by Janet Waring

Establishing yourself as an expert in your industry causes potential and current clients to inherently trust you more – and equally beneficial media outlets are seeking industry experts. Done correctly, your content will establish you as an expert and a “go to” person in your field encouraging media to reach out to feature on their platforms.

Thought leadership should be part of any business development strategy. Consider these statistics from the 2019 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study:

• 55% of decision-makers say they use thought leadership content as an important way to vet business.
• 50% of decision-makers spend at least one hour per week consuming thought leadership content.
• 47% of C-suite executives say they will share their personal contact information with sellers after reading quality thought leadership from the brand.
• 61% of decision-makers say they are more willing to pay premium prices to work with a brand that articulates a clear vision through thought leadership.

Tips for Writing Content

1. Know your audience and write specifically to them.
   1. Where do they hang out online?
   2. What news platforms do they frequent?
   3. Do your research and learn your target audience so you get their eyeballs on your content.
2. Perform keyword research of how your audience is searching for information.
   1. There are lots of free keyword research tools available.
3. Use research tools like BuzzSumo to research which content is performing best
4. List your most Frequently Asked Questions. Often your FAQs are a goldmine for content. You know what people are asking you about your industry. Use those questions in combination with keywords to create content.
5. Provide insights into industry data. People are bombarded by statistics and data. Do you know how to provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? Write content around it!
6. Think. Is this content easily shareable and worthy of sharing? Would you be happy to get this content forwarded to you be a colleague? This goes back to knowing your audience.
7. Use your company SMEs (subject matter experts) to generate content. (How to Develop In-House SMEs)

Tips for Promoting Your Content

1. Your content should live on your website.
   1. Your website is the hub of your marketing and you want to drive traffic to your website so visitors will learn more about your business, engage with additional content and ultimately convert to clients.
2. Make sure your blog pages have other recommended reading and a call to action such as signing up for your newsletter or attending an event.
   1. Think Amazon, once you view what you originally came to the site for, they offer you suggested products and to keep you on their site and shopping. Your site can do the same thing with content!
3. Post your content on social media but avoid duplicate content.
   1. Write an article on LinkedIn that summarizes your blog then include a link to the content lives your website. If you publish on your website and put the same content into an article on LinkedIn, Google sees that as duplicate content and it will dilute your website search engine ranking.
   2. Post to social media and be sure to include an image (increases engagement significantly) and the link back to the article.

Author:
Janet Waring
Artform Business Solutions