Methods to win the thought chief arms race in 2022

If your feeds are like mine as an executive, every time you open LinkedIn, the News app, or your email client, you’ll be inundated with a rush of articles promising to give you the formula for success, new trends, and the latest To teach innovations, industry insights and developments.

It’s like every brand, company, and executive is involved in a race to get the most content, most comments, and most shares. If we don’t steer this ship off the rocks, I foresee a dystopian future of disorganized content publishing, where everyone is battling for attention and the screams get so loud that the mind of the viewer simply shuts them off. In fact, we’re already there with advertising. News and articles fly out at the speed of light, and executives live in fear that someone will bring them to their desired audience. The business journalism and thought leader markets are saturated with content and consumers cannot hear the shouting. “Read me! Look at me! Love me!” is the taste of the day.

Thought leadership is in an arms race and every man or woman is out for himself. At the end of 2021, I would like to declare a temporary ceasefire to reflect calmly on our failures and successes and to codify a methodology that can bring a better strategy not only for us but also for the public.

Maybe we got so focused on winning the race that we forgot why thought leadership existed in the first place.

The purpose of thought leadership

The purpose of Thought Leadership is to provide knowledge and expertise that will lead to positive change for organizations and their leaders, employees and stakeholders.

To make thought leadership a competition about who can be bigger, better, and faster, ignores the fact that value drives growth – it’s about helping others find meaning, success, and satisfaction.

So how can we differentiate ourselves and create a really powerful thought leader?

Related: That’s why we need to humanize content now

Thought Leadership Strategies in 2022

The Thought Leadership Strategy of 2022 is a multi-topic and multi-executive strategy that integrates and uses the expertise of each individual team member to support a cohesive whole.

Not sure where to start? Read on to learn the five actionable steps you can take to create a successful thought leadership strategy in 2022.

1. Determine the purpose of your thought leadership strategy.

Before doing anything else, you need to determine what you want your thought leadership strategy to achieve: “What do you want our readers to learn or improve? Is there any knowledge that I would like to leave you? “

If you don’t know why you are speaking, just add to the noise. Without a clear purpose, your thought leadership will take a back seat.

Additionally, by defining the purpose of your thought leadership strategy, give yourself guidelines for the job – all content should fall under your purpose. There are three questions to consider for any content:

1. Who is your audience?

2. What problems do they have that you can solve?

3. What is your primary message to help them solve these problems on their own?

For example, if you are a leading technology and software company looking to solve the problem of intelligently organizing data so that it works best for your users, your primary thought leadership message will become valuable logic, methodology, mindset, ethics, and personality That is what it takes to solve your problem of an overwhelming amount of confusing data that is no longer serving any purpose and is inefficient. This thought leadership content doesn’t require a plug-in for your brand – it’s not PR. We help the observer to gain access to knowledge to which only you have the key.

2. Integrate the most important pillars of your brand, your product and your values.

Crystallize the key knowledge, formulas, mindset, and workflow required to achieve the purpose identified in Step 1. What are the different pillars of your brand and how do both merge into a cohesive, well-functioning structure to achieve great things?

Remember, the individual didn’t build your organization – it required a team. If we rely too heavily on a pillar, we will miss out on important information.

I once brought in a consultant who was an expert in raising capital. And while this person did a fantastic job helping our company do just that, they couldn’t help me when it came to using the capital they had just raised for growth. I needed help with HR, training, software and a lot more. While the consultant was an expert on one of the pillars of success, I missed a few others.

So we don’t have just one pillar – any content you share should build on the previous one and pass the baton on to the next. Any thought leadership role without integrated content will have no effect and convey a global understanding.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for niche content. There will always be an audience that wants to record cutting edge material. However, to have a widespread and successful thought leadership strategy in 2022, we need to merge each niche into a cohesive brand image. Each column can have its own swim lane, but you need to show your audience how each lane fits in the same pool.

The software data company from our previous example will have pillars of insights into data hygiene, data organization and speed, finding great people, culture, user experience, marketing, security, procurement, management strategies, and sales strategies that power the company. All of these pillars of excellence will individually satisfy one or more of your desired target groups and, when they work in sync, create trust and an affinity with your leaders and the organization as a whole.

3. Identify key leaders.

Identify the leaders who are best informed and experienced in each pillar to be the forward-looking spokespeople for each relevant campaign. Pick a trusted executive with extensive knowledge at the top of every thought you share. Additionally, you should bring the leaders together so they know they are on the same team and leverage each other’s expertise in creating content.

Using the pillars above, Thought Leadership contributions would likely come from the CEO, CMO, CIO, Chief People Officer, Chief Procurement Officer, or the variations of these titles

Ask yourself who has the broadest knowledge of each of the pillars and name them for your thought leadership strategy.

4. Create a structured calendar for thought leaders.

Once you’ve identified your purpose, pillars, and speakers, you need to plan a structured content calendar for thought leadership. A calendar enables you and your team to be more strategic in your thought leadership role. Plan your content so that each piece meshes together to create a complete picture that will guide your audience on a path of continued growth.

Your calendar would show links between an executive’s content and another executive’s content. The CEO’s article on “The Data Revolution” is commented, quoted, and quoted in the Chief People Officer’s article on “Finding & Cultivating Disrupters for Your Technology Startup”. The CMO’s article on “Investing in data is the new gold rush” highlights the importance of the people behind it and links (and cites) the Chief People Officer’s article. And on it goes – the picture of excellence is painted and the structured thought leadership is worked out so that everyone can follow this example.

Internally, this requires ghostwriting, editing and publishing contacts in the media. Executive ghostwriting and securing authorship for thought leaders is an art in itself. To solve this challenge, consider read some of the solutions from my good friend and executive content specialist, Tom Popomaronis.

Related: The step-by-step guide to creating and publishing high quality content

5. Create a content library.

It is not just luck or a boost from the search algorithms that someone stumbles upon your work. In 2022, the old-fashioned approach of hoping for discovery will no longer be enough. We need a new strategy.

As you launch your thought leadership strategy, consolidate all of your content into one searchable and easy-to-use library. Create a roadmap for your audience to move through the content at a pace that suits their understanding and experience. Help them grow from beginner to expert, and provide them with a single content platform that they can return to when they’re ready to learn more.

Related: The Value of Thought Leadership Building

In order to win

In order to dominate the crowded space of thought leadership, we create values. This is the proven strategy to beat the competition: purpose, strategy and teamwork.

We don’t know what 2022 will be like, but we know that people always need answers to questions and leaders. So, put your team together, go back to basics and start with the steps that I have outlined here. By the time you get to step five, you may be the face of your entire industry.