Thought leadership has resurfaced again as a popular buzz word in the business world and for rather good reason. Thought leadership is essentially content marketing just through a more internal route. Exploring the passions that drive your business or listening to the experiences of your audiences, these are all part of a thought leadership strategy and a strategy is extremely useful for startups. You’re a startup and you’ve spent much of your beginning phases establishing how you differentiate yourself from the rest of the startups in the world. You’ve pitched your idea and company to so many, focusing on the points of how you stand out specifically. Now that it comes time to set up your thought leadership strategy as a startup, if your first thought is to approach it by differentiating yourself just like everything else, think again. CREDIBILITY AND CONSISTENCY A strategy means developing a plan for growth. The steps you took and the approaches you made to get your startup to where it is today may not be the same steps you will take to catapult future growth and development. When a startup is developing their voice and forming their opinions as a thought leader, it is important to understand the audience. You don’t need to always be different with your voice and views, in fact, often times it is favourable to take a popular opinion or contribute your two cents towards the latest trend. At this stage you are still developing credibility and through this platonic point of view, you exercise consistency and build trust within your community audience. Michael Brenner from Marketing Insider Group validates this, saying that nearly half of the C-suite says they vet an organization by its thought leadership and 81% say their trust increases after engaging with thought leadership content. DIRECTION AND UNITY While thought leadership brings a lot of interesting discussion, when done well, these interesting discussions are still all under a unified overall thought goal and direction. It is not enough to just simply agree with everything that everyone says. You are bound to contradict yourself at some point. Rather than mindlessly following what everyone else thinks, a good thought leadership strategy will participate in bright and lively conversations and maintain their stances over many different thought conversations. This sculpts an overarching theme and mantra for what your startup values and preaches.
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