Ensuring a company or its senior management remain top of mind involves creating and sharing thought-provoking ideas consistently over time. Building credibility — or thought leadership — is an important tactic that can be used to shift public opinion, improve a brand’s reputation or generate consumer demand and sell products.
We asked 10 PR professionals how they approach thought leadership. Keep reading to learn their strategies.
Thought Leadership Advice
Kris Naidl, APR of Laughlin Constable
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Thought leadership is developing and leveraging someone’s credibility by sharing their expertise, insight, advice and/or opinion and having others find it compelling or trust it.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
It is important to find your frame of expertise or “thought box” and work within that space to establish credibility, continuity and consistency through shared content. Just because one is a CEO or business leader doesn’t mean people care about their opinions on everything, but they can and will if it is authentic to their passion or if it is a compelling argument or position presented.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
We measure success based on engagement – shares, comments, dialogue started, follows – and more importantly, specifically around the goals of the thought leadership effort such as awareness, industry recognition, business leads, earned media queries or speaking requests for the expert and more.
Jeff Worden, APR of Worden Public Relations
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Thought leadership is a fresh approach to a long-standing problem. Innovative thinking is nothing without language and imagery that inspires audiences to think in new ways and/or take meaningful action. This requires a thoughtful and professional communications approach that seasoned PR practitioners provide. Moreover, public relations professionals bring a third-party view that is so important in relating to and motivating others.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Understand your audience better than it understands itself.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
The number of times others repeat your key messages. Don’t make the mistake of only counting the instances in which others agree. Changing minds is rarely a straight-line progression. Many of the ideas we accept as common sense today were met with resistance in their early days.
Jenny Smith, MBA of Acuity Public Relations LLC
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Thought leaders are the experts we seek out for information and insight on a specific topic, industry or profession. Thought leadership is the active promotion of the thought leader’s insights to demonstrate the brand’s usefulness and generate interaction that converts to leads.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Know the thought leader’s strengths and how this relates to your audience(s). Understand how competitors in the same space operate. Be genuinely helpful with valuable, sharable content. Be consistent: share content frequently on the platforms your audiences use. Continuously monitor and measure engagement, and track this against your other KPIs.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
Active engagement with the audience. Visits to the thought leader’s organization, service, or product via website visits, email opens and clicks. Earned media interviews and mentions. Positive public sentiment about the thought leader or organization. And sales, whether that’s buying a product or service, joining an organization, or taking action that’s aligned with the thought leader’s message.
Jennifer Bisbee of Bisbee and Company, Inc.
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
A thought leader is an individual or organization recognized as an authority in a specific industry.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
I have become a huge believer in LinkedIn as a key strategy for elevating thought leadership, particularly for our B2B clients. LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world and when integrated with other strategies and tactics, such as submitting bylined articles and white papers, or presenting at conferences, LinkedIn is a very powerful self-publishing tool that has proven very successful.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
We always tie any campaign to business objectives and try to apply measurable metrics. With thought leadership, our campaigns usually pave the way for business development, so measuring the volume of new business inquiries or new/renewed sales is a solid way to measure success — of course, taking into consideration other tactics in the marketing mix.
Liz Hersh, Hersh PR and Marketing
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Thought leadership is establishing yourself or your company as an expert on a specific topic.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
First, know your niche. Make sure the subject is truly in your wheelhouse and that you can provide strong, thought-provoking insight on the topic. Then develop a long-term content strategy to reinforce your ideas. The tactics and channels will vary depending on the audience. But consistency counts so be prepared for the long haul.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
KPIs vary from campaign to campaign, but we use data points such as email opens, email clicks, website clicks, website leads generated, etc. Get clear on how you’ll measure this at the start of the campaign, and then set-up the tracking accordingly. We are doing a lot with custom events in Google Tag Manager to measure progress in the early stages of a campaign. And then leads and sales further along the buyer’s journey.
Vannessa Wade of Connect The Dots PR
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Thought leadership is understanding, knowing and using your thoughts to encourage active conversation. Believe it or not, sometimes people want to know what we are doing and how we feel about certain topics. By making it a part of the strategy, it allows you to guide the talks, engage with audiences and above all, helps you become or stay a trusted voice.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Don’t worry about being first to talk about a topic, instead focus on presenting information and engaging with the people on each platform. Also, do it weekly – that way people will send you content, engage with you and look for you to add your voice to the topic.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
There are several ways to track and measure success. For example, does it lead to speaking engagements, clicks, likes, shares and interviews from trustworthy publications?
Sharon Kreher of teamworks communication
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
To be a thought leader means to be someone that has new, authentic approaches to current and often long-standing issues. Our job is then to find the opportunities for that person to share ideas with relevant communities.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Our client who heads up a sizable local food bank is an example of a thought leader because his organization is trying new strategies for eliminating food waste, capturing food that would otherwise end up in landfills, supporting food production in rural native communities and operating with a goal of generating zero waste. He has important insights to share in discussions around those issues. So, we look for places where that dialogue is taking place and try to add him to the discussion.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
Thought leadership isn’t something we expect to yield immediate results. If we’re reaching the communities that matter to our clients and establishing them as expert resources for future discussions, we’ve accomplished our goal.
Tony Vann of Monkey Works Creative
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
A thought leader is very valuable to individuals and businesses alike. As a notable expert in a specific company, industry or society, a thought leader is someone who offers guidance and insight to those around them. This is also someone who uses years of experience to understand trends and can sometimes predict, or closely speculate, new shifts in business, paradigms or strategy. From a PR strategy perspective, at thought leader is invaluable when thinking about steps past the first and second question. Rather, these are individuals who forecast beyond what might happen to what may happen and beyond – deeply important when calculating messaging, positioning a particular brand or executing a communication crisis plan.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Establishing thought leadership, at least in my opinion, is like asking grape juice to become wine overnight. It takes a culmination of experiences, failures, risks and ideas to become a rare thought leader. Furthermore, I am unsure the state is static. In other words, thought leadership may shift from individuals to individuals. Being an expert in an industry or situation is key, but often we can all learn from more exposure.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
To me, this is a campaign marketers try to implement which positions a brand as an expert in a certain area or field. The measurement of that campaign, probably the ability to influence your audience that you have become an expert. Political campaigns have been using this tactic for decades, they just called it campaigns.
Tom Garrity of The Garrity Group Public Relations
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Thought leadership is establishing a credible presence in a vertical or industry sector. In layman’s terms, thought leadership validates the trust of your target audience. Embodied in reputation management, it is the strongest asset of the tactics that public relation firms offer to their clients.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
The Garrity Group reinforced its subject matter expertise of New Mexico by commissioning an Albuquerque research and polling firm to conduct a perception survey of state residents. Since we owned that information, we doled it out based on the favorability of 17 industries, trust of 15 professions and how residents access news and information; all were included in the survey. The approach solicited our positioning as a New Mexico thought leader.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
We are working with the clients we want to work with and that is, in part, due to the focus on New Mexico thought leadership.
Brian Chandler of Commonwealth PR
#1 WHAT IS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Thought leadership is being able to see situations or circumstances through a different lens and then offer up solutions or ideas that inspire action.
#2 BEST TIPS FOR ESTABLISHING THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Read as many books as possible. One of my favorites is QBQ by John G. Miller.
#3 HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS
Success can be measured by changes in attitude, a result in terms of action, or a different perception about circumstances or situations.
Ready to take the next step? Find a PR professional in your market today to start your thought leadership campaign.