Stand out in a crowded market. Learn what thought leadership content is, how to create it, and why it drives authority, trust, and long-term growth.
Thought leadership content isn’t just a buzzword, and it’s not a content strategy reserved only for big brands with large audiences.
Authoritative individuals (and yes, that could be you) in all industries, as well as in both B2B and B2C businesses, should be writing industry-important content with original perspectives.
Failing to incorporate thought leadership into your content strategy is a huge loss. Without it, your brand risks fading away into the obscure, because if you don’t add thought leadership content, you’re just saying what everyone else is.
No nuance, no new stories, and no added value.
The greatest challenge for producing thought leadership content might just be recognizing how you bring value to content, whether as an individual or a business, and then harnessing that into a thought leadership strategy that builds credibility, influence, and trust in competitive industries.
In an era of AI-driven search, authoritative content is more important than ever. You can gain credibility in niche segments of your industry, increase your chances of earning visibility in search, and accelerate your sales funnel.
In this comprehensive guide, we’re deep diving into good thought leadership, from what it is, how to do it well, and common pitfalls you’ll want to avoid. Follow this guide, and your content will drive authority, influence SEO, brand perception, and demand generation like never before.
What is thought leadership content?
Thought leadership is content that has original, expert-driven insights. It’s the big content that positions your brand, executives, and/or organization as an authoritative voice inside your specific field or niche.
Thought leadership often refers to long-form content, like articles or blogs, but it can really be any material featuring unique insights, such as:
- Research reports
- Keynote speeches
- Social media posts
- Podcasts
- Contributed articles or podcast guests in industry publications
It’s a mistake for businesses to confine thought leadership content to just the blog. Instead, it should be distributed widely as part of your content syndication strategy, which involves sharing your original content on relevant and authoritative websites. You benefit from reaching relevant audiences who don’t know you yet.
You should also share your thought leadership content on owned channels, such as your social media and email newsletters.
Further reading: What Is Content Syndication? The Basics + How to Do It
The further you can push your thought leadership content, the better it can serve your brand because more people have the chance to see it. Every new impression creates an opportunity, whether that’s someone engaging with your call-to-action, an introduction to your brand for the first time, or reconnecting with an audience who already know you in a meaningful way.
Plus, third-party sources that come across your content may cite it, link to it, or share it with their audience, resulting in more visibility from new audiences and increased digital trust. All of this contributes to increased brand authority.
The goal of thought leadership content is to position companies and/or individuals as authoritative sources in their niche by prioritizing:
- Unique insights
- Original perspectives
- Solutions to emerging problems
With original, value-added content, brands educate, inspire, and influence readers by offering forward-thinking perspectives and solutions to current challenges that audiences face.
By comparison, standard marketing content is designed to inform, compare, or convert readers to buy a particular product or service, and nearly always includes product benefits or transactional CTAs. If your thought leadership is too promotional, you risk turning readers off. We cover this and other mistakes in detail in the common pitfalls section.
Thought leadership content balances:
- Deep expertise: Content is grounded in experience, knowledge, or data
- Relevance: The topic helps audiences solve a topical and common problem
- Accessibility: No matter how complex, readers of all levels can understand it
Why thought leadership drives business impact
Thought leadership is powerful for brands because it positions organizations and/or individuals as experts in the field. If you continuously and proactively show up for your audience with expert insights, data-backed perspectives, and actionable advice that can help your audience with current or future problems, your audience will begin to trust you.
With trust comes better visibility online, due to increased expertise, experience, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T) signals, increased click-through rates (CTR), stronger backlink profiles, and more.
Here, we look at some of these key benefits of thought leadership more in depth and how thought leadership drives business impact.
Increased E-E-A-T signals
Thought leadership is one of the most effective ways to strengthen E-E-A-T signals, as it combines unique insights with credibility markers that algorithms and audiences value.
For example:
- Experience is demonstrated through real-world practice, say, a case study that proves you’ve done what you claim, or lessons learned from working directly in your field.
- Expertise is proven by original insights from subject matter experts who can interpret trends, share data, or offer solutions that go beyond surface-level advice.
