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In this episode, host Surbhi shares six ideas on how brands can weave thought leadership into their content strategy.
Digital evolution has pushed many brands to look at content seriously. While businesses understand the importance of content, they often get stuck in the hamster wheel of just producing more content. Thought leadership is far left behind.
In today's world where customer's attention is the most precious thing to achieve, it is important to differentiate and be found. That's where thought leadership content makes all the difference.
Tune into this episode to get started on #buildingthoughtleadership with well planned content for your brand.
In previous episode, Surbhi shared 10 resolutions one can make to get started or enhance #thoughtleadership in 2022. Incase you've missed that episode get it on https://podcast.digitalgenie.co/17
[00:00:00] Surbhi Dedhia: Welcome to a brand-new episode on the making of a thought leader podcast. Happy New Year and hope that your new year has started off very well. Before the end of the last year, I had shared 10 resolutions one can make the start building thought leadership in 2022. If you haven't yet had a chance to grab that episode, do that sooner than later.
[00:00:32] Surbhi Dedhia: There is still a time to create new goals and action them for the new year. All right. Today's episode is all about amplifying your brand with thought leadership content. Most brands today have acknowledged the importance of content marketing. A brand's digital journey and continuity is heavily dependent on its ability to communicate to its audience.
[00:00:59] Surbhi Dedhia: Competing on digital landscape has evolved to a level where the audience needs to find the right information at the right time and also in the format that he can consume it at that time.
[00:01:16] Surbhi Dedhia: So, this is where thought leadership styled content comes in as a key differentiator. Thought leadership first approach to content marketing is a powerful way to enhance on brands, communications, effort to potential buyers in the decision-making process.
[00:01:34] Surbhi Dedhia: Customers of today read and consume a large volume of digital content to get their questions answered.
[00:01:43] Surbhi Dedhia: Heck even you and me before going for a dinner, select the restaurant based on Google or any other web reviews. Looking up or researching has now become a quintessential part of our digital lifestyle. In the B2B sphere the same rules of apply and yet what has changed is the competition for attention across the web.
[00:02:10] Surbhi Dedhia: Content presented in an innovative and thoughtful and valuable format stands to win. So, how do you do the content, which is valuable, informative. Thoughtful. And innovative? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to share how to amplify your business brand, by creating thought leadership centric, content.
[00:02:34] Surbhi Dedhia: So, the first step or the first way is to create. A cluster of topics that is relevant to your brand. You might be doing this for your annual content plan already and if so, that's great. By creating a cluster of topics. I mean, you want together content in different cluster, but also have several different topics within the same cluster. Let me give you an example here. If your business is in into FinTech sector. You can have clusters such as smart financial technologies, advance investing information, wealth management, financial wellbeing or profitability, et cetera. When you have worked on these major cluster, it allows you to have a logical pattern to design your content for your entire funnel. Focusing your thought leadership around key topics within these clusters can give you a head start on your thought leadership efforts.
[00:03:38] Surbhi Dedhia: The second step is to further spread your content into three categories. They are self-promotional. Education and industry-based content. What we are talking about here is for the dividing Content clusters into different categories. Let me explain the three different categories and probably you'll have a better idea of what I am suggesting here.
[00:04:03] Surbhi Dedhia: So the first category is self-promotional content. Self-promotional content is often looked upon by marketers as a low value content because it cannot be spread or hosted on different third-party platforms. But the self-promotional content is the easiest to work upon. Self-promotional content can go on your website, on your company blog page or on the LinkedIn company page, for example. Educational content is the next category. Is a content. Like the word says education. It is, it means the same. So, it is the content to educate your target audience about the technologies, the trends, the insights from your team.
[00:04:50] Surbhi Dedhia: Last type of content category is the industry-based content. Industry based content means the content that is relevant to domain that you operate in, but it is not about your products or services or technologies.
[00:05:05] Surbhi Dedhia: This allows your audience to find you and then take notice of the website. I will, talk about that a little bit later in this episode. But going back to our examples of FinTech industry. Self-promotional content can be something that the company is talking about, how their product or service can actually bring profitability or.
[00:05:29] Surbhi Dedhia: impact the bottom line for the businesses they're selling into.
[00:05:33] Surbhi Dedhia: Educational content can be around topics like. Healthy investment plans, wealth management around the content clusters that they have decided. The last type of content, which is industry-based content can be around. What are the trends in the financial industry? How has technology converging services, those kinds of, um, macro topics are some of the topics that the FinTech companies can think about, while categorizing their cluster into different content styles.
