How to Create a SaaS Thought Leadership Strategy
One of my favorite Nassim Taleb quotes is: “Any idiot can be intelligent.” Funny enough, his quote also sums up most thought leadership content: not much thinking, not much leadership, but plenty of content about it!
Thought leadership is some of the highest-potential content you can produce, but it rarely performs. Here’s why: Some tech founder expert decides to flex and tell the world what’s on his mind. He (it’s always a dude) publishes some meandering 3,000-word article that no one asked for. It gets a few clicks from esoteric nerds who leave incoherent, jargon-riddled comments.
That’s cool and all, but what’s the point? What did anyone get out of that? It reminds me of the old Garry Shandling joke: After making love to my girl, I asked if it was good for her too. She said, “I don’t think this was good for anybody.”
I’m not knocking on tech founders, thought leadership as a genre, or its readers. I’m knocking the lack of intentionality, the braggadocio, and the wasted potential. There are some legitimately good thought leaders out there, which is just what the world needs right now. But we won’t get great thought leadership content by accident.
What is good thought leadership content?
Thought leadership (TL) content is the type of writing that’s published in Forbes, the Wall street Journal, or online paid subscription publications like Medium or Substack. It’s typically written by an expert and comes in the form of blog posts, white papers, videos, presentations, or even social media posts (like Twitter threads). TL content should do at least one of these things well:
Introduce a new, original idea or perspective
Provide insightful commentary on an existing situation or problem
Make an informed prediction about the future (short- or long-term)
Say something provocative
Educate, inform, entertain, or inspire the reader
Exert influence on other thought leaders and decision-makers
But that’s not enough to be good. Good TL content will also:
Explain something clearly and concisely, even for less-informed readers
Back up ideas and insights with data or other authoritative information
Have a longer shelf life than other types of content
Bridge the mental, intellectual, and experiential gaps between where a reader is right now and where the thought leader is going
In their area of expertise, thought leaders often think years ahead and an order of magnitude deeper than most people. I’ve ghostwritten content for people who created solutions years ago that are just now starting to become mainstream. They are ahead of their time, not because they are clairvoyant but because they have an understanding of an industry, profession, or event.
My most oft-repeated advice is: “Don’t forget that you eat, drink, and breathe this stuff every day. Most of the people you’re addressing in this article are just working with it. You’re inventing it. You’re pioneering. We need to help the reader understand where you’re taking them and where they’re going to be, whether that’s by the end of the article or the end of the decade.”
Stay on topic and be concise
You don’t want to drown your reader with words, but you also want your piece to look serious. Most TL pieces start at 2,000 words. I’d say they average between 2,500 and 3,000. Why? Because otherwise, it looks like a run-of-the-mill blog post.
Corporate blog posts are typically 1,000-1,800 words long. They usually target a specific set of keywords to capture search traffic, and aren’t meant to change the world. When readers see a short piece, they’re not usually going to think it’s a TL piece, unless it’s in the New York Times or some other notable publication.
The second aspect of length is a matter of practicality. If the content isn’t engaging, informative, and meaningful, then nobody will want to read it.
The third and final aspect of length is all about staying on topic. I don’t know what it is, but once a thought leader breaks through the 2,000-word mark, all bets are off. They are totally comfortable going to infinity and beyond. They start meandering from one topic to the next. By the time I’m 1,500 words into reading, I’m asking, “What on earth is this article about?”
Keeping TL content to a reasonable length is helpful for the reader and the writer. Don’t waste the reader’s time and don’t waste your own time. Be strategic with what you include and how much you need to say.
How to create a thought leadership strategy
Creating a thought leadership strategy involves more than simply writing down big words and exploring a niche. It involves research, a game plan, and a roadmap.
Thought leadership isn’t one-and-done
To effectively communicate an idea, sometimes you need to write five different pieces about it and attack the idea from multiple angles. For example, don’t just write one extensive, detailed piece about why one particular framework is the best for a specific problem. Write several pieces about why other frameworks are unsuitable and lean on expertise and examples for thorough demonstration. Write comparison pieces that go beyond a typical blog post. Write about the problem and why its solution demands a particular solution by making a rock-solid case that attacks several angles.
Nobody gets great at writing TL content by doing it once. You need to get in the reps. You never know what your readers think about whatever you’re writing about. The way you think about it as a thought leader is probably pretty different from people who need to read your piece.
Plus, every thought leader thinks and works differently. Sometimes it takes a few iterations of an idea or an article to really hone in on the central thesis. Besides, you’re not a thought leader if you have just one article about something you know really well. You have to demonstrate that you not only think about something a lot, but that you have a lot to say about it.
What to research for thought leadership writing
Before writing a single word of thought leadership, you need to research:
What you want to write about
Who’s already writing about it (and adjacent topics)
Whether they’re succeeding and why
What types of content they’re publishing (e.g. blog posts, social media, white papers)
Whether that content has evolved over time (e.g. started as tweets, evolved into articles)
How it’s getting promoted and how often
What the metrics look like (e.g. likes, shares, comments, views)
How people find that content (e.g. google search, recommendation algorithm, paid ads)
Opposing viewpoints or alternative ideas
Who’s reading it and how they’re finding it
How are people responding to it (e.g. angry comments, shares, dunks)
I know it’s hard to resist that moment of inspiration when you think, “Oh, I really need to write this stuff down.” Go ahead and do that—in your notes file.