- Authoritativeness comes from third-party validation in the form of citations, backlinks, and references from respected sources that amplify your perspective.
- Trustworthiness is a combination of the three other metrics, but you can also build trust with accessible content, transparency, clear attribution, and authentic brand storytelling.
Increased E-E-A-T signals are hard to measure because E-E-A-T is a broad quality framework that Google uses to evaluate content. This framework encompasses many factors and metrics. Therefore, it’s not something you can measure directly with a single metric.
Instead, it shows up in signals that collectively point to credibility. For example, first-hand case studies (experience), original insights from subject matter experts (expertise), backlinks or citations from reputable sources (authoritativeness), and strong user engagement metrics like CTR and time on page (trust) all feed into E-E-A-T.
When these many signals increase, so do your chances of earning visibility across the search landscape—from traditional SERPs to emerging AI-driven search features.
And with that, the other benefits follow, such as increased CTR.
Higher organic click-through rate
As audiences become more familiar with your brand as an authority and a reliable source of expert-driven advice or data-backed perspectives, their desire to visit your website increases, particularly during times of change, such as a major algorithm update or the introduction of AI search on the SEO landscape.
When things change, audiences are looking for a solid, trusted perspective that they can lean on to help them understand what’s happening in an industry, its impact, and how they should think and react to it.
When people look for solutions to problems, they type their problem into Google, and if you are known to them and appear at the top of search results, searchers are more likely to click on your listing.
Here’s an example of content that provides solutions to problems during change:
We knew that SEOs were starting to panic due to fast-paced changes in the SEO landscape, so we created an article titled “The future of SEO is now: Growth and visibility.” Within this article, we detail how search is changing using the latest stats and then cover what SEO specialists need to do now and how they can expand their skillset to meet the changing search demands. The article is informative, actionable, includes timely statistics, and provides many examples that readers can follow.
Search engines of all types (traditional or AI-powered) are more likely to rank your site for the desired search terms if your brand is known as a reliable source.
The article ranks in position one for many keywords and is also featured in AI-generated search results. In the following image, the symbol within the “SERP features” column represents searches where AI overviews are present and citing this article.
It’s thought that increased brand mentions influence rankings. Often, brand mentions come with a link. We know that Google uses link analysis as part of its algorithm because it mentions it in its documentation, which states that Google has systems that analyze how pages link and relate to one another, what topics they cover, and which are most likely to provide the most useful answers to a search query.
Many SEOs believe that brand mentions don’t have to be clickable links to benefit a business, just a mention within content; in social media posts, in other articles, or when another trusted source cites your content, but doesn’t link to you.
Here at Search Engine Land, Andrew Holland says that brand mentions are the new backlinks, and Tanatswa Chingwe says brand mentions are trust signals. If other sources are trusting you, it’s a signal to search engines that they can trust you, too.
And with more rankings and citations comes more visibility and more clicks.
Search Engine Land is a good example of a website that has a strong association with thought leadership content. It’s cited across the search landscape.
For example, a search for “SEO news” on Google brings Search Engine Land up as the first and third rankings.
Google’s AI Mode cites Search Engine Land for the search “SEO news”:
And ChatGPT cites Search Engine Land three times in one answer:
This visibility places Search Engine Land at the top of search results, increasing the click-through rate due to its position, but also because people are inclined to click on sources they believe can provide an authoritative and trusted perspective. This visibility is not accidental, but owing to Search Engine Land’s long-term commitment to showing up, as thought leaders, for their audience.
CTR is a metric that, to some degree, determines the effectiveness of your thought leadership and E-E-A-T.
An increase in CTR indicates an increase in trust.
What does ChatGPT say about your brand right now?
Check your visibility, share of voice, and sentiment in ChatGPT answers, then see what to fix first.
Compare share of voice and sentiment in seconds.
Increased visibility online with unique insight
The increase in CTR section above explains how increased visibility can help your site earn clicks, but there’s another major benefit to thought leadership content when it comes to ranking well. If you have the ability to publish content about a topical subject fast, you might get the top spots in Google.
