What is a thought leader?
A thought leader is an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.
Why should you care about thought leadership?
You should always be aiming to build yourself or your brand as thought leaders in the industry because this goal, once you reach, will start passively converting your leads. People trust thought leaders and buy their knowledge and products.
What kind of thought leadership drives value to your business?
One book will not make a huge difference. Consistency is an integral part of current thought leadership and marketing sphere. You want to answer questions of your audience across channels as often as possible. Leaders do not ask questions; they are expected to have answers to them. If you don’t have most of the replies related to your industry, do not try to position yourself as a thought leader.
Your answers and your content should feel engaging and motivate to ask even more questions. If you don’t like questions, you cannot start content with the goal to become an influencer or a thought leader.
Jeff Kear, Founder of Planning Pod, encourages business owners to write blog posts that address the most significant pain points your customer’s experience and most pressing questions your customers ask on search engines.
Pain points are always different when it comes to various industries. Therefore, CRO expert and Web Strategist at Citrix Jessica Collier tells that based on her experience personalizing content by sector increases an essential website metrics across the board.
You can make sure that your website provides value, demonstrates your thought leadership and improves the following parameters:
- Bounce rate
- Engagement
- Pages per session
- Average session duration
….by personalizing landing pages for industries. Do not offer the same value proposition to the accounting industry as you do to IT development companies. They have different problems and sense by visiting your website if you care about their industries or not.
How to get engagement when you start building your thought leadership content?
Interview your customers and demonstrate your knowledge about the subject when you interact with them. It will become a case study for your future clients, and they will see your style of engagement with a representative from the industry that you serve.
You can also quantify your thought leadership. Starting from the day 1, try to quantify your engagement so that you can see which activities yield best results for you, your sales and your brand mentions. You can measure: social media posts, blogs, your book sales, journal publishing, speeches, webinars, conference engagements, newsletters, interviews, mentions in the news.
Remember the numbers are not just for you to be happy or sad about your growing following, but to make smart decisions about your campaign. For example, if you see that a webinar is the most successful in increasing book sales and when book sales increase you close more consulting clients – it means that you have identified a prosperous pipeline to generate leads.
Each business is different, as well as the country where you generate leads might want to interact with you differently. However, the truth you will see will only be in your analytics.
“A noble leader answers not to the trumpet calls of self-promotion, but to the hushed whispers of necessity.” — Mollie Marti
How can you use content provided by thought leaders for your business?
Before you build your thought leader brand, you can easily use the content produced by the current thought leaders.
Content curation is one part of using the advice of the leaders of the industry. However, you can also just grab an article that is related to your services or products and add your CTA with a form on it. It is possible today to do it with Snip.ly
You can add CTA, forms and hidden buttons to gather emails or visitors from the articles that you share. Moreover, you can also use Snip.ly with Pinterest. Snip links to the Pinterest pin that you collect and see that it is popular with your followers.
How to make this process even faster?
RSS feeds are one of the underused Snip.ly features that can save you tons of time. “Sniply Feeds” allow you to convert entire feeds of content into Snipl.y links. Sharing is easy because you have the vast freedom to choose social sharing and scheduling platforms that can be found on Zapier, as Snip.ly integrates with them all.
When you gather emails with Snip.ly form button, send them to Red Cappi software and personalize the emails that you send based on the industry. You won’t regret trying it. Use snip.ly with Red Cappi email marketing software and generate leads. So easy a baby can use it.