[00:06:06] Surbhi Dedhia: This brings me to the next point, which is number three. Create content equally across these categories. And draw a logical connection between these categories.
[00:06:18] Surbhi Dedhia: This is a step of creating a cohesive brand narrative. And this is the crux of building thought leadership in the overall content strategy to amplify your brand. Drawing logical connections between different categories of content works as the industry-based content will raise questions about adjacent topics that can be addressed by educational content and down the line self- promotional pieces can entice the audience further.
[00:06:49] Surbhi Dedhia: How to type of content is valuable, but it has become so commoditized that really insightful, actionable, and data-oriented thought leadership. Has come into demand.
[00:07:01] Surbhi Dedhia: Centering your content strategy around this paradigm shift will help you differentiate and position you for success. I hope this is making sense so far. And just to reiterate what we spoke about is when you start thinking about your content and you want to drive thought leadership through the content, think about first, the clusters of topics, the connections that you can make within the topics, which are suitable for your company. Second is categorize them, which is into educational content industry based content and self-promotional content. And third is to drive a brand narrative across these three different categories of content.
[00:07:45] Surbhi Dedhia: The fourth point is content distribution. Now that you have content in different categories, you got to think about how you distribute this content. And thanks to this digital revolution, the world that we live in today, there are umpteen number of platforms when brands can publish their content.
[00:08:03] Surbhi Dedhia: Besides self-owned websites and social media handles and newsletters to the databases to spread brands thought-leadership look at different industry publications, online forums and opportunities of speaking at different events to distribute your content. Now as a part of content plan, you can create content across these three categories that I spoke about earlier. But when it comes to distributing, the content to. third-party sites focus on industry-based topics or articles. And why do I say that? Because industry publications are often looking for content, which is industry specific and not brand specific.
[00:08:45] Surbhi Dedhia: Research and review the standing of these publications. Now this is where differentiating, comes across and why do we want to research the publications before approaching them is because. A Highly valuable or highly read publication, will earn you better viewership or readership.
[00:09:04] Surbhi Dedhia: Most of these publications are also willing to give you a link to your company website and another blog on your page. And this is where you put that link to your educational type of content or a link to a downloadable content.
[00:09:18] Surbhi Dedhia: Now that you have thought about distributing the content, the next step is to repurpose content. Repurposing content across various types of content options and across different channels. This is important as your audience consumes content differently at different times today. If you write a great blog post. And post it on your company website, you can take a section of that post and put it with the URL.
[00:09:46] Surbhi Dedhia: Post on the social media channel. This will create engagement and potentially drive people to your website. Then wait for a period of three weeks or a month and posted on LinkedIn. And this will be seen by a different set of audience and also be SEO, indexed by Google. You can get really creative with the one single blog post.
[00:10:09] Surbhi Dedhia: Take a line or two of the post and share it on Twitter. If you have a creative person on the team, the same couple of lines can make a great Instagram post. You can even do a video of the blog and post it on different channels post it on YouTube. One piece of content like that can have an extended shelf life.
[00:10:31] Surbhi Dedhia: And some of these authority pieces can be actually updated annually. So it is fresh and re indexed by Google. And also allows your community to know your latest thoughts.
[00:10:43] Surbhi Dedhia: Now that we have repurposed the content and we know that the importance of repurposing it. The last way to engage thought leadership in the content that you're driving is to provide a platform for your audience to communicate with you. And have a conversation around these technologies as through these conversations, you will hear more questions, which in turn will drive newer content topics for your marketing team. Today, there are multiple possibilities to connect with your audiences near and far be live sessions on the social media platforms or through more private zoom sessions. All right. So quick recap here, there is a systematic approach to amplify your brand with thought leadership content.
[00:11:30] Surbhi Dedhia: The first step is to create content clusters around the topics, which is closest to your brand. Create categories across the content such as self-promotional, educational and industry based. Third, create equal amount of content in each category. And weave a tight knit. Brand narrative. Fourth, content distribution is important across digital channels. And the fifth step is content repurposing for audience. And the last one provides a platform for your audience to communicate and have a conversation.
[00:12:07] Surbhi Dedhia: Monitoring your content performance or I'll say an overall marketing performance. Has become an integral part of marketing operation. Very often, we marketeers end up tracking the not so important metrics. This conversation is for another day, because there are so many metrics that we are able to access these days.
[00:12:29] Surbhi Dedhia: For building thought leadership. Once you distributed the content pay, close attention to its performance is one thing that I'll leave you with. This brings us to the end of this episode. And I hope you got a tip or two about how to weave content around your brand while building thought leadership.