For example, If someone within your industry has intel on a future challenge, the faster you can publish content about it, the better your chances of reaching the top spots of Google. If the challenge is new to the industry, and you’ve seen it coming before others, you can quickly become that authoritative source.
Here’s an example of that in action from Search Engine Land.
The future of SEO is somewhat uncertain, due to changing algorithms and now the introduction of AI search, which is growing fast. The subject is causing considerable controversy and polarization within the industry. Statements like “SEO is dead” have entered the industry, and many people in the field are worried about their jobs.
Search Engine Land’s article, The Future of SEO provides stats and new perspectives about the industry, where it’s heading in the future, and what SEO specialists need to do to stay relevant. It ranks well now, and it ranked fast after it was published.
AI overviews also cite this piece:
Don’t be mistaken: thought leadership isn’t a content strategy reserved only for big business.
Smaller businesses without the authority and resources of Search Engine Land can capitalize on early opportunities to showcase authority on a niche subject, too. Getting visibility for timely topics is a highly effective PR strategy. It’s called newsjacking, and it’s a tactic where companies attach content to timely news and it often can work quite well because you can add value early and get traction in Google or within AI search engines before anyone else.
Thought leaders are encouraged to leverage breaking news and provide opinion pieces on what it means. That’s because they can add value early and get traction in Google or within AI search engines before anyone else.
We’ll cover this tactic in more detail in the future-focused insights section, which is a core element of effective thought leadership.
Stronger backlink profiles from earned media
If you’re the only one publishing content on a topic, then you’re the only one who can show up. This timely approach to content is what’s known as a link bait strategy, or a way to encourage linking to your content. That’s because if you secure a position in search engines early on, other websites that are slower to publish content will likely research, find your article, cite it, and link to it.
This strategy helps you build a natural backlink profile, which ultimately benefits your website in the long term.
A natural link profile includes:
- Diverse referring domains, meaning that there are different types of websites linking to you. Your links will come from the industry journals, blogs, news sites, or similar.
- Varied anchor texts refer to the text used in the clickable links from one site linking to yours. Many will cite your brand name, but others might link from specific words or phrases from your quote.
- Topical relevance and contextual fit are almost guaranteed when you’re creating thought leadership because those in your industry will be interested in it.
- Nofollow and dofollow links are the likely types of links from this strategy, and you’ll likely get a mix of the two depending on how the linking site handles its links. If all your links were dofollow, it would look spammy. A mix of the two is more natural and is a signal that you’re not backlinking with the intention of manipulating search engines.
- Steady link velocity occurs because thought leadership content doesn’t just get linked to in the early days post-publication, although this is likely when most links will come. After that, you might get fewer links as attention on the topic dies down, but an evergreen perspective stays relevant and can earn citations indefinitely.
- Links from websites of all sizes feed into your backlink diversity and help your backlink profile to appear more natural. A varied link profile suggests genuine interest from a broad audience, and is a strong signal that a site isn’t using backlinks to manipulate search engines. This plays into higher E-E-A-T signals.
In competitive landscapes, these backlinks are authority signals and often determine whether a brand earns further attention or fades into noise.
Improved lead quality
Improved lead quality comes from strong thought leadership, as the content influences buyer trust.
When you establish yourself as an authority in your niche and help your audience with their problems and challenges, you provide value to them upfront.
Thought leadership content is also a signal of genuine care and passion for your role or industry, and this is attractive to buyers who want to work with the most conscientious or the best. Yet, creating high-quality content is no easy feat, and very few do it to the highest standard.
But, if you can consistently create high-quality thought leadership content, you can actively demonstrate what your work and your audience mean to you.
As your content gains a following and your unique perspectives are cited across leading industry publications, you’ll find that lead quality naturally increases as well.
Of course, not everyone who comes across you will be an ideal lead or someone ready to convert straight away. Some audiences won’t be ready to reach out, whereas others will approach you for work.
Thought leadership content can also accelerate long sales funnels by helping the decision-making process. If your audience already knows you and likes what you have to say, then they’ll already be inclined to want to work with you.