Writing your thoughts and ideas down is an important part of the process. Just don’t release it until you’ve figured out how it fits with all the research above. Your thought leadership content has a time and a place. If you do your homework, it can go viral.
Use a spreadsheet to track your research. When you see all the names and posting frequencies, you’ll see opportunities (e.g. “Wow, nobody is writing about this”), constraints (e.g. “Too many people are writing about this”), and minimally-viable metrics (e.g. “To be successful, I need at least 10 likes on my first five posts”). This should also give rise to other questions, like why no one else is writing about this topic or whether there’s interest in the topic.
How to build a thought leadership game plan
Good thought leadership content is rarely successful overnight. There’s a lot you can and should do before you write, release, and follow up with your next piece.
Start simple, always
When I’m called in to write (usually it’s a rewrite) thought leadership content, I hear about these problems from either the author or the marketing director who’s terrified about actually publishing the piece:
“It’s way too long”
“It’s too meandering”
“Only, like, 5 people are going to understand this”
“I’m not really sure what this is trying to communicate”
“There’s too much to say”
The best thought leadership content is timely, articulate, engaging, and sufficiently thorough. When you’re thinking about what to write, find an idea, then deconstruct it into its constituent parts. See how small you can get the idea. The smaller the idea, the easier it will be to write about it.
Here’s an example. Let’s say we’re going to write about playing checkers like a world-class champion. Where do you start? The pieces? The board? First moves? The first move as a defender? The first move as a defender when the offense makes one particular move?
You can see how an idea can quickly split into something smaller and more granular. Find the smallest, most granular thing you can write about. And then see if you can split that again. Whether you’re doing product thought leadership or technical thought leadership or CEO thought leadership, you’re going to need ever-smaller ideas to reach people in a way they can understand.
You’re the big-picture thinker. Your reader is there to learn.
Develop a cadence
Writing TL content isn’t something you do on a whim. It’s a discipline. It’s a practice. It needs to be honed and improved over time.
To position yourself as a thought leader, you should be known for your content and deliver it consistently. You don’t have to be famous, you just have to be reliable, predictable (in cadence, not intellectually), and authoritative.
Set a schedule for yourself. When we work with brands and executives, they usually want to start aggressively. “What if we did one TL piece per week?” Frankly, that’s unrealistic. The idea sounds way more exciting than the reality. I’ve worked with enough execs to tell you authoritatively: weekly TL content is exhausting. You will hate producing it and no one will want to read that much from you anyway.
To begin, I recommend doing one piece per month. Even that will be difficult. But you’ll develop the muscle and tolerance for it.
Do not do this alone
If you have a marketing director or someone else who can help you, lean on them. Chances are if you’re a thought leader, you’re already over-allocated and have too much on your plate. Don’t add TL content to your insurmountable list of things to do every month.
Get some help. Whether it’s a ghostwriter like me or a content marketer who can help you build a project schedule or just a friend who can bug you about it every week, you’re going to need help. You won’t sit down and write a TL article in a day, or even a week. Like everything else that’s good in life, it takes time for an idea to percolate. You might think you understand your topic well enough to write about it, but something happens a week after you start typing. You look back at what you wrote and say, “What the hell was I thinking?”
At the very least you will need an editor. Your piece will not be ready for prime time, no matter how great you think it is. Lean into getting help. Make the piece as good as it can be without it turning into a “decision by committee” thing.
Besides, I’ve already told you that you’ll be writing multiple pieces. You’ll need a sounding board to help with ideation, vetting the quality of a topic, etc.
Plug into your marketing strategy
Every piece of content you develop should fit into a marketing calendar of sorts. Not every piece is going to be a high-quality bastion of intellectual influence. You’re going to write a couple of zingers that you’ll probably dislike in hindsight. That’s okay and it’s a normal part of the process. Whoever is in charge of your content strategy and marketing calendar (you have someone doing that, right?) should be there to tell you:
If your piece is good
Whether it’s well-timed (e.g. in alignment with a product announcement)
If there are better topics for you to write about (e.g. “We’re seeing a lot of search traffic for X and we have nothing to show for it”)
If you can plug into other thought leadership campaigns that may be occurring
How to optimize for organic search engine traffic
Every piece of TL content can fit into your existing content marketing strategy. Just work with whoever that brilliant content person is to ensure it gets promotion, distribution, and attention.
Thought leadership requires a lot of thought
When thought leaders create content—whether it’s case studies or tweet threads or long articles like this one—there’s an opportunity to make a small dent in the universe. I rather like how Buckminster Fuller thought about it. He called himself “trim tab” because it’s the smallest part of the rudder that can have the biggest impact on the direction of a much larger ship.
Yes, there are a million thought leaders in technology trying to fight the signal-to-noise ratio, but there’s still room to stand out. A well-timed and strategic push on a site like Hacker News has gotten our clients tens of thousands of hits in a single day. There’s a high chance that any TL piece will fizzle and get chalked up as a “brand awareness effort” instead of being an industry-changing turning point. Nevertheless, it’s still worth trying, getting those reps in, and building those TL muscles.
Think you could use some help with all this? Drop us a note and let’s see if we’re a fit.
