Thought Leadership Content: Best Practices
Thought leadership content entails contributing original insights that help your peers better understand their industry or a problem in it. For example, in martech, thought leadership content might take the form of a blog post that explains how personalization is evolving, how marketers can prepare for the cookieless era, or how to recruit top talent.
But most of what passes for thought leadership in adtech, martech, and the data industry leaves ample room for improvement. In this article, I’ll lay out three tenets of compelling thought leadership and explain how many marketers and execs go afoul of them.
Thought leadership content begins with original arguments
Thought leadership content should present an original idea or argument. This does not mean every thought leadership essay or video needs to contain a groundbreaking product or marketing idea. In this case, originality simply requires advancing an original angle on an industry topic.
I completed PhD training in the humanities, where original, or creative, argumentation is the name of the game. (We’ve been debating what ‘literature’ means for centuries.) A professor once taught me a lesson about crafting original theses: Start with a paradox, or at the very least a counter-intuitive argument. For example, I once wrote a film analysis that argued it is the very possibility of divorce that makes marriage alluring. Get it? The topic is not original, but the angle is original — or at least surprising and thus enticing to read.
If a paradox is too convoluted for your industry — for example, adtech, martech, and customer data thought leadership, your task as a would-be thought leader is to take a consensus item in your industry and push back against it. For example, in 2021, marketers engaged in the collective hallucination that first-party data would solve all their privacy and data supply chain issues. But, as Reklaim CEO Neil Sweeney likes to argue, first-party data can also be collected and shared without the consumer’s consent. So, we thought leaders in martech might write an op-ed arguing that “First-party data is not the answer to marketers’ privacy problems.”
A lack of originality is my chief complaint with the state of thought leadership in adtech, martech, and customer data. Companies churn out a seemingly endless series of blog posts, bylines, and LinkedIn posts touting the same advice on issues like privacy (be transparent, focus on first-party data, etc.). Challenge yourselves and your marketing team to buck the consensus, and you’ll be on your way to writing high-quality content that cuts through the clutter.
Specific argumentation makes thought leadership content convincing
An argument is your thesis or idea; argumentation is the way you make the argument. Argumentation is also where a lot of would-be thought leaders fail, and one of the primary ways they fail is by not being specific enough.
Let’s return to the example of the much-touted adtech and martech advice: “Collect more first-party data.” As the editor of a publication that covers martech, I’ve reviewed dozens of op-eds that offer this advice without attending to the specifics the advice entails. Namely, how can the reader collect first-party data? Will first-party data scale enough to meet the needs of the reader’s business? Why is first-party data better than second- or third-party data? What available tools would allow the reader to collect first-party data? How can first-party data drive actionable insights?
As you can see, specific argumentation is where original arguments transform into robust, educational content. Content bearing advice is good; content explaining how to actualize that advice is much better.
My advice for writers hoping to be more specific is to provide examples for each of their core arguments. For example, in this post I urged the reader to craft original theses, so I included a couple of examples of original theses and also provided tips to help the reader create original ideas themselves. I also criticized writers for being insufficiently specific, which is why this section contains examples of how writers can be more specific when writing about first-party data and marketing.
Expertise is the secret sauce
If original arguments and specific argumentation relate to logos, authorial credibility pertains to ethos — a fancy way of saying that if you want to become a thought leader, you would do well to write about topics related to your expertise (or your organization’s). If you’re looking for topics, begin brainstorming by asking yourself what you and your company know better than most of your peers. Even more importantly, when creating content, you need to show the reader that expertise. You can accomplish that through the specificity of your writing and mastery of the industry consensus you’re challenging or extending.
For a strong example of thought leadership content, consider the LinkedIn article, “The Last E-Commerce Duel Between Amazon and Google” by Fabric CEO Faisal Masud. The article explains why Google has struggled to keep up with Amazon in e-commerce despite having a massive search advantage. What makes the piece stand out is its extensive references to the history of Amazon and Google’s e-commerce war, its illumination of Amazon’s technical advantages, and the many data points about Amazon, Google, and their rivals the article summons to substantiate its claims. All of these highly specific references craft a sense of expertise and therefore credibility. Masud truly comes off as a thought leader in e-commerce (his company’s sector).
Does this mean Masud necessarily wrote the entire LinkedIn article himself or that professional writers with no industry experience were not at all involved? No. What it means is that Fabric and Masud avoided two crucial process errors:
1. They did not outsource thought leadership to writers with zero involvement from either subject matter experts or the writer, Masud, himself. The article shows too much range, too much familiarity with its topic, to have simply been dreamed up by a talented writer with no subject-specific information.
2. This is an expensive piece of content — in terms of its length, complexity, execution, and expertise. I would bet this marked a collaboration between expert writers and subject matter experts or Fabric executives such as Masud.
In this LinkedIn article’s case, the results speak for themselves. I found the article at the top of AdExchanger’s daily newsletter — top billing for the adtech, martech, and e-commerce media.
Too long; didn’t read
Strong thought leadership presents original arguments with specific argumentation and leverages the authoring team’s expertise. It does not need to present wholly new ideas, but it needs to present a novel angle on a commonly debated idea in the author’s industry.
Furthermore, thought leadership content must defend its arguments with specific examples, and if the piece touts the writing team’s expertise, it should, well, show those expertise through the breadth of its references and depth of its analysis.
Authors who are original in their theses and specific in their argumentation while demonstrating expertise will be well on their way to establishing themselves as thought leaders.