For businesses that need to reach a range of stakeholders—such as end users, financial controllers, and/or management teams—you can create content that addresses different pain points.
For example, a SaaS company might show a marketing manager and end user how their product solves a common, upcoming problem in the industry. The content might also mention the cost savings to businesses, so the thought leadership content also impacts financial controllers.
Pro tip: Thought leadership can only drive business impact and improve lead quality if your content strategy supports business goals. Consider the person you want to impress and write thought leadership content that best supports them.
Core elements of effective thought leadership
If you want to create thought leadership that supports your audience and drives business impact, you’ll want to include the core elements that make for effective thought leadership.
In this section, there’s a complete list of other elements to include, but there are also three key pillars that all thought leadership must have.
The three core pillars are:
- Original expert-driven insights that bring unique insights to a current conversation, or start a new discussion that’s relevant and important to the industry.
- Audience relevance ensures the content is tailored to the specific challenges faced by a business’s audience or industry.
- Strong business alignment ensures that the content you’re creating is strategically tied to brand positioning, or brand unique selling points (USPs), to further business goals, such as converting specific audiences for certain products or services.
Let’s look at each of these elements in detail, alongside other elements, such as E-E-A-T and future-focused insights, that help to make effective thought leadership content.
Original expert-driven insights
An original idea or a new perspective on an existing topic is critical for effective thought leadership. The content needs a clear point of view and a strong idea that it can confidently anchor itself to.
Why?
Thought leaders don’t make waves in their industry by following the crowd. Without original, expert-driven insight, you risk fading into the background.
Pro tip: Contrarian takes are very effective, but use them wisely. You must be completely happy to lean into controversy with your opinion pieces. You must be able to integrally and confidently stand with your opinions. Bold opinions can risk turning off some audiences, but they can also allow you to engage and connect with the right ones.
Audience relevance
Your original insights need to be helpful to your audience and actionable so consumers get something of value from you.
You can create thought leadership content on a range of topics, but the most effective original content will be tailored to your ideal client profile. Think about your audience’s specific challenges, priorities, and goals, and create content that resonates with them and helps them.
When you’re speaking directly with your audience, your content has the best chance of pushing your business towards its goals because you’ll be resonating with and attracting an audience that needs your products or services and wants to work with you.
Pro tip: Talk to your audience and find the challenges they face so you can channel your content efforts into the right topics. If you haven’t prepared audience profiles already, go ahead and do that first so you can write to a particular audience.
Audience personas help you build a profile of who your target audience is and include elements like:
- Name
- Age
- Location
- Family status
- Job titles
- Biog
- Challenges and frustrations
- Motivations and goals
- Preferred content formats
- Where they consume content
- Brands and influencers
Here’s an example of a B2B audience persona for Devin Nikolaus:
Looking at the buyer persona’s pain points, Nikolaus struggles to keep up with Google’s algorithm updates and doesn’t like generic SEO advice.
Thought leadership for this audience needs to address these frustrations.
How?
By keeping the content highly actionable, moving away from generic and into specific, practical guidance that directly tackles his challenges and shows him exactly how to adapt to current changes.
Business alignment
Original content that aligns with your business goals has the best chance of having a meaningful business impact because the content serves the audiences you most want to attract and for the right reasons. For example, if your business has a goal to sell more of a particular product to a specific audience, you create content tailored to them.
HubSpot CRM, for example, creates content for an audience of startups. Here’s their landing page for their startup audience. The page features video content with startup stories, insights into how the CRM can help start-ups, and resources specifically tailored to that audience.
HubSpot takes its audience-specific content to the next level with entire events dedicated to its startup audience. Here are just some of their upcoming events for their startup audience:
Building authority within your industry or audiences is always good, but if you build authority with the people you most want to engage, then the compounding effect of increased trust will impact revenue.
Content with an original perspective takes time to create, especially if you include evidence and data. We’ll take a look at why that is in-depth in the next section. If you’re going to invest time into content, then you might as well make it optimally worthwhile by aligning your content with business goals.
