How to grow a reputation as a thought leader
As a manager, you bear the greatest responsibility towards the people in your company. As you serve your team, you may be wondering if you can share your expertise more broadly with a larger audience to create greater reach for your ideas and lasting contribution. You could write a book to record your knowledge. Or, if you want to take a simpler but also impactful route, you can become a thought leader by sharing your ideas online.
When you consciously choose to share content in online spaces to advance ideas on important issues, you become a thought leader. A thought leader, loud peter wink, is someone who has both thought and guidance to share a point of view. Your act of sharing content is an act of leadership.
If the thought of creating content to expand thought leadership online is overwhelming, consider that you likely have a wealth of content that can be refactored and repurposed.
Executives from organizations of all sizesWe regularly communicate vision and values to their teams and can also share their technical expertise or business acumen with internal and external audiences in a variety of ways: in email messages, internal documents, face-to-face interactions, internal team meetings, client meetings, in training materials or through presentations at industry events. It’s also possible that your company is already creating content about your team’s core competencies in the form of a blog, podcast, or video series.
Here are five steps you need to follow to make the most of content you already have (but may not recognize.)
1. Identify the content you want to share
What are the best topics for you to exchange ideas on? Would you like to share your company’s vision, values and approaches to establish thought leadership in the areas of company culture, leadership, team building or collaboration? Or would you like to share content on the topics related to your organization’s expertise?
Throughout my journey I have shared content online directly linked to my company’s areas of expertise in digital marketing and book marketing. I’ve also shared my journey as an entrepreneur and my ideas of leading a remote team and shaping our culture through shared values.
Identify and clarify your key issues, issues and areas of expertise, whether they relate to how you work or your job.
2. Find out what content you already have and create a content catalogue
A content catalog is a listing of all your existing content resources, organized to identify each one’s subject matter, its location or link, and its format. I recommend using a spreadsheet to capture these assets. (I like Google Drive for its easy sharing and real-time updates.)
- Do you have slides from speeches or presentations?
- Have you written articles or blog posts?
- Have you published articles?
- Have you written FAQs about your areas of expertise?
- Have you sent email replies to frequently asked questions?
- Did you hold webinars?
- Did you write newsletters?
- Did you create videos?
3. Create a content calendar
When you’ve completed your content catalogue, organize it around the key themes you outlined earlier. This helps identify gaps in your existing content and gives you creative ideas for places to create new content, time permitting.
Create an annual content calendar to guide the creation of your thought leadership content. Add your key topics to the calendar so it can drive your content focus. Your audiences probably won’t pick up on the topics, but the topics provide structure and give you or your marketing team a roadmap to support your content release.
If you need new content, think about your day-to-day work when you talk or write to others about your core competencies. Be present in your day and keep thinking about the stories you are telling. What questions do you keep getting asked? What frameworks do you share? Are there particular differentiators that make people come to you instead of someone else? These are the pointers to the content you should create.
If you find yourself answering the same questionKeep asking, recording your answers and getting a transcript. (Otter.ai automatically transcribes Zoom calls, and you can easily cut, paste, and edit content from transcripts for use in other ways.)
4. Flex to reuse your content
Remember that the content is flexible. Consider the different ways your audience consumes your content. If you have content in a written format, such as B. a blog post, you should consider this three minutes to talk about this content in a video shared as a reel on YouTube or Instagram. If your audience prefers audio content, try turning your written content into a podcast series or audiogram.
All longer content can be wrapped into shorter forms for sharing on social media, and all shorter content can be bundled together to create a longer form content object.
5. Bundle it!
As you continue to develop content, move towards creating content packs around your core themes and topics. For example, take a question you get asked all the time, then create a variety of different content types that can reach people in different ways over time. You don’t need to create these different pieces of content at once, nor would you release them all at once. But they give you a content pipeline for the future.
When you create content that you want to share with external audiences, the people in your organization benefit in two ways. First, your team benefits from learning from the content you create. In addition, as you expand your thought leadership, you expand your organization’s awareness and expertise, thereby increasing the success of your business.
Becky Robinson is the founder and CEO of influence of weaving, a full-service marketing agency specializing in digital and integrated marketing services and outreach for writers, business leaders, coaches, trainers, speakers and thought leaders. Becky’s first book Reach: Create the widest possible audience for your message, book, or cause (Berrett-Koehler Publishers), shares how to create the widest possible audience for an idea, book, business or cause.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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