The Two Types of Thought Leadership I Teach to Content Teams
The other day, a friend and I were discussing thought leadership.
(You may be thinking: UH, Allie, you talk about this a lot. Yes, I know. But bear with me, you'll like this one.)
So, my friend had been tasked with “doing thought leadership” by her higher-ups and needed some guidance. How could she determine what to write about? How did she involve internal experts? How would she measure this new content initiative?
I also get these questions on many Omniscient sales calls, so let's discuss.
When I think about how businesses can create thought leadership content, I break it down into two buckets:
Topic-led thought leadership
Story-led thought leadership
Topic-led thought leadership content is search-friendly content written with first-party research—original data, surveys, and expert quotes. The chosen keyword(s) guide the outline and overall topic—allowing it to compete on the SERPs—but thought leadership efforts diversify the post from other ranking content.
I call this “hybrid content” and often utilized this writing method at HubSpot. (This piece is a good example.)
If you’re looking to add thought leadership to your content strategy, I say topic-led thought leadership is the place to start. Once you choose your keywords and analyze the SERPs to craft a competitive outline, you’ll know what questions to ask your subject matter experts. These additions ensure your SEO content adds something new to the conversation and gives you new ideas that you don’t have to source from a competing publication.
The topic-led thought leadership approach all comes down to how you write your content and shouldn’t necessarily determine what you write—the latter applies more to the story-led method.
Story-led thought leadership is equivalent to brand journalism. You identify a cool story and work with the expert (or “thought leader”) to tell it.
This type of thought leadership is one of my favorites, but it's usually a tougher and riskier content play because:
It’s near impossible to measure results if you’re only looking at keyword movements and organic traffic (as most content marketers are)
Topic ideation is super manual and requires being very in touch with your team and your industry
I battled these two challenges when I was at Shopify and was contributing story-led pieces to the Shopify Retail blog.
Let’s discuss the first challenge. In my experience, story-led thought leadership content needs a boatload of distribution support because these pieces aren’t (and IMO shouldn’t be) search-optimized. So you can’t expect to measure success through Ahrefs and organic traffic reports.
This is where targeted social and email distribution comes into play. For every story-led piece, expect to repurpose the content into 5+ LinkedIn posts and Twitter threads (or Facebook or Quora or Reddit or wherever, depending on your readership). Plug that piece into every email newsletter you can get your hands on. Encourage your featured thought leaders to promote it on their channels. Give content to Sales to include in decks and presentations. Add links to your story-led articles to your search-friendly pieces, too. The list is endless—just don’t expect to rely on SEO here.
My favorite tip? Change your schema markup to identify these pieces as “News.” Then you have a better shot of them showing up in some Google results, provided someone searches for a relevant query.
To combat the second challenge above, you must be super well-connected (like, well, a journalist). I subscribed to every retail email newsletter, started my day reading news and trends in the industry, and even reached out to a few external experts just to chat. I jotted down every possible story idea, especially those relevant to our audience, merchants, and product.
(This and this article were some favorites that I produced.)
I also plugged myself into nearly every Slack channel led by the Product, Sales, and Dev teams. They’d sometimes share a win and I’d think, “Hold on—let's write something about that.” This method was great for brainstorming brand and product-related stories.
If you're trying to surface new stories within your organization, it's hard to simply ask people if they have any new information. You have to discover those stories passively and build trust with folks who aren’t yet used to talking about themselves and their wins.
This is another reason why I recommend starting with topic-led thought leadership. By reaching out to internal and external experts with specific questions inspired by the SERPs, you build a network you can tap into later for story ideas. Better yet, these SMEs will know to come to you with new ideas, too.
The cool thing about these two thought leadership methods is that they feed off each other and create a nice, neat brainstorm loop. For example:
You reach out to an expert for an article you're writing on the keyword “AI writing tools best practices”
As you’re talking to this expert, they might mention a trend or experiment that'd make for an awesome story to tell on your blog
When you interview them about this story, they may mention a new keyword that, with some additional research, you realize has thousands of searches per month—and another expert who can speak on this topic
Voila. Your thought leadership engine is up and running, and your network of experts begins to take shape.
I love producing both types of thought leadership. Why? Because they add something new to the conversation—a critical ingredient for every content project and something important to combat the growing trend of ‘churnalism’ we’ve been seeing on the SERPs.
