How to Write Thought Leadership for Technical Companies
As a techie and a writer, I’m baffled when I visit a SaaS website and don’t see any thought leadership writing. Not a blog post, nothing on social media, no open source packages, and nary a mention of a company leader appearing at a conference. Not a single piece of content to give me the depth and insights I desire before I decide to purchase.
I’m one of those buyers who watches, like, 25 hours of YouTube videos before buying something for more than $100. (Yes, I’m aware that’s a poor use of my time.) I’m like those freaks in the movies with giant cork boards, thumbtacks, and red string tying everything together.
For example, I just bought a $2,000 guitar effects unit after spending more than a year thinking about it, speaking to owners, and evaluating competing products. If there were case studies on guitar effects, I’d have read ‘em. Just imagine how bad I am about spending on SaaS software!
This might ruffle some feathers, but I’m going to say it anyway: Every technical company should be publishing thought leadership content. If you’re making efforts to innovate, develop new products, or get a leg up on the competition, you need to publish thought leadership articles and white papers.
Yes, even you should be publishing technical thought leadership
I meet a lot of CEOs and executives who “don’t know what to say” or “don’t want to add to the noise.” That’s nonsense. If you’re giving your life to your work—and let’s face it, that’s part of the gig—how can you have nothing to say about it?
It’s not that these people lack opinions because, boy oh boy, they are opinionated! Sometimes I can’t even publish a simple blog article because an exec has an opinion. Trust me, there’s no shortage of strong opinions. But once I say to them, “Okay, let’s publish a thought leadership article,” it’s like I’ve sucked all the air out of the room.
Suddenly they’re thinking about “being that annoying guy on LinkedIn” and “inviting people to disagree in the comments.” They have trouble stringing together coherent ideas and get all tongue-tied. Or, we write the piece and they get all flustered with editing minor details and making it all “just so.” Then we spend 3 weeks on back-and-forth editing and moving the goalposts.
Thought leaders in technology shouldn’t be worried about what other people might be thinking. They should be worried about whether the world knows anything (or cares) about their product. If no one knows about it, no one’s gonna buy it. Last time I checked, that’s bad for business. Although thought leadership isn’t really about brand awareness or lead conversion, it’s still another solid way of getting the right kinds of eyeballs on the website.
Content marketing vs thought leadership
One of our clients started working with us because he knew his SaaS needed some technical blog content. He’s a very successful one-man company, which means he was publishing infrequently and his attention was scattered. We started publishing blog content and he said, “Well, what about my opinions?” I said, “We’ll incorporate your opinions, for sure, but these are just SEO blogs.”
That was news to him. He didn’t know “SEO blogging” is different from thought leadership. He said, “What do you mean? Isn’t every blog post a thought piece?” Nope!
Here’s a table for how to think about thought leadership vs. content marketing:
| Thought Leadership | Content Marketing |
|---|---|
|
|
Different content, different goals
Content marketing and thought leadership have very different goals. Content marketing is part of an overall content strategy, focused on creating high quality, search-optimized content that attracts people (hopefully, decision makers). It leads to brand awareness and sales.
Thought leadership should be part of a content strategy, but its goals are not are not tied to conversions. The goal of thought leadership is to establish credibility, demonstrate expertise, and share meaningful, thoughtful opinions with the world. These opinions are usually industry- or business-specific, like:
Where an industry is and where it’s going (i.e. predicting and influencing the future)
What technology products, platforms, frameworks, etc. should or shouldn’t be used more prominently by individuals, teams, businesses, or the industry as a whole
Response to a newsworthy event, like a security breach or release of a game-changing new product (like ChatGPT)
Sharing in-depth insights of a new tech or product innovation, especially one developed by the thought leader’s company
Challenging readers with new ideas or dismantling a mainstream narrative (e.g. “Why ChatGPT is going to replace 80% of workers in the next 10 years”)
How to write thought leadership content
Thought leadership content requires the same attributes that make anything enjoyable for an audience. It should be:
Engaging and interesting or thought-provoking
Well-written and well-constructed
Deep and insightful enough to gain respect of other experts
This is hard work in and of itself! Most professional writers I know have a hard time doing it. For effective thought leadership content, it needs to also be a worthwhile use of expert readers’ time.
