come to understand the problem and the solution so much better.

?. SEO Fodder

I put a question mark on this one, because I don’t know where it fits into the priority list. A lot of thought leadership content is a very rich target for people searching the internet for things.

The differentiation from “direct sales opportunities” to general SEO content is one of causality. In a perfect world, someone reads something you write and gets in touch about that specific thing. However, often, someone searching for something finds something you wrote, and then starts investigating a little more, and consuming more traditional marketing content, and converts sometime later.

Same concept, just less direct (and, therefore, much harder to attribute).

…

It’s pretty clear that #1 is the dream scenario from a direct financial standpoint – write words, get money!

#2 and #3 are longer plays. They’re both indirect. Being seen as a smart person among customers and peers in your industry can and does lead to financial opportunities, but it’s not direct and it can be hard to link it back to what you’re in terms of content creation.

#4 is something most people don’t think about, but there’s enormous value there. The process of developing content is often a “rehearsal” for explaining it later. I’ve spent a career quoting things and telling anecdotes that I worked through earlier during some effort to create content around it.

…

Once, at Blend, we went through our top 10 customers and analyzed each one to find out where the initial contact was – what brought us into that deal? And we hopscotched all the way back: if Client X came in through a friendship with Person Y, well, how did we meet Person Y?

We found that something like 9 out of the 10 could be traced back to something I was doing that did not involve billing an hour to a customer.

Here’s a specific example –

  1. I wrote a lot of blog posts about CMS. I started doing this in about 2003, and we started Blend in 2005, so I had a body of published content out there.

  2. I applied to speak at a conference in 2008 and was accepted (my first speaking gig) largely on the strength of what I had created in the past.

  3. At this conference, I met The Guy. He gave a talk about CMS that resonated with me, and I had a conversation with him between sessions.

  4. The Guy and I kept in touch. He followed by blog (RSS was big back then), and we connected on LinkedIn and Twitter. We started a dialog about CMS.

  5. The Guy did CMS selection consulting, and he thought of us when he was helping an organization pick a CMS and an implementor. He asked us to come pitch the prospect in 2009.

  6. I “knew” Another Guy as a regular commentor on my blog who worked in a related discipline. I asked him to come into this opportunity to help.

  7. We won the project, helped at least partially on some of the content I had created over the years and the participation of Another Guy.

That is a longer play, and it’s clearly harder to attribute. But it happened, fairly regularly. And that entire sequence of events really depended on the original practice of me writing a lot of content about CMS with no particular concept of what it would lead to.

(Also, me, The Guy, and Another Guy are still good friends, so that’s a bonus.)