When it comes to the success of content marketing, sharing thought leadership through content is essential. Start-ups and small businesses should never forget one sheer truth that ‘stories sell products’ and a well-positioned thought leadership can foster it wonderfully. No matter how young your brand is and which industry it belongs to, you can connect better with your target audience by leveraging thought leadership for establishing ‘faces’ and ‘narratives’. In fact, it helps any small business with a good content marketing strategy hit the gold by expanding branding and sales as well as building awareness, trust, and longevity.
With the heightened competition in the online market these days, marketers are relying on thought leadership to woo customers in a more viable manner. For an SEO company in India or anywhere else in the world, this is a huge opportunity to get amazing exposure while appearing authentic, relevant, and insightful to the target audience. However, developing a consistent and effective thought leadership strategy needs a concrete agenda.
Let’s dive deeper into it and figure out the ways to build thought leadership for small businesses.
1. Identify With Your Audience
Being audience-centric with your thought leadership strategy is the only way to come up with diverse as well as unique insights into delivering the right message. Know your target audience and try to identify with them. If you neglect what they want to hear from you, it will be impossible for you to add value to them through your content. Start with developing target audience personas, which will not only help you understand their issues well but also provide thorough solutions by using your expertise. Once you will show the ‘human side’ of your brand, your audience will feel bound to come back to you for even more authentic solutions.
2. Find Your ‘Thought Leader’
To establish your brand, you have to establish a ‘central voice’. Needless to say, this is one of the most important parts of your thought leadership strategy. So, find your thought leader, who can mirror your entire brand image with his or her ideas, insights, experiences, and communication skills while adding value to your audience simultaneously. Focusing your thought leadership content efforts on such an ‘aligned individual’ will help you build credibility, enhance your narratives, and expand your content reach. You should also craft thoughtful and valuable content that has the potential to lead industry conversations instead of creating highly promotional pieces.
3. Develop Standard Guidelines
It is crucial to create a cohesive strategy so that your overall brand message remains focused and consistent across different channels. Hence, create a set of clear and concrete guidelines for your content and make your thought leaders conform to it while sharing their own thoughts in their own style. You can maintain a checklist of ‘elements’ to include in each piece of content, which can contain anything from keywords to links. Also, use resources, such as an editorial calendar or a blog management tool in order to simplify collaboration, organize content, and ensure consistency.
4. Nourish Your Company Values
No thought leadership strategy will work for you without enough attention to your brand promise. As a small business, your primary focus is to prove your worth and trustworthiness to your target audience and you should never ever get distracted from it. While developing your strategy, make sure that you do not get too caught up in the technical nuances and try to remain true to your company values as much as possible. Be focused and provocative in order to stimulate your brand communities and check regularly that none of your content contradicts your brand promise. The more you will achieve consistency, the better your strategy will work.
5. Choose Your Platforms Wisely
While creating a thought leadership agenda, small businesses should take advantage of every opportunity and choosing the right platforms can help them in channelizing their efforts the right way. Help your thought leaders explore alternative platforms beyond their blogs, specific publications, and other native spaces. With the rising popularity of videos in content, visual stories have become the first choice of marketers for expanding their audience reach. Image content plays a key role in attracting the young generation through ideas, cultures, and best practices. There are platforms which offer community forums for small businesses along with great shareability.
You can even present your thought leaders to the industry as well as your audience by taking them to offline conferences. This will not only help you share your worth and innovation but also allow you to nurture your relationships with your audience, thereby establishing credibility.
Establishing a smart thought leadership strategy can help your brand grow and go a long way. If you are yet to leverage it, just follow these 5 ways to develop an agenda and you will never have to look back again!
