10 Tips to Becoming a Thought Leader in Your Industry

Oct 22, 2021 | Business Tips

Kevin Fouche

10 Tips to Becoming a Thought Leader in Your Industry

Posted by Kevin Fouche, Pixel Fish Director

Kevin handles the planning, design, launch and training of every website that Pixel Fish creates. He ensures that every website is highly engaging and aligned with our client’s goals. With over 20 years of design and web industry experience to draw upon, Kevin aims to pass on his knowledge to our clients and like-minded businesses wanting to grow their online presence.

According to research, thought leadership is the most impactful form of content marketing, surpassing case studies and adverts. Generally, most buyers rely on online sources to gather information about the products they want to buy. Perhaps, that’s why thought leadership is such an influential content type, thanks to its high credibility.

The importance of providing credible information to your audience cannot be overemphasised. A research by Edelman and LinkedIn on global decision-makers showed that poor quality content has a negative impact on business generation. Almost half of the interviewees said poor content quality decreased their opinion of a company after reading it.

In short, positioning yourself as a thought leader can influence your brand perception significantly. Consequently, you can leverage thought leadership to generate more leads and sales.

What Is Thought Leadership?

A thought leader is someone who has distinguished themselves as a credible source of information in their industry. They generate ideas that shape people’s views on a particular subject, hence becoming trusted information sources over time.

Thus, thought leadership entails packaging the information your audience wants and delivering it in a way that earns their trust. In other words, you provide answers to the audience’s biggest questions in the most profound way.

Thought Leadership Tips

Ready to establish yourself as a trusted and reliable source of industry information? Well, it all begins somewhere. It takes hard work to build a solid reputation and position yourself as a thought leader in an industry. Here are tips to guide you on the journey.

1. Define Your Niche

While being a jack-of-all-trades is admirable, establishing yourself as an industry thought leader requires some level of depth into a subject matter. Essentially, focusing on a single area enables you to gain in-depth insights that you can then share with your audience. Your expertise also improves the more you become conversant with a particular field.

Hence, choosing a niche is of utmost importance if you want to become an impactful thought leader. To select your niche, identify an area in which you have extensive knowledge and are passionate.

Once you pick the niche, study as much as you can about it to gain a deeper understanding. For instance, profile the personas in that niche and seek to understand their values, interests, and pains. This way, you can create content that they resonate with.

2. Find Your Voice

As a thought leader, you want to come out as naturally as possible. You may be sharing information that the audience might probably find somewhere else later, but you want your presentation to be memorably unique to you. Besides, relaying your expertise in a personal voice helps you connect with the audience at a deeper level.

Essentially, as a thought leader, your interest should be to draw an audience that resonates with your values. Hence, allowing your thoughts to flow naturally lets your personality shine through, attracting the right audience for your brand.

3. Start Creating Content

This is a no-brainer. Content is the engine that fuels thought leadership. Start by honing your content creation skills and have a documented content strategy. While the focus here is on producing credible and unique content that adds value to the readers, you need a content strategy to guide the process.

The strategy should cover things such as the content types (blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.), posting frequency, platforms to use, etc. The secret is to mix various content types and post on all the platforms where your ideal audience hangs out.

That should be the starting point if you haven’t launched a blog on your website. Then you can promote the blog posts on your social media profiles alongside other social posts.

Important note: Quality content is a main factor that distinguishes a thought leader. Hence, the content you put forth – whether it’s a blog post, video, podcast, etc. – must always meet high-quality standards.

4. Be Consistent

Becoming a thought leader doesn’t happen overnight. Once you start creating the content, it might take long before garnering a substantial following. For this reason, you might be tempted to slow down your efforts (besides, people don’t seem to consume the content that much). However, you should avoid that mistake.

Effective content marketing requires consistency, so ensure you share high-value content regularly. Maintaining a steady flow of quality content is a surefire way to extend your reach, grow a following, and build your reputation.

5. Engage on Social Media

Social media presents a ripe opportunity for you to grow your brand as an industry thought leader. With over 3.78 billion users flocking the platforms, there’s no telling how much potential social holds for you.

While you may want to open an account on every platform to maximise your reach, the move can be counterproductive. Start by identifying the platforms your target audience prefers to optimise your efforts. Once you have that ticked off, test different content types on each platform, as each user base consumes content differently.

For instance, you may find that a particular segment of your Facebook audience prefers videos over text content, or the link click-through rate is higher on LinkedIn than on Twitter. This information is crucial as you can concentrate on creating and sharing the content likely to garner the highest engagement.

Remember, creating and sharing different content types on social media is vital as it helps you maximise your presence. For instance, you can share quotes, short, punchy posts, videos (live or recorded), infographics, links to blog posts, images, etc.

Lastly, you should identify relevant groups in your industry, join the discussions and post helpful content regularly. Alternatively, you can start your groups and enrich the members by offering tips on topics that matter to them.

6. Be Strategic

What sets thought leaders apart from the general content creators is their ability to create ‘aha’ moments in their audience. This enables them to address issues that seem to escape the attention of others. They take a unique and strategic approach to content creation that the rest fail to leverage.

To leverage this strategy, the balance between sharing your ideas and answering questions no one else is answering. For instance, browsing industry forums can give insights into issues people seek answers for. You can filter the questions and answers to find inspiration and create the content.

7. Seek Out Influencers

Once you have established a library of high-value content, you can identify industry influencers to help you reach more audiences. Influencers already have an established following to whom they can endorse you, increasing your exposure.

One of the best ways of connecting with the influencers is by following them and commenting on their posts. Providing insightful perspectives on their posts can help you stand out and build a  relationship with them over time. Alternatively, you can seek their direct endorsement for mutual benefit.

8. Build a Like-Minded Team

Thought leaders do not run a one-person show. If you browse through websites of leading thought leaders from different industries, you’ll find that part of their content is produced by other team members. Essentially, you require a team to keep your website updated with fresh content frequently. This calls for assembling a team of like-minded content creators to run your content calendar.

Would this not compromise content quality? Of course not. However, it’s essential to hold regular brainstorming sessions with the team, discuss content objectives and give frameworks to guide creation. Afterwards, you need to thoroughly review every post before publication. This way, you can ascertain that the content going live represents the brand well and meets the objectives.

9. Get Published

Blogs and social media posts provide regular visibility. But they are easily forgotten as soon as newer content comes up. However, you can achieve long-term exposure by publishing e-books and guides and offering them as freebies.

For instance, you can attach them as downloads on related content pages or build landing pages and give them incentives for signing up for offers. But remember, if you want to be more impactful as a thought leader, prioritise giving out free information with no barriers to access.

10. Guest Blog

Looking for opportunities to blog on industry-leading websites can give you more exposure and build your following pretty fast. Guest blogging is especially essential when you’re starting out. Identify leading news or industry journals and publications and offer to contribute for a backlink to your site. It’s common for readers to follow guest bloggers who share insightful content, so be sure to provide a catchy bio and a compelling call to action whenever you guest post.

Start Your Journey to Effective Thought Leadership

If you have already flagged off content marketing for your business, that’s an impressive milestone. Perhaps you have a business blog where you share articles regularly and an active social media presence. If you have gone into all that trouble, you should reap the full benefits. Thought leadership can help optimise your content marketing efforts by reaching a wider audience with credible information capable of influencing buyers’ decisions. And as you reach out and influence, you should expect to see more leads and sales. Even if you are yet to roll out content marketing, following the above tips will help you rock thought leadership and become a respected and trusted source of information.

Finally, if you don’t have a business website yet, or would like to optimise an existing one, we’ve got your back. Contact us now, and let us build you a crisp site to optimise your online presence.

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