One of the best ways to generate brand awareness is for the organization’s executive team, particularly the CEO or founder, to establish a thought leadership profile.
A thought leader is someone who has an established status for offering industry insight, unique perspectives and advice. Thought leaders perpetuate expertise in the public domain, which positively reflects on the individual and the brand he represents.
Building a profile of thought leadership can prove useful to achieving business goals, no matter the size of the organization.
The recipe for success requires a combination of frequency, unique perspective and channel distribution to make a lasting impact.
The key principles for establishing an effective and sustainable thought leadership profile are as follows.
Define your thought leadership expertise
The profile of solid, thoughtful leadership is based on knowledge sharing. Shared expertise should be free from promotional content and focused on specific industry knowledge, position or trend. Critically, the content must offer a more unique perspective than information already in the public domain. If you have never raised enterprise capital funding, it’s best to not be giving fundraising advice.
An infinite array of topics can fuel your thought leadership profile. Offering insight into hiring practices, operational expansion, global workforce management, and investor acquisition are examples of desired topics. Alternatively, industry trends, technology forecasts and economic barometers represent more business-oriented content that may support a thought leadership profile and gain industry influence.
Customize your content
Regardless of the topic, specialized knowledge should be focused. Take every frequent guest CNBC — focus on a specific area of expertise and tailor their commentary based on the news of the day. AND Bank of America the analyst does not cover the bank itself, but as an alternative provides ongoing insight into the market, perhaps focusing specifically on the stock.
By defining their most important area of specialization, they turn into a valued resource and build a profile closely related to that topic.
Identify engagement channels
Where you share your content is as essential as the content itself. Options similar to social media and blogs can even help build a public profile along with a media presence.
Media coverage, a key aspect of developing a thoughtful leadership profile, must be a core element of any strategy. In addition to interviews, CEOs should write articles and post regularly to build familiarity.
Alternatives to consider include speaking on panels about industry events and engaging with non-traditional media sources similar to Youtube.
Go for frequency
The most successful thought leaders provide consistent expertise on a chosen topic. Therefore, it is essential to prioritize frequencies. To achieve industry influence, you have to recurrently stay connected to your topic, so their commitment to consistently sharing their expertise is essential to building a recognized thought leader profile.
The exact frequency varies, which for some means day by day posts. However, this approach only works if you have invaluable content that you simply want to share regularly.
Most CEOs use a weekly or bi-weekly content distribution schedule, which can include a combination of blogs, events, media appearances, articles, or social media posts. The optimal approach to determining frequency is to evaluate the time you may devote to creating high-quality content and the amount of content you have to offer. If you have limited time and limited content, you might want to use a less frequent schedule.
Ultimately, the road to building a thoughtful leadership profile is long, but it is an achievable and rewarding goal with the right strategy.