To align content with business goals, you first need to understand what your goals are. Then, discuss these goals with sales and marketing, and break them down into actionable aims.
For example, your goal might be to increase your business’s revenue by 20% this year. But this goal is broad, and it doesn’t help you align your thought leadership content, nor does it give you any direction on where to take content. It doesn’t give you actionable steps to take in order to achieve it.
Instead, a better goal would be a SMART goal.
SMART goals are:
- Specific: “Increase sales by 20% by generating 75 new SaaS product signups per month by targeting mid-sized marketing teams looking to streamline campaign reporting.”
- Measurable: “We’ll use Google Analytics to track conversions, including trial signups and demos from content.”
- Achievable: “We’re currently earning 45 new trial signups per month through blog content. Given our 15% month-over-month growth rate and additional focus on tailored CTAs and audience-driven content, reaching 75 signups is achievable within the next quarter. Share content across social media channels for optimal reach.”
- Relevant: “Marketing managers struggle with siloed data and inefficient reporting. By publishing thought leadership content that offers fresh perspectives on analytics challenges—and clear, actionable solutions—we’ll position our SaaS as the trusted tool for overcoming these issues.”
- Time-bound: “With this refined content and CTA strategy, we’ll achieve 75 new monthly signups within three months.
With a goal like this, you might start creating thought leadership in a way that is:
- Appealing to the right audiences. Based on the example above, you would create thought leadership for marketing managers. You might talk about reporting and the challenges and solutions to analytics, and the value of reporting holistically (not in silos).
- Trackable in Google Analytics. Provided that your analytics are set up correctly, you can always view metrics such as page views. To take it a step further, set up conversion tracking, such as form fills from your content, or use URL parameters to track how your content performs when shared from specific channels.
- Shareable across other marketing channels, like social media or email. When you’re writing the article, you might write posts and snippets as you go, or you could add a process at the end of the content production, asking AI to do this for you.
Further reading: In this article on content strategy, we share a comprehensive guide on how to strategize content. There’s a step-by-step guide and a process that enables us to publish an average of 42 articles per month.
Evidence-based arguments and data
“Evidence” is a key component of demonstrating E-E-A-T to search engines and readers. We know this because Google added the “E” for evidence to E-A-T most recently.
In its guidelines about creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google says:
“Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?”
Ranking helpful, reliable, people-first content is a priority of Google’s (and any other search engine) because this type of content is what people most want to read.
In its documentation, Google directly states that clear sourcing, evidence of experience, and the author’s background all contribute to great content.
You can add these components to your content, but it’s not always easy to do so.
Why?
Experts are busy, and finding availability in their schedules to create content can take time, plus the experts might not be natural wordsmiths. And if you get into sourcing original data, the challenges and work compound.
Creating evidence-based, data-backed thought leadership isn’t always easy or fast, but that’s why it’s so effective for those who can do it.
A gold-star example of evidence-based arguments and data-backed original content done well is HubSpot’s trends reports. HubSpot’s reports marry marketing industry insights with organizational and individual E-E-A-T signals, which build authority for the brand and its team.
HubSpot gathers data and publishes annual reports across multiple areas of marketing. For example, its Social Media Trends Report is based on surveys of more than 1,000 marketers worldwide, compiled into actionable insights.
Here’s an example page from their social media report:
HubSpot doesn’t stop at one thought leadership report.
It repurposes the same data into additional long-form content, such as related blogs (like this one) on social media marketing.
This is thought leadership done well.
One asset is transformed into many, extending the lifespan and reach of the original research while reducing production costs; the production of the second asset will be significantly less than the first because a lot of the hard work, including data gathering and processing, is already done.
HubSpot also spotlights its experts. In the social media trends report, Amy Marino, Head of Brand Marketing, is featured with a quote highlighting the overarching takeaway. This not only reinforces the authority of the report but also builds E-E-A-T by connecting insights to credible individuals within the company.
Referring to the Google guidelines, these strategies are recommended for creating helpful and reliable content. As readers, we like to see added value from expertise and data.
