John Knotts | President and Owner of Crosscutter Enterprises — Your Success Incubator.
Getty
Have you considered thought leadership as a pivotable tactic to grow your business?
You may have already read my recent article that outlined the path to thought leadership. Now, you might be thinking, how can I use thought leadership to increase my revenue and capture more customers?
For a business leader, thought leadership can take a lot of work. Consider the four steps in my previous article; simply building a network can seem like a daunting task for a business owner. Plus, as I said in that article, thought leadership is a long-game activity.
Thought leadership is like adopting a pure content marketing approach for your business. I highlight why content marketing is hard in my February 2021 article.
If you desire to implement something like this for your business, it can be very effective and propel your business to the top of its industry. The question is, how does a business do this?
Make a commitment.
As a business leader, your first step in this approach is to make a formal commitment to the effort. This must become an official part of your business strategy. Working with your senior leadership team, establish the purpose of your effort and set direction.
The most important part of making a commitment is to put your money where your mouth is. You must fund this effort and recognize it as a long-term investment. If you cheap out on this, you will likely quit early and treat it as a failure.
Create a department.
With your commitment set in strategy and fully funded, the next step is to put someone in charge. Typically, this activity resides in your marketing function, but it can also be its own department under senior leadership. It can even be an outsourced effort.
This department builds out the long-term strategy, organizes the business effort and facilitates its tactics. The department will need full access to all the company’s marketing channels but will also guide a large part of the organization’s efforts.
A failure occurs when the creation of thought leadership is tasked to this department. This is not their purpose—they are a controlling and organizing function.
Matrix your organization.
To effectively become a thought leader in your industry, your business must be appropriately organized to become that thought leader. This is done by matrixing your marketing, sales and operations (program and project management) functions in verticals.
Verticals typically represent your customers and how they are best organized for your business. Verticals could be by industry (e.g., health care, manufacturing, supply chain, technology, education, etc.). They also could be organized by customer type, like business-to-business and business-to-customer, or by geographic location.
By organizing your company’s customer-facing functions this way, your employees are structured to become experts in how your business supports each of these verticals. When starting out, you can probably only dedicate resources to a few verticals. This means that you focus on the most lucrative to your company today and expand in the future.
Develop your people.
With your thought leadership teams organized to effectively deliver across your most important customer verticals, now is the time to develop your people within each of their respective spaces.
Seek out industry events and training, find publications and look for professional courses and certifications that can immerse your people in their assigned vertical. The more they learn and interact, the more they determine how your business can serve that specific area.
Additionally, the thought leadership department, along with senior leadership, should continually deepen the company’s knowledge of its own industry. As a whole, this information should be routinely shared across the organization.
Demonstrate thought leadership.
Now you put the entire organization to work sharing their innovative and disruptive thoughts on a regular basis. The thought leadership department collects, assists with development and disseminates these thoughts through the company’s marketing channels.
The typical methods of sharing thought leadership material involve company blogs and social media platforms. However, to really expand your reach, the business should write for industry publications; speak at local, national and international events; participate in and host podcasts; and even publish books.
This is where your thought leadership department really earns its money. They not only keep this thought leadership engine running, but they organize everything the employees share into one cohesive message from the company.
Becoming an industry thought leader can be a very powerful concept for any company that looks to stand out in the crowd. It requires commitment, funding, organization, all hands on deck and time. But your company could soon stand head and shoulders above everyone else in your industry.
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
