How to break through the noise, amplify your ideas, and drive business impact.
Thought leadership is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a strategic necessity. But with more content than ever competing for attention, the old playbook needs a rewrite.
At iResearch’s Thought Leadership for Tomorrow event in late May, I joined leaders-–including Craig O’Boyle from Google, Sonja Jacob from Cisco, Anna Bernasek from State Street, Josh Rosenfield from PWC, Karen Feldman from State Street, Joe Lazer (FKA Lazauskas) from PepperContent, Jeff Potter from KPMG, and Lucas Rivers from Morgan Stanley, among others-–to discuss what it takes to lead in this new era.
I’ve been doing Thought Leadership for more than a decade since I started my comms-marketing career at Edelman, where we pioneered a lot of early models in content marketing. We built the first models of corporate newsrooms, then used owned media to drive corporate reputation and developed innovative frameworks for using content to drive business through account based marketing and lead generation.
So it seems like a good time to reflect on the last decade based on what I heard from other leaders in the field. Here are some of my observations:
Be Bolder to Break Through the Noise
Thought leadership is now a core part of modern communications. Many companies have learned the power of using content and modern digital technology to communicate directly with stakeholders. But with growth comes saturation—and greater competition for attention.
The new imperative: Companies need to be more bold to break through the noise of an increasingly crowded marketplace of ideas. Bold makes some people worried, of course. And the risk-averse culture of many companies, especially in highly regulated industries, means it will always be a grind to be original. But the bar is higher than ever—and playing it safe all of the time won’t cut it.
Ground your content in proprietary data or research that underpins a bold point of view. That is a tactic we used at Meta when I led Facebook IQ (later Meta Foresight) and created future trend reports based on original research, anonymized proprietary user data and creative storytelling. This tactic gave us signals about culture and the permission to be more provocative about emerging trends, like the rise of body positivity, or creative AI or the reprioritization of smaller social circles with the people that matter most.
“You’re bringing new data to the world,” said Lazer. “You’re bringing that fuel that’s going to power the entire media and content ecosystem, that’s only gonna grow more and more valuable as we have more really derivative, generic content out there.”
Another tactic is to get closer to your clients to find some kind of white space. Morgan Stanley hit a nerve when it spoke to its financial advisors and asked what their LGBTQ or allied clients wanted to see from a big firm. That led to the creation of thought leadership content that addressed investor appetite for investment options that target LGBTQ equity and inclusion. In addition, the insight inspired the launch of an index that lets investors to screen investment portfolios for any sort of controversies or policy indications as it relates to LGBTQ issues.
“There was a vacuum of any content on this topic as it relates to LGBTQ issues and investing and specifically from a brand like Morgan Stanley,” said Rivers. “Being able to fill that void really allowed us to have that outsized impact down the road.
Make Distribution as Important as Creation
Content creation has certainly improved—but distribution is still the Achilles’ heel. Too often, it’s an afterthought. In the early days of thought leadership, I always found it odd that companies would invest great amounts of energy and resources to create quality content, but very little time figuring out how they were going to get that content into the hands of audiences. Poor distribution, which leads to poor engagement and low ROI, is still the industry’s dirty little secret.
One panelist revealed distribution was their biggest challenge. A common issue: not enough time or resources to brief client teams, arm them with the right content, or build momentum internally.
There are some solves here though based on my experience that were validated by several panelists. One, tie your thought leadership to major comms or marketing moments. That creates a natural deadline—and mobilizes teams to amplify content across multiple surfaces. “It’s just so critical to align the topics with the business, the marketing team and the comms team,” said Feldman. “That way it becomes just a core anchor piece, and very often that’s what the press will gravitate towards in advance of a big event.”
Another great tactic is to use employees as a distribution channel. In an age of declining trust, employees are your most credible and underused brand ambassadors. Getting employees to share content is also a surefire way to get your content placed in the feeds of people’s social media channels, which is how most people find information these days. Increasingly, people are more inclined to follow other people than brands or publications.
“Businesses should use their people more,” said Jacobs. “It’s one of the most impactful distribution methodologies that didn’t cost anything. You don’t need a tool to do it. You can create a squad of people that are there for amplification.”
Build up the profiles of your internal thought leaders and use them as messengers. Lazer calls this the “Substackification” of media. “The most powerful distribution mechanism you have for your content is the internal thought leaders, the ones that are going to be super relatable to the target audience you’re trying to reach, as well as other influencers in your industry, subject matter experts who have the ear of your target audience,” he said.
Cracking the Attribution Code
In the early days of content marketing, we quickly realized that attribution was the holy grail of thought leadership. As companies poured money into thought leadership, the question became: what’s the return? How do you tie content to some concrete ROI or tangible business impact? You needed some kind of answer to continue or grow the investment.
Advances in software tools, content analytics and measurement systems have definitely made it more possible to track the impact of thought leadership. The value of content on reputation has become easier to measure, no doubt. There are the typical reputation and content engagement metrics that companies use as a proxy for business impact. Direct reputation metrics like NPS scores, changes in sentiment and share of voice, or indirect ones such as page visits, unique visitor growth, social media followers, time on page, scroll depth, return visits, bounce rates, etc.
Monetizing content remains tough—and there’s no silver bullet. The truth is that every thought leadership program requires the creation of its own bespoke measurement framework based on business priorities. These frameworks typically leverage a blend of quantitative analytics, attribution modeling and qualitative signals to track impact throughout a marketing funnel. You will also need to deploy marketing tools such as HubSpot, Marketo or Google Analytics and others to track content performance.
For example, you can track top-of-the-funnel lead generation metrics through gating downloads of content and capturing emails of people who filled out forms; or you can track newsletter signups after reading articles, or landing page conversions with calls to action. Further down the funnel, you can track sales qualified leads by measuring which pieces of content produced further engagement, or compare average deal size of leads influenced by thought leadership. You can measure some degree of conversion to sales by tracking whether deals with thought leadership engagement closed faster than those without it.
Finally, qualitative indicators could include feedback from your sales team, customer testimonials or inbound communications from senior buyers responding to content. As with distribution, it’s critical to bake a measurement and KPI framework into the content strategy from the very beginning so there’s alignment on what success looks like.
None of this is easy, but in an age of increasing efficiency and data-driven decision-making it’s becoming more critical to build the knowledge, skills and systems needed to measure the performance and return on thought leadership.
The future of thought leadership won’t belong to the loudest—it will belong to the most original, strategic, and data-savvy. We have the tools. We have the talent. Now we need the courage and intention to be bolder, build smart systems, and deliver content that fuels reputation and the bottom line of a business.
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared as an article on LinkedIn. See more from Spencer at linkedin.com/spencerante
