Recognisable thought leaders can be a huge asset for the organisations that they lead. A thought-leading CEO can be a highly attractive proposition to potential investors, customers and talent, creating benefits aplenty for the CEO themselves as well as their wider businesses.
Drawing on our experience working with CEOs and senior leaders from a range of national and global businesses, here are our top five tips to establish yourself as an industry thought leader:
Review the landscape and develop a strategy
Before embarking on any thought leadership campaigns, it’s critical to first review the industry landscape, benchmark your current performance and conduct a holistic audit of the channels that will genuinely drive influence with your stakeholders. Reviewing competitor activity is a good place to start, in addition to working with expert partners that will be able to guide you on which channels will be most effective for engaging your various stakeholder groups; whether they be investors, partners, employees or potential clients.
Establish your key talking points
Once you have analysed the best channels to reach your audience, you need to establish which messages and talking points that you want to promote within your strategic communications.
There are certain topics that CEOs will be more confident talking on than others. There should be a blend here between big-picture industry topics through to more granular, detail-oriented analysis. You can then map these topics against the audiences they are most relevant for and therefore, the channels that they will be best distributed through.
Deploy social media strategically
Social media can be a highly effective tool for CEOs to establish themselves as trusted thought leaders. LinkedIn’s algorithm prioritises individual rather than company pages so sharing content from your CEOs channel can be an effective tactic to generate engagement with your brand. Engaging with other thought leaders posts in the form of comments or shares can be a clever way to grow your network and in turn, broaden your reach.
While it can be a challenge to find the time to write long-form content, consistency is the key to generating sustained engagement from a growing audience. Trusted agency partners or communications teams can often support with this content development and will also have the skills required to develop posts and articles that are suitable for driving engagement on the platform.
Expert commentary and thought leadership
Commenting on relevant, breaking news stories can be an effective way for CEOs to secure prominent media coverage. While it might start as just one quote in a wider article, becoming a trusted source of insight for journalists may open the door to longer form thought leadership opportunities.
Agility, speed and existing media relationships are usually the key to securing these reactive opportunities. Your thought leadership media strategy should cover a range of media outlets that are relevant for each of your audience demographics as a business.
Capitalising on the rise of podcasts as a content format
Alternative media is growing in influence for CEOs. While mainstream media brings with it credibility and trust, content formats like podcasts give CEOs the opportunity for deeper, longer-form and more organic conversations. Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular and should not be neglected within a thought leadership strategy.
Click here to read more about the rise of alternative media in our corporate communications trends article.
Securing speaking opportunities
In addition to a strategy focused on the media (social, mainstream and alternative), CEOs should also consider the role of events within their marketing mix. Every industry has a full-to-bursting schedule of events ranging from expert round tables through to trade shows and networking conferences.
To ensure optimal use of resources it is important to assess which of these will be most effective. Speaking at certain events can help you reach a targeted industry audience, build your credibility and potentially also enable you to build relationships with other industry leaders.
If you’d like to discuss how we could support a thought leadership strategy why not get in touch today.