If you’re on the hamster wheel of an underresourced PR team, stepping off it to rethink your thought leadership content strategy seems like an outright luxury. After all, the CEO expects a draft of the company’s new whitepaper any minute.
But reflect, you must. Because thought leadership best practices have evolved since B.C. (Before Corona). The availability of generative AI tools has also turned this genre on its head.
Pop in a quick prompt, ask the tool to sprinkle in buzzwords for your target audience, and voilà! Anybody can be a thought leader, right?
Not so fast, says Google. To counteract a flurry of mediocre content, the search engine giant tweaked its algorithm to include first-hand experience as a ranking criterion.
More about that in a bit. The good news is that the basics of good thought leadership content haven’t changed that much.
The All-Important Dos Of Thought Leadership
Pick a niche
Step one is to select a relevant topic you’re not only passionate about but also one that links to your brand and the industries you serve, says Carine Visagie, founder of Double-Hyphen Creative, a content marketing agency based in the Netherlands.
“There’s little point pursuing thought leadership in healthcare when you run a music school,” Carine says. “You need to find a niche topic that bridges the gap between your brand and your interests and expertise.”
Finding your voice and unique perspective is an important starting point, confirms CEO and Founder of PRLab, Matias Rodsevich.
“For example, your voice and perspective can be found in areas where change occurs rapidly (e.g., AI) and businesses are struggling to keep pace,” he recently told attendees at a PRLab webinar. “Or it could be found where important information is absent—an area not being discussed or talked about often.”
If you don’t feel like a thought leader yet, Carine's advice is to immerse yourself in your chosen key topic: Read about it, talk about it, pick other people’s brains about it. Do this until you start feeling comfortable bringing in your own views. “The right marketing partners or content professionals can help draw out your insights and curate leadership articles, of course.”
Stick to your pigeonhole
Content creation should be part of your ongoing marketing and business strategy. It’s especially important in competitive industries, where consistency helps establish authority and trust." It’s not something you pick up and leave on a whim,” advises Carine. “You must commit to a niche topic and discuss it consistently for months, possibly years, on end with regular cadence. This is key to leadership marketing, where credibility and visibility go hand in hand.”
The aim is to position yourself (or the brand leader) as an expert on the topic of choice by sharing interesting, valuable perspectives with your target audience. In many industries, this kind of authority can be a deciding factor for potential customers.
According to a theory by the American psychologist Robert Cialdini, people often react in an automated way to instructions from someone in a position of authority. When someone in your target audience feels it’s a natural choice to purchase your product or service based on your thought leadership content, you’ve nailed this principle.
Create demand
For Matias, becoming a subject matter expert is about creating demand for a product or service. “One of the best ways to build demand is by educating your target audience and inspiring them to take action,” he notes.
Data reports are a great tool for building demand and establishing your brand as an authority and reliable source in a particular area. They also lay the foundation for more thought leadership content. For example, a good data report can become a few LinkedIn posts, a podcast episode, and a leadership article in a newspaper or magazine to help you reach your target audience.
A content calendar will help you keep everything organized and ensure a steady flow of valuable insights. Another way to showcase your expertise is by actively participating in industry events, conferences, and panel discussions. Being consistent with the content you share not only helps you build credibility with your target audience but also helps you stay top of mind.
Quality trumps quantity
“The part people often forget when it comes to thought leadership is that it truly needs to be thought-provoking, valuable content,” Carine continues. “I see lots of content produced under the thought leadership banner when you can’t call it thought leadership.”
Far from merely being ineffective, poor thought leadership can damage your brand. Instead, focus on fewer but higher-quality pieces that align with industry trends, provide genuine value, and eventually contribute to business growth.
Don’t sell (too hard)
What potential customers should take away from your thought leadership content is that your CEO or brand leader is knowledgeable about their pain points, says Carine. “They shouldn’t only feel seen and heard in the high-quality content you share with them but also that you can help them overcome their challenges.”
