No More Isolation: How to Create a Holistic Thought Leadership Strategy

It was the Germans who first came up with the idea of missile silos to serve as launch bases for their V-2 rockets. The United States adopted this concept and built missile silos across its western states soon after. 

You’ll find the concept of silos in farming as well, where they’re used as storage units for grains, instead of missiles.

The thing about silos is that they save a lot of space because of their vertical structures. Silos are also heavily built so there’s no fear of leakage.

They’re also isolated. 

Which is why a siloed mentality is the last thing to have in your marketing campaigns, and especially so if you have undertaken a well-thought-through perfectly-executed thought leadership campaign.

Because when it comes to content – especially, great, intelligent content as in thought leadership – creation is not enough. Neither is dissemination. What you must aim for is amplification.

For that, you need to have a holistic strategy in place, designed to reach all audiences through all platforms. 

Creation: That Always Comes First

In the beginning, there was nothing. That’s how it always begins. 

Thought leadership is not about creating multiple variations of already existing content just to increase footfall or awareness. It’s about creating unique content that showcases your subject matter expertise, gives the audience massive value, and is brimming with your own perspectives and ideas.

For brand thought leadership as well as personal thought leadership, the best suited platform by far is LinkedIn. The network platform has close to 740 million members worldwide and spans across 200 countries. Talk about visibility!

Once you publish your article on LinkedIn, make use of the platform first to get maximum reach. For example, as soon as you publish an article, LinkedIn will show you a prompt asking you to send a notification to the people in your network who will be interested. Do it.

Value Addition: Adding Spice to a Bland Broth

Yes, value comes in the form of the originality you bring to the content with your unique perspectives and expertise. But sometimes, a free goodie is just difficult to reject. It’s human nature.

Create ungated resources like one-pager guides, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, or even videos that you can share with specific pieces of content. Don’t ask for email IDs, don’t ask for permission to send newsletters. Just give them the link and let them enjoy the additional content you have created.

Apart from you being loved, you’re cementing the already existing belief that you know your stuff. 

Of course, there’s another way to go about this. Create a gated resource, full of niche ideas, and make this available for people who want to know more. What’s great about this is that, you get to collect data on the people who are committed to following your content and are genuinely interested in what you have to say.

Hand over the data to your sales team and let them do their magic with conversion.

Dissemination: Let the Chips Fall Where They May

Even if your expert content is out there on LinkedIn, chances are that it might not be reaching the right audience. Or maybe, people simply won’t be reading enough. 

Targeted ad campaigns then become the need of the hour. Ad formats like carousel ads that tell an interactive story often inspire the audience to take some action. You can reuse the content from your existing thought leadership articles to come up with a compelling story for the carousel ads. 

These ads can be used to create brand awareness as well as inspire your audience to take action.

Amplification: Go Forth and Multiply

Remember those people who were interested in your gated content? You can keep them even more interested through custom offers and prices.

Take, for example, an email marketing campaign. Targeting these people, you can send an email blast linking the specific content they showed interest in with custom and relevant offers designed for them.

If they visited your website in search of more content, well then, you can do it the good old fashioned way of retargeting as well.

Paint the Whole Picture

So long story short, your thought leadership strategy must not be an isolated entity that sits miles away from others, underground and untouched. Paint a whole picture by involving other strategies as well to amplify your content as well as presence.

Does all of this seem a bit much for you? Well, that’s why we’re here. Econz Digital can take over this all-connected process and deliver results because, well, that’s what we do. Reach out to us, and we’ll see what we can do to demolish these silos and create a unified strategy.