From solo to symphony: How to create a team-wide thought leadership strategy that resonates
- Why moving beyond a single executive voice can amplify your thought-leadership strategy.
- How to embrace diversity and empower multiple SMEs to own their niche while maintaining a unified message in market.
- How data-driven decisions ensure that the right message reaches the right audience on the right channel.
We’ve said it before–CEO perspectives aren’t the only ones that matter. At Quietly, we’re big advocates of team-wide thought leadership. Not only does it align your internal teams around company messaging, it also demonstrates the diversity in your expertise and the authenticity of your people. Having multiple, unified voices in the market will more powerfully shape the perception of your brand.
But how do you actually go about expanding your thought leadership strategy beyond the C-suite? What are the steps you need to consider to ensure that the content you created activates your business and brand goals, while remaining relevant to your audience?
Team-wide thought leadership strategies need team-wide objectives
It sounds obvious, but connect your team-wide thought leadership strategy to a clear, compelling business or brand strategy. You can unify teams under a shared vision while also acknowledging each team’s unique objectives and the department roles they play in helping drive outcomes.
For example, inventory specific team objectives alongside each other, and reconcile those against overall corporate strategic objectives. Look for common ground and themes that create fertile territories for topics that work across all teams and all altitudes of leadership.
Once you’re aligned, determining the topics your company should be known for is a natural next step. Already, there are broad topics and conversations that you already know you should be owning in your industry. Establishing what those are from the very start can help pave the way for a strategic approach.
Data should shape even the most personal perspectives
All content that your brand publishes should be data-driven, but especially the content that is supposed to establish your brand as a trusted authority and expert in its industry.
Thought leadership isn’t just sitting down with a SME and interviewing them.
Determining white space through a competitive analysis can further shape the direction of the topics that have emerged from your team-wide objectives. Meanwhile, signals from search data can help you gain a sense of both long-term and recent trends, so that your content can speak directly to your customers’ needs–and be search-engine optimized while you’re at it. In other words, your thought leadership should answer questions and challenges your audience is actively looking for.
Lastly, intelligent social listening can help you get a deeper understanding of how people may feel toward your company, industry, or competitors. Use this data to understand where your thought leaders can speak directly to your customers’ needs, wants, or concerns.
A data-driven thought leadership strategy can identify overarching themes, campaigns, and evergreen topics. But you also need to respond to current events and changing circumstances, so leave room for more timely opportunities.
For even greater impact, integrate proprietary data or orthogonal insights that can contextualize niche topics within a broader, more relevant narrative, thereby elevating the conversation and strengthening thought leadership credibility.
Use your SMEs to pressure test your brand’s key messages
Whether we like it or not, content is an exercise in brand. In some cases, your organization may recognize the need for a clear perspective, but still be refining its internal stance. Meanwhile, other topics may seem fully developed, only to reveal gaps in your thinking when you attempt to articulate them through thought leadership.
In this situation, try and identify the contextual “so what” attached to your brand’s key message. If you can’t identify the “so what” of your thought leadership, chances are your messaging is underdeveloped–both for the SME and the brand–and it needs to be defined with your team before you deliver a point of view to the market.
This is true no matter how many marketers or SMEs are involved in producing thought leadership. By pressure testing the key messages of the brand through the individual, you can begin to put forth a stance in the market that is credible, relevant, and differentiated. Remember, your strategy is the hub, and your thought leaders are the spokes.
Let experts play to their own strengths and style–and let them play off each other
Allow your SMEs to own their niche. They’re the ones with the passion, knowledge, and expertise to drive meaningful conversations. So, involve them early and often in the process. When interviewing them, ask open-ended questions, and give them the freedom to steer the conversation in unexpected ways. The best thought leadership comes from SMEs who genuinely care about the topic, so create conditions that enable their enthusiasm to shine through.
And while it’s important to align to your brand’s voice and tone guidelines, thought leadership content should have permission to take a few creative liberties. By capturing the authentic voice of your SMEs, you’ll not only raise their individual profiles, but also differentiate your brand and stance on the topic.
One of the biggest benefits of team-wide thought leadership is the opportunity to draw on multiple voices and perspectives. Look across departments and roles to find experts who can approach a topic from different angles. For example, pair a high-level strategic leader with a more technical expert to create a rich and nuanced conversation. And don’t forget to leverage opportunities for pull quotes, comments, and response pieces to keep the dialogue going. By embracing the diversity of your team’s expertise, you’ll create thought leadership content that’s truly greater than the sum of its parts.
Distribute in surround sound
Finally, think strategically about how you’ll get your thought leadership in front of the right audiences. If you’re moving from solo to symphony, imagine your platforms as surround sound channels. Sure, everyone wants to contribute to a third-party publication, but you need to consider your owned channels, too. And what about platforms like Quora, Substack or forums affiliated with trade publications and industry associations? Examine all channels and assess where you can easily start spurring engagement. You’ll be able to immediately engage with your network through your owned channels, making it easier for content to gain earned and paid engagement down the line.
By sharing your content far and wide, you can bolster its performance and increase its reach. Build engagement tactics into your team-wide thought leadership strategy from the beginning, including a system to notify your company when a new thought leadership asset is live. And much like you’d see in established employee advocacy programs, your employees will amplify the reach of your content in ways that your brand alone cannot.
Employee amplification is an often-overlooked but highly effective way to increase the reach of your thought leadership content. With a little internal enablement, you can unlock the full potential of your thought leadership content and make a lasting impact on your industry.
At Quietly, we like to call-out specific leaders in our space who we know will have something to contribute to the conversation, whether through tagging them in our LinkedIn comments or including them in our content from the get-go. This isn’t just to improve engagement—we simply like to kick-start the conversation by calling on the smartest people we know in the field.
Don’t be afraid to think big, be bold, and unlock the full potential of your team-wide thought leadership. Get in touch with Quietly to get started today.