Thought leadership content typically belongs at the top of the marketing funnel, where it serves to create awareness about your brand among your target audience. Keep these pieces of content as editorial as possible. If they must contain a sell, keep it soft.
“In B2B marketing, only 5% of the companies you target are ready to buy,” Matias says. “The other 95% are not problem aware, are not ready to buy, and are not looking for a solution."
Placing your thought leadership content behind a lead-generation form is a good strategy. By building up your database with leads flowing from these pieces, you can steer potential customers down the sales funnel until they eventually purchase your product or service.
What Has Changed With Thought Leadership?
Owned media for the win
Viewed through PR guru Gini Dietrich’s PESO framework (segmenting different types of channels into paid, earned, shared, and owned media), PR teams have traditionally focused most of their energy on achieving earned mentions in newspapers, magazines, or broadcast media to reach their audiences.
In 2025, finding new ways to get publicity is important since traditional media coverage is becoming harder to obtain, especially in saturated industries. Competition is fierce, and many news outlets now put their insightful content and expertise behind subscription paywalls.
Owned media channels now offer much more scope for companies to share their insights and different types of content across industries, Carine says. Think about it: Publishing a stellar thought leadership piece on your website can lead customers or other stakeholders to share your insights on their social channels, for example. This could catch a journalist’s attention, who may report on it—without you even having to send them a pitch.
“You can use thought leadership for paid media, too,” explains Carine. “When you create well-researched blog posts, ebooks, or white papers with many original ideas and valuable insights, you can run an ad with it and capture data for future use.”
Help your customers—or risk losing them
The quality of thought leadership content has been rising, a survey by LinkedIn in conjunction with communication agency Edelman shows. Half of the decision-makers* from seven countries worldwide polled in December 2023 said the “overall quality of thought leadership they read is good.”
The study also revealed that two-thirds of the C-suite leaders questioned whether their existing supplier was still the best option after reading a competitor’s thought leadership piece. This shows the power that your thought leadership strategy has in shaping perceptions, building credibility, and influencing decisions. True thought leaders guide their audience by offering fresh insights and practical solutions.
“If companies are not helping your customers think about their challenges in new ways, someone else will,” the report’s authors warn.
▴ One of our favorite thought leaders in the PR space is Parry Headrick, CEO of Crackle PR. If you don't follow him on social media yet, you don't know what you're missing!
Experience earns Google’s trust
Back to the Google algorithm change that got us going. At the end of 2022, Google updated its ranking mechanism, adding experience to the existing criteria of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T).
The E-E-A-T framework now prioritizes content created by individuals with firsthand knowledge and real-world experience, making it crucial for thought leaders to demonstrate their expertise within their industries.
“I love that Google is forcing us to create better quality content—and focusing on a niche topic through thought leadership is ideal for this,” says Carine. “If you produce truly original thought leadership, sharing experience, expertise, and innovative ideas, you’ll interest your readers and earn trust from the search engine bots.”
A great piece of content may even be cited by an AI tool that displays its sources (such as Perplexity), offering another excellent way to build your brand.
This brings us to Carine’s final advice when rethinking your thought leadership strategy: You must involve the thought leader in generating the content.
“Many brands think they can commission a writer or PR agency to write content and allow the CEO or thought leader to step away from the process completely. But this approach doesn’t really work in practice. The writer simply doesn’t have the same experience as the thought leader who works with the product or service and talks to countless people in the field every day.”
A solution is to pair a strong writer with a thought leader and create a process for them to collaborate on creating quality content.
Step Up Your Owned Media Channels
The take-home message? Earned media is out, owned is in. When you manage to step off the PR hamster wheel, take the time to evaluate how companies leverage owned media channels and how thought leadership can boost your content marketing strategies.
Do you have a beautiful place to share your brand’s story, content, and expertise? PR.co builds custom sites powered by PR software to help ambitious brands become thought leaders. Book a call to discuss your needs.
*Company executives who consume thought leadership and are involved in making final decisions on their company’s choice of professional service providers or products.