[00:12:49] Surbhi Dedhia: You can definitely reach out to me for a conversation if you have a question on this topic. All right. With that said, I'll see you in the next episode with more interesting content to pique your interest. Until then stay safe and take care.
[00:00:00] Surbhi Dedhia: Welcome to a brand-new episode on the making of a thought leader podcast. Happy New Year and hope that your new year has started off very well. Before the end of the last year, I had shared 10 resolutions one can make the start building thought leadership in 2022. If you haven't yet had a chance to grab that episode, do that sooner than later.
[00:00:32] Surbhi Dedhia: There is still a time to create new goals and action them for the new year. All right. Today's episode is all about amplifying your brand with thought leadership content. Most brands today have acknowledged the importance of content marketing. A brand's digital journey and continuity is heavily dependent on its ability to communicate to its audience.
[00:00:59] Surbhi Dedhia: Competing on digital landscape has evolved to a level where the audience needs to find the right information at the right time and also in the format that he can consume it at that time.
[00:01:16] Surbhi Dedhia: So, this is where thought leadership styled content comes in as a key differentiator. Thought leadership first approach to content marketing is a powerful way to enhance on brands, communications, effort to potential buyers in the decision-making process.
[00:01:34] Surbhi Dedhia: Customers of today read and consume a large volume of digital content to get their questions answered.
[00:01:43] Surbhi Dedhia: Heck even you and me before going for a dinner, select the restaurant based on Google or any other web reviews. Looking up or researching has now become a quintessential part of our digital lifestyle. In the B2B sphere the same rules of apply and yet what has changed is the competition for attention across the web.
[00:02:10] Surbhi Dedhia: Content presented in an innovative and thoughtful and valuable format stands to win. So, how do you do the content, which is valuable, informative. Thoughtful. And innovative? Well, in today's episode, I'm going to share how to amplify your business brand, by creating thought leadership centric, content.
[00:02:34] Surbhi Dedhia: So, the first step or the first way is to create. A cluster of topics that is relevant to your brand. You might be doing this for your annual content plan already and if so, that's great. By creating a cluster of topics. I mean, you want together content in different cluster, but also have several different topics within the same cluster. Let me give you an example here. If your business is in into FinTech sector. You can have clusters such as smart financial technologies, advance investing information, wealth management, financial wellbeing or profitability, et cetera. When you have worked on these major cluster, it allows you to have a logical pattern to design your content for your entire funnel. Focusing your thought leadership around key topics within these clusters can give you a head start on your thought leadership efforts.
[00:03:38] Surbhi Dedhia: The second step is to further spread your content into three categories. They are self-promotional. Education and industry-based content. What we are talking about here is for the dividing Content clusters into different categories. Let me explain the three different categories and probably you'll have a better idea of what I am suggesting here.
[00:04:03] Surbhi Dedhia: So the first category is self-promotional content. Self-promotional content is often looked upon by marketers as a low value content because it cannot be spread or hosted on different third-party platforms. But the self-promotional content is the easiest to work upon. Self-promotional content can go on your website, on your company blog page or on the LinkedIn company page, for example. Educational content is the next category. Is a content. Like the word says education. It is, it means the same. So, it is the content to educate your target audience about the technologies, the trends, the insights from your team.
[00:04:50] Surbhi Dedhia: Last type of content category is the industry-based content. Industry based content means the content that is relevant to domain that you operate in, but it is not about your products or services or technologies.
[00:05:05] Surbhi Dedhia: This allows your audience to find you and then take notice of the website. I will, talk about that a little bit later in this episode. But going back to our examples of FinTech industry. Self-promotional content can be something that the company is talking about, how their product or service can actually bring profitability or.
[00:05:29] Surbhi Dedhia: impact the bottom line for the businesses they're selling into.
[00:05:33] Surbhi Dedhia: Educational content can be around topics like. Healthy investment plans, wealth management around the content clusters that they have decided. The last type of content, which is industry-based content can be around. What are the trends in the financial industry? How has technology converging services, those kinds of, um, macro topics are some of the topics that the FinTech companies can think about, while categorizing their cluster into different content styles.
[00:06:06] Surbhi Dedhia: This brings me to the next point, which is number three. Create content equally across these categories. And draw a logical connection between these categories.
