As we said, there is no exact type, but we surely found that some were easier to produce and would have a bigger impact on our market. We decided to start with these 5 different types:
- Opinion articles
- Case studies
- Industry Analysis
- Interviews
- Storytelling
1. Opinion articles
Counterfactual opinions work very honduras phone number list well in this type of content. To produce them, we need to reflect on common sense to see what is true and what is not, and find a “right way” that relates to our narrative. It is like finding the “old way” and showing “our way, the new way,” as Raskin says.
For example: growing organically was just a counterfactual opinion to the prevailing narrative (and still is) for many people.
It may also be a new approach to the same model/argument, something that has been “ignored” or simply needs more attention.
These topics can also be related to a trend or hot topic relevant to our audience, but it must have timeless value.
Authors should preferably be people from the company itself who are knowledgeable about the proposed topic.
Apart from being written by the author himself, another way of developing this category of content is through interviews. The opinion text is developed from an interview with the author.
2. Case studies
It can be a how to build an effective sales strategy personal narrative (our own case or someone from the company) or a client’s story.
The idea here is to share a story where we learned something or achieved a goal when we used an empathetic strategy, method, or mindset with our narrative.
It also needs to be empirical and show those results and really focus on the storytelling, where we have a great opportunity to connect with the reader.
3. Industry analysis
This usually begins with afb directory an in-depth analysis of a company or sector by making a diagnosis of its current state through questions such as:
- Why is it successful?
- Why is it failing?
- What is right and what is wrong?
- What will the future of this sector be like?
Like all thought leadership content, this will need to tie back in some way to our brand narrative.
We also tested that a couple of times by producing content on how a specific sector (one that was the focus of our ABM strategy) was using Content Marketing and what it meant in terms of branding for a couple of big brands in that market.
Beyond having a huge impact at the time, it also brought us many clients interested in being as successful as their competitors.
4. Interviews
This can be done by conducting full interviews (those that follow the ping-pong style), using parts of different interviews to create content or even to enrich the content and give weight to evidence from an expert on the subject.
The interview can be about the person’s background, their business, something they are an expert in and can provide valuable advice on.
To interview someone, the most common ways are:
- CSM or sales suggestion on who to interview.
- Actively seeking Marketing interviewees.
With the transcript in hand, an editor must work on the text to get it into an easy-to-read format ready for publication, highlighting the most important parts of the text.
5. Storytelling
Storytelling is one of the best ways to create new insights that will benefit our audience. We can do this by collecting data from our own historical strategies, from clients (if possible), from the audience itself (as we did with the reports), from partners, and more.
It is important to be credible, to use methods that work and are “scientific” ( remembering the mantra: correlation does not equal causality ).
Someone who does a great job with it is Cyrus Shepard from Moz.
How to present thought leadership content to the world?
Here, we’re considering the look and feel of thought leadership content pieces: their layout, title, and everything else that works to make the experience more interesting.
Design
If you have an amazing blog design that’s perfect for your message, great, but don’t stop there.
Thought leadership content should have custom visuals that are valuable and help highlight important concepts and information. It should also have interaction points, such as quick polls, calculators, and infographics that are able to engage the reader.
When we think about larger campaigns, such as a report, we can go even further, creating a special identity for it, which is used in each content (blog, social networks, email).
A good example is what Microsoft is doing on its “stories” page, where there are different visuals and audios and everything is personalized, they even flirt with a couple of interactions. Check it out here .
Securities
Titles should be creative, unique and provoke emotions, we must go beyond SEO titles, so revolutionize your titles, at least the H1 ones!
Think about your company’s brand and add some distinctive assets to it. For us, rock is vital to our culture, so adding subtle elements of rock music can be a good way to draw attention and cause us to be associated with a nice and innovative idea . Knowing how to create creative, interesting and direct titles is essential.
How to promote your thought leadership content?
As we showed in the introduction, promotion is essential for thought leadership content. We also know that a well-performing promotion campaign depends largely on planning, time and budget.
That being said, we must follow a timeline for everything to be possible:
- define the agenda for the month/quarter;
- define the types of content to be produced;
- establish the exact number of pieces of thought leadership content;
- create guidelines for these contents;
- schedule interviews or take time to plan data collection methodology*;
- conduct interviews and collect this data*;
- send it to the drafting stage;
- map design opportunities for promotional pieces: social channels, hellobar, etc. and beyond (interactive elements, images, diagrams and more);
- send it to a designer;
- correct it;
- go to translation stages if necessary*;
- publish it;
- schedule Pushnews;
- Post the link on social media channels and excerpt short clips to promote on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram throughout the week;
- send emails;
- ask your coworkers to post it on their own LinkedIn;
- share it in related communities;
- promote it using paid channels if it makes sense for the content and for your business.
You can also invest in partnerships to expand that promotion.
This is a very basic plan.
Remember: create a plan to make these ideas famous! Our Rock Content magazine was, until the pandemic, printed and delivered to our community. Many people thought we were crazy to go back to printing, but it made sense and worked really well. We were innovative by being retro.