When you think of marketing, who is the first person that comes to mind? Or if you needed professional advice on how to improve your sales skills, or how to develop your leadership capabilities, whose wisdom would you automatically revert to? Here’s what all answers to the above have in common: thought leaders.
These respected experts rose to prominence in their industries over time, with many years of providing quality content and value, helping to solve the world’s largest questions and problems.
Becoming a thought leader will bring many tangible benefits to your career, including increased reach to your target audience, and stronger respect and trust in your work and philosophy, which in turn leads to more clients and stakeholders seeking to work with you.
Here are five ways to establish yourself as a respected expert in your industry:
Find your niche and sub-niche
To become an industry thought leader entails you having a unique specialism and command of your subject matter. Therefore, it is essential to pin-point, from the beginning, what you wish to be an expert in. It is not possible to be the jack-of-all-trades. Narrowing down your specialism as a thought leader will help you deliver more value to your audience and increase your earning potential.
However, don’t stop with the industry name alone. If you focus solely on your industry at a high level, your potency as a thought leader will be watered down. Take it a step further and unpack what you really want to deliver and to whom, to create your sub-niche. To do this effectively, you need to be clear on your target audience and what questions you will solve for them. For example, wanting to become a life coach is too generic, because there are tons of life coaches, all promoting their services and claiming to have the answer to life’s problems. Becoming a life coach specifically for, say, working mothers or for women in their 40s, takes your industry knowledge and value to another level.
Add value to existing conversations with a unique perspective
Thought leaders are so named because they are brave enough to think outside of the box. They have unique ideas and perspectives that make them invaluable. They don’t establish their thought leadership through reposting others’ insights on social media, or commenting “I agree,” or “Great post”. There’s nothing original or unique about doing any of those things.
The next time you see a post on social media related to your industry or target audience, ask yourself, What original value can I bring to the conversation? How can I challenge this person’s thinking? How can I inspire others to break out of the status quo through introducing a fresh idea, or an innovative point of view?
Consistently providing valuable content in your comments on social media and forums will help to position you as an expert, a go-to person who has authority in your field.
Publish long-form content
Thought leaders become reputable experts because they have conducted extensive research, study, and practice into their respective niches, and share their findings with their audience in the form of quality content. Long-form content, i.e. writing blogs on your own website, guest-blogging, or writing articles on LinkedIn’s Pulse, are great ways to effectively demonstrate your in-depth expertise. In these articles you are able to explore your research and desired topic in greater detail than a social media post, which tend to be much shorter.
Establish a strong LinkedIn presence
LinkedIn has 930 million members worldwide in over 200 countries and territories. These members are professionals using the platform to scour for talent and/or networking opportunities. This makes it an essential step to establish a strong LinkedIn profile to boost your thought leadership and personal brand image. Beyond this, crafting a clear LinkedIn strategy and utilizing its emerging tools will help you boost your credibility on the platform, potentially exposing your content to millions of professionals globally.
You should also seek to establish your presence and influence on other social media platforms; however, the exact platform you choose should be relative to your content type, audience, and where they tend to frequent.
Educate in multiple media forms
Your goal as a thought leader is to educate and inspire. Everyone digests information differently, therefore to reach the broadest possible audience within your niche and sub-niche, seek to reproduce your content across multiple forms of media.
For example, you could write a long-form piece of content such as a blog and repurpose it across several short social media posts, caption quotes from it and frame them in photo posts, create an infographic with data that lends itself to your content, or even shoot a short video. The goal is to share the same information a thousand ways so that you have the greatest impact and are a dominant expert in your industry.
Is thought leadership hard? Yes, no one said it would be easy. Be prepared to work consistently at it and pour in long hours of research and well-planned material for your content production. But is it really worth it? Absolutely! Through defining your unique angle, adding original value to your industry conversations, producing long-form content, establishing a strong LinkedIn presence, and seeking to educate through various channels, you will can revolutionize your industry, gain credibility, and increase your earning potential.
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