Finding and Lifting Rising Stars
Mid- to large-size organizations often struggle to cultivate a pipeline of next-generation thought leaders. They seek ways to promote high-potential people, but when it comes to thought leadership, however, they typically don’t engage in a similar process of succession planning. To avoid losing thought leadership traction, companies can follow a simple three-step approach.
Using Thought Leadership to Sustain the Conversation
High-quality thought leadership allows companies to stand out from competitors with differentiated insights that communicate unique value. While its primary purpose is differentiation and adding value, thought leadership also provides an enormous benefit for sales pipelines and client relationship management. The reason why? Thought leadership sustains conversations. A few scenarios help illustrate this point.
Four Things You Can Do Right Now to Become a Thought Leader
Thought leaders have a strong, credible, and unique point of view that helps drive improvement and innovation within a specific area of business. They share their insights and actively expand their credibility with public written and spoken thought leadership. You can start to lay the groundwork for becoming a thought leader with just four simple steps. While your job level might influence the balance between breadth and depth of perspective, the foundational steps for thought leadership are relatively similar.
Making The Best Use of Voice Guidelines
Many companies, by default, come to believe that their communications should use an official corporate voice. This voice may not be well suited to effective and authentic thought leadership. While corporate voice has its place, excessive enforcement of corporate voice can cause thought leadership to ring false. It’s better to thought leaders the right combination of guidance and latitude, coupled with the right combination of support and review, as a way to help them communicate authentically while adding depth and nuance to your campaign.
Good Readers Make Better Thought Leaders
Focusing only on industry knowledge can inadvertently become a limiting factor for your reach as a thought leader. Reading widely in many disciplines and genres helps you complement your depth with the necessary breadth. It makes you a better writer, a clearer speaker, and a more fluent communicator. It gives you a broader sense of how to think through a set of issues and articulate a point of view on them. And, finally, it adds to your toolkit for persuading and connecting with audiences. Here’s what other genres or reading can give you.
Four Ways To Support Thought Leaders
To make thought leadership work as an effective component of a company’s marketing strategy, companies need to ensure that individual thought leaders have the resources to succeed and thrive. Thought leaders invest a lot of their personal energy and time in their expertise. Companies must reciprocate by making it as easy as possible for thought leaders to get traction. Whether these support mechanisms reside within marketing, communications, or some hybrid of the two, they are all critical to unlocking the marketing benefits of thought leadership.
The Thousand People Who Matter
In most areas of B2B fintech or specialized institutional banking services, there are rarely more than a thousand key decision makers and influencers who can make a difference to your business. Potential audience size ties directly to content strategy. B2B financial innovators should focus on getting the highest-quality bespoke content directly into the hands of people who make buying decisions — no more and no less.
10 Traits of Successful Thought-Leading Organizations
To achieve thought leadership at the organizational level takes some work. But there’s good news. Much of this work does not require a huge outlay of capital or high levels of effort. Instead, it requires simply stopping dysfunctional processes and changing mindsets. Here’s what thought-leading organizations do to stay ahead of the pack
The Brain Is Bunk
In a world of idea merchants and evangelists to the gospel of their own brand, recourse to the brain often seems like the height of proof. Many attempt to use brain science as a kind of convincing justification of their notions, of the processes and practices they sell. But the brain is bunk. If you’re using brain science to validate what you say and what you put forth into the world, you’ve already lost your argument, even in a culture like ours that fetishizes science.
“What If I’m Wrong?”
Don’t worry about being wrong. Thought leadership works in the aggregate over the long haul. You’re a thought leader by virtue of being a consistent part of the conversation. It’s not dependent on one remark. It’s not even dependent on one article or one book. For these reasons, you have to look at the big picture — visibility and reputation are always a long-term play.