It’s fair to say that not every brand has access to large numbers of audiences, such as 1,000 marketers, to gather data at scale for unique, data-driven, expert-led content.
But don’t let that stop you from creating thought leadership.
Instead, look at what you can do.
- Leverage expertise from subject matter experts within your business. You can interview them, use their name and background to build E-E-A-T, have them write content, or ghostwrite articles for them to edit and byline.
- Use your own company experience or case studies as evidence. If you want to prove your SaaS product saves thousands per year, demonstrate it with a case study.
- Data sets, even small ones, add value. You don’t have to survey over 1,000 marketers to conduct research that brings value and offers a unique perspective. Do what you can.
Future-focused insights
The goal of thought leadership is to publish content ahead of the curve so that you can quickly build authority as a leader. You want to offer an early and unique perspective on an upcoming or future challenge, before or as the industry is discovering it.
In circumstances where you’re reacting to news or industry changes, do it promptly.
The faster your response is, the fewer opinions are out there, which in turn means that you are more likely to be seen and cited.
The graph below shows the lifecycle of news-related content and the ideal point to cover it as thought leadership.
As soon as news breaks, you want to cover it as close to the point of breaking news as possible. This means that by the time other websites are publishing content, they’re researching and reading your piece. The idea is that they will cite you as the source.
Most developments happen in cycles; the interest in news or an industry change peaks and normalizes until it’s completely done.
Not all thought-leadership pieces follow a steep decline to becoming normalized or done-with news, though. Some pieces are more evergreen, and you can use them as educational pieces for years.
Pro tip: In circumstances where your thought leadership has a fast cycle, find other ways to repurpose it. For example, take opinions and repurpose the insights into actionable snippets that help audiences and then share them across marketing channels.
Balance practical applications and actionable advice with empathy
Valuable content helps audiences. By valuable content, we mean things like practical applications and tips on how to apply learnings from data or unique perspectives to benefit your audience.
Without the advice or practical applications, thought leadership can come across as arrogant instead of authoritative. If your thought leadership is simply recognizing challenges or industry pitfalls without bringing something helpful to the discussion, it’s just an arduous complaint that’s likely to turn readers off and potentially do more damage than good to your brand’s perception.
You want to apply actionable advice at every step.
Here’s a good example:
In a recent data-driven study, Semrush studied the Impact of AI Search on SEO traffic and, importantly, shared learnings.
For many SEO specialists, the findings from the study might’ve been quite scary; the study found that AI traffic will surpass traditional search traffic by 2028, and some specialists will feel unprepared for what’s coming and maybe unenthused about the changes. This could lead them to question whether their jobs are safe and whether the skills they’ve developed for years are still useful.
The subject of AI search and SEO is quite polarizing in the SEO community because there are mixed opinions on the impact. Some studies show that AI search will take over, and needs a special set of skills, whereas others argue that the SEO practiced today is sufficient.
Without the shared learning component of Semrush’s data-driven thought leadership, there was a risk that the article could scaremonger.
Instead, thought leadership should recognize the emotions triggered within readers, fear, for example, and then empathize with that feeling and provide value to this audience. In order to achieve this, every single point included in the Semrush study article has a “What This Means for You’ section.
The following screenshot presents one section.
Within the section, you can see:
- A guideline on what this means in plain English, no jargon, nothing complicated, just accessible insights from the writer, Rachel Handley, who has a decade of experience in content marketing and SEO. For example, the line “even the smallest traffic gains from AI search make a huge difference to your bottom line” in this article.
- A “Good news” callout that flips the narrative positively. The bold text helps it to stand out and makes this more inviting to read.
- Clear directions on what readers can do are displayed in bullet-point format for easy skimming, e.g., “present information in an easily equitable or ‘chunkable’ way.”
- Tool recommendations and a screenshot showing readers how SaaS tools can help, e.g., Semrush’s Enterprise AIO tool. Naturally, this is the tool the brand wants to promote strategically in its thought leadership. The chosen tool aligns with business objectives, meets a need of the target audience, and is highly topical.
When providing content about upcoming challenges, lean into offering actionable advice to frame the content positively.