Thought leadership strategy
First of all, thought leadership strategy isn’t just “I’m smart, so I’ll just write like I talk and it’ll be great.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Sure, you might want to write like you talk if you’re a great speaker, but you really want to pack as much punch into every sentence as possible. Never be boring, never lose the reader. If you go too technical, you could lose the reader. If you get a detail wrong, you could lose the reader. If you have 1-2 paragraphs too many, you could lose the reader.
Secondly, thought leadership doesn’t act like typical content marketing. It looks and smells like a typical piece of written content, but it’s really more like middle- or bottom-of-the-funnel content. It doesn’t leverage SEO and keywords, but it needs to use enough of the right language for search engines and social media users to care. It’s very tricky to get right and the typical SEO-driven content marketing strategy approaches don’t always work. (But if you can kill two birds with one stone, then write great thought leadership content that’s got great SEO.)
Third, thought leaders need to continuously and consistently create content. They must put in the reps! It’s not enough to publish one piece in February and another piece in September. Whether it’s quarterly, monthly, or even semi-monthly (a frequency I don’t recommend), the audience should get to know the thought leader as a consistent provider of interesting ideas with a vested interest in the industry or topic.
Start with a big idea
Even if you’re not a CEO, you might need to think and speak like one. There’s plenty of room in the market for deep-dive technical thought leadership stuff, but if you want readership then you need to think about and address big ideas. Think of what you’re doing as “CEO thought leadership.” People will listen to a CEO because the title has clout and the CEO is the leader.
Technical thought leadership reaches technical audiences and will get shared on technical content aggregators like Hacker News or developer discord servers. If that’s your goal, then go for it. But if you want the attention of non-technical executives, analysts, and business publications like TechCrunch, Forbes, or the Wall Street Journal, then you’ve got to speak in a way that says, “I’m blowing your mind and we’re just barely scratching the surface.”
The “thought” part of “thought leadership” is about making your audience think. You want to share ideas that are worth thinking about. It’s like a TED talk: “Ideas worth spreading.”
Probe every angle
Thought leadership content says, “I know a lot about this one thing—because I know so much about all these other things.” It’s not enough to say why you love Amazon Web Services. You have to also demonstrate that you’ve tried loving Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, and a variety of other infrastructure-related services. You have to show that you’ve tried them all and you’ve thought about it a lot and you’ve tested what each can and can’t do.
You can’t just be smart. You have to be smarter than the reader. You have to address the “but what about?” questions that’ll rise when they’re reading your article. You’ve always got to be one step ahead of an informed reader, quickly making it clear that you’ve thought through all the “but what about?” situations.
Even if you’re not an expert in all the alternative ideas, angles, products, frameworks, or languages, at least acknowledge that they exist and that you know they’re worth your time.
How to establish yourself as a thought leader
Anyone can buy a van full of plumbing equipment, but does that make them a plumber? No. They need to go out and actually install and fix pipes. Being a thought leader requires experience (putting in the reps, remember?) and showing up consistently as a thought leader.
You can’t just read an article called “How to write thought leadership articles” and say, “I am now a thought leader.” You actually need to write!
If you’re looking for the real-deal “how,” I’d recommend talking to your marketing leader about setting up a formal thought leadership campaign that’s tied to actual business outcomes. The only way to do it well is to get serious about it. You might even consider investing in a coach who can help you become that thought leader.
You could always hire a ghostwriter like me, who can interview you, take notes, and turn your ideas into content worth reading. Or you could start a substack and just start writing on the regular. Or you could plug into your company’s monthly newsletter and make a regular blog contribution.
And if you or your company aren’t doing any of these things, then you should give us a call. We don’t bite, we’re fun to work with, and we don’t charge anything until we start working. Plus, I probably write 10,000 words of thought leadership every month. I’m happy to talk you through how that works.