[00:06:18] Surbhi Dedhia: This is a step of creating a cohesive brand narrative. And this is the crux of building thought leadership in the overall content strategy to amplify your brand. Drawing logical connections between different categories of content works as the industry-based content will raise questions about adjacent topics that can be addressed by educational content and down the line self- promotional pieces can entice the audience further.
[00:06:49] Surbhi Dedhia: How to type of content is valuable, but it has become so commoditized that really insightful, actionable, and data-oriented thought leadership. Has come into demand.
[00:07:01] Surbhi Dedhia: Centering your content strategy around this paradigm shift will help you differentiate and position you for success. I hope this is making sense so far. And just to reiterate what we spoke about is when you start thinking about your content and you want to drive thought leadership through the content, think about first, the clusters of topics, the connections that you can make within the topics, which are suitable for your company. Second is categorize them, which is into educational content industry based content and self-promotional content. And third is to drive a brand narrative across these three different categories of content.
[00:07:45] Surbhi Dedhia: The fourth point is content distribution. Now that you have content in different categories, you got to think about how you distribute this content. And thanks to this digital revolution, the world that we live in today, there are umpteen number of platforms when brands can publish their content.
[00:08:03] Surbhi Dedhia: Besides self-owned websites and social media handles and newsletters to the databases to spread brands thought-leadership look at different industry publications, online forums and opportunities of speaking at different events to distribute your content. Now as a part of content plan, you can create content across these three categories that I spoke about earlier. But when it comes to distributing, the content to. third-party sites focus on industry-based topics or articles. And why do I say that? Because industry publications are often looking for content, which is industry specific and not brand specific.
[00:08:45] Surbhi Dedhia: Research and review the standing of these publications. Now this is where differentiating, comes across and why do we want to research the publications before approaching them is because. A Highly valuable or highly read publication, will earn you better viewership or readership.
[00:09:04] Surbhi Dedhia: Most of these publications are also willing to give you a link to your company website and another blog on your page. And this is where you put that link to your educational type of content or a link to a downloadable content.
[00:09:18] Surbhi Dedhia: Now that you have thought about distributing the content, the next step is to repurpose content. Repurposing content across various types of content options and across different channels. This is important as your audience consumes content differently at different times today. If you write a great blog post. And post it on your company website, you can take a section of that post and put it with the URL.
[00:09:46] Surbhi Dedhia: Post on the social media channel. This will create engagement and potentially drive people to your website. Then wait for a period of three weeks or a month and posted on LinkedIn. And this will be seen by a different set of audience and also be SEO, indexed by Google. You can get really creative with the one single blog post.
[00:10:09] Surbhi Dedhia: Take a line or two of the post and share it on Twitter. If you have a creative person on the team, the same couple of lines can make a great Instagram post. You can even do a video of the blog and post it on different channels post it on YouTube. One piece of content like that can have an extended shelf life.
[00:10:31] Surbhi Dedhia: And some of these authority pieces can be actually updated annually. So it is fresh and re indexed by Google. And also allows your community to know your latest thoughts.
[00:10:43] Surbhi Dedhia: Now that we have repurposed the content and we know that the importance of repurposing it. The last way to engage thought leadership in the content that you're driving is to provide a platform for your audience to communicate with you. And have a conversation around these technologies as through these conversations, you will hear more questions, which in turn will drive newer content topics for your marketing team. Today, there are multiple possibilities to connect with your audiences near and far be live sessions on the social media platforms or through more private zoom sessions. All right. So quick recap here, there is a systematic approach to amplify your brand with thought leadership content.
[00:11:30] Surbhi Dedhia: The first step is to create content clusters around the topics, which is closest to your brand. Create categories across the content such as self-promotional, educational and industry based. Third, create equal amount of content in each category. And weave a tight knit. Brand narrative. Fourth, content distribution is important across digital channels. And the fifth step is content repurposing for audience. And the last one provides a platform for your audience to communicate and have a conversation.
[00:12:07] Surbhi Dedhia: Monitoring your content performance or I'll say an overall marketing performance. Has become an integral part of marketing operation. Very often, we marketeers end up tracking the not so important metrics. This conversation is for another day, because there are so many metrics that we are able to access these days.
[00:12:29] Surbhi Dedhia: For building thought leadership. Once you distributed the content pay, close attention to its performance is one thing that I'll leave you with. This brings us to the end of this episode. And I hope you got a tip or two about how to weave content around your brand while building thought leadership.
[00:12:49] Surbhi Dedhia: You can definitely reach out to me for a conversation if you have a question on this topic. All right. With that said, I'll see you in the next episode with more interesting content to pique your interest. Until then stay safe and take care.