Information gain and authority
Information gain refers to how much new, valuable insight your content contributes compared to what’s already available online.
Avoid repackaging existing knowledge.
Your thought leadership needs to add depth, data, nuance, or perspective that genuinely improves the reader’s understanding. Only then can you demonstrate authority signals in your niche.
Kenny Maciver, Business and Technology Editor at Seven, warns against thought leadership that lacks an original point of view.
He says:
“Thought leadership content needs to go beyond the obvious. A lot of what is produced rehashes existing ideas. So, unless the content expresses originality of thought, gravitas, and a real passion for the subject, the result is unlikely to gain traction with the audience. Worse, the absence of any genuine value for the reader can be seen as a waste of their time, thereby undermining business credibility rather than enhancing it.”
Maciver states that thought leadership without original thought won’t gain traction with the audience, and it could even undermine business credibility.
For subject matter experts, especially those who don’t write or have marketing experience, adding value or new information isn’t always obvious, because to them, it’s all run-of-the-mill.
To access the trove of information in your subject matter expert’s mind, the marketing team might need to get a bit more creative. Consider recording conversations or holding meetings about the business and industry more generally. Pay close attention to what experts within your industry are saying so you can jot it down for your next thought leadership piece. You could also ask for opinions on current conversations, particularly where there’s controversy or polarization, so that you can present the facts and statistics in your content.
Your own curiosity is key. Follow up on their answers or thoughts with questions so you can pull out stronger insights from your experts. Not everyone will provide the level of detail you need, and they might not know how to access the most important insights without your questions.
Formats and channels for thought leadership content
It’s common for thought leadership to be expressed through long-form articles, but effective thought leadership can be so much more. You can share thought leadership in a range of formats, and each format serves a different role in the funnel, which is why you can reuse the same perspectives in multiple formats.
For example:
- Long-form articles establish authority by deep diving into topics your audience cares about. Paired with SEO, this format is ideal for evergreen subjects that can earn clicks and engagement for years. Semrush’s study on the impact of AI on SEO traffic is a great example of this kind of article.
- Research reports provide stats and data that build trust with audiences. Simply gathering data and having the means to do so builds trust because readers can see that your brand is well-connected and large enough to access and summarize insights from large datasets. Plus, you can spotlight your team members as having an overarching perspective. HubSpot excels at this kind of reporting with its trend reports on various aspects of marketing, like this one for social media trends.
- Keynote speeches position subject matter experts at the center of conversations. If you secure a spot at a major event, such as a conference, where decision-makers are present, you can influence them. Because the conference chose you as a speaker, it acts as a significant vote of confidence, building your authority and increasing your chances of influencing attendees. Salesforce does this well. Their CEO, Marc Benioff, opens their annual conference, Dreamforce, which is described as the largest tech conference in the world. By Benioff opening the conference keeps him and his brand front and center in the minds of attendees, and guests also benefit hugely from the CEO participating as a keynote speaker.
- LinkedIn posts enable individuals to connect directly with their target audiences. This is a powerful tool for building relationships because thought leaders can go deeper into conversations with connections in the comments or, if a post resonates, through LinkedIn’s Messenger. Lily Ray is a good example of a thought leader in the SEO space who skillfully employs this tactic. She has over 40,000 followers on LinkedIn and shares her insights and unique tests into SEO and the development of AI while engaging with her SEO audience.
- Podcasts, particularly guest opportunities as opposed to owned media, enable thought leaders to share perspectives with broader audiences. The conversation or interview style podcasts allow for exploration and clarity through natural conversation. Podcasts like The Tim Ferris Show amplify the voices of inspiring people, from founders and CEOs to athletes and performers.
- Contributed articles in industry publications extend the reach of your prospective audience by tapping into new channels within your specific industry. This can help you to build trust with those who are familiar with you, too. For example, a SaaS CMO could contribute to a TechCrunch article on the future of AI in marketing.
Pro tip: When creating your first piece of thought leadership, consider how you can effectively share your perspective and strategize for optimal delivery. For example, if podcasts are effective in your industry, you could create pitches for industry-specific podcasts and send them ahead of time to gauge interest and drum up excitement so that your subject matter experts can then share new and exciting insights with the podcast before someone else does.
Strategies for creating thought leadership content
As mentioned above, creating effective thought leadership is a process. Below we’ve outlined three key steps that will help you find the right theme, add authority, and ensure your content gets to the right audience.
Step 1: Identify key themes that align with both brand expertise and audience needs
Thought leadership lives at the intersection of original content, audience relevance, and business alignment. You want to find the topics and content that belong here and ensure your brand or its authoritative individuals have something distinct to say about those topics.
To uncover these themes:
- Review customer feedback such as surveys, online reviews of your brand and competitors, customer support tickets, and even sales calls to find out recurring problems or pain points. You can speak to sales and customer support teams, too.
- Analyze industry trends and monitor emerging topics in your sector to find opportunities where your brand can add a fresh perspective. Websites like Exploding Topics or Google Trends are helpful here. Both websites provide trend graphs for industries or keywords so you can explore what’s happening before these topics reach the peak of the news curve. Google Alerts is also good for setting up email alerts for specific keywords or newsworthy topics.
- Leverage proprietary data like HubSpot does in the trends example above. To obtain data, conduct internal research like focus groups or surveys, interview experts within your organization, and set and review benchmarks.
Step 2: Bring the authority
Remember the guidelines from Google’s helpful content documentation? E-E-A-T is important, and you can weave this through every thought leadership content that you produce.
Proven authority comes from experience. And subject matter experts bring that lived experience. When you connect their expertise directly to your content, you make it more credible and impactful. Drawing on examples from above, the Semrush article with the study findings was authored by a writer with over a decade of industry experience and HubSpot incorporated insights from its own brand marketers.
You can include brand-level storytelling that brings a level of authority to thought leadership by demonstrating years in the industry or in-the-field experience through case studies and successes for your clients.
Step 3: Take your insights to the market
Collaboration with PR, SEO, and content teams is essential to ensure amplification and consistency in your thought leadership pieces. Even the best thought leadership fails if it remains hidden; you must do the work to get eyes on your content.
To maximize reach and get your content to the market:
- Collaborate across teams: Align PR, SEO, and content marketing to ensure consistent messaging and amplification. It’s one thing to write the content, but if it’s not optimized for search, people may never find it.
- Diversify formats: Repurpose insights into blogs, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts, and social posts to meet your audience where they are. These formats are best decided upfront so you can consider them in the content creation phase. If you know social media will write a certain number posts across what channels, you can have AI repurpose the content into snippetable posts.
- Engage proactively in industry opportunities: Join panels, contribute guest articles, and take part in industry discussions to extend your reach beyond your own channels. If a company or leading journal covers a topic relevant to you, get involved because their audience likely overlaps with yours. Partnering with others builds visibility and credibility. When another trusted brand includes you on their platform, it acts as an endorsement, strengthening your authority even further.
SEO and discoverability considerations
Where possible, there should be a strong connection between SEO and thought leadership. If what you’re creating is truly a new idea with no coverage elsewhere, then search might be low, since you need audiences to be aware of a concept to search for it.
In most cases, you can, at the very least, tack SEO onto thought leadership content; you just need to get creative.
For example, your product might have the solution to a challenge, and your thought leadership content might showcase the solution, but if the audience doesn’t know the solution exists, they’re not searching for it.
Instead, you’d target the challenge.
Here’s an example using Google Trends:
The keywords “how to track AI SEO” (blue line in the image above) and “AI SEO tracking software” (red line in the graph above) both gained traction from mid-July; however, the informational keyword “how to track AI SEO” received considerably more search volume. This shows that audiences are more aware of the challenge (tracking AI SEO) than they are of the solution (software).
For optimal visibility, thought leadership content should target the challenge and provide the solution (the software) while balancing empathy for the reader’s situation and genuinely helpful, actionable content.
However, your future-focused content should lead to increased search over time.
Here are some ways that you can connect SEO to thought leadership:
- Use search trends to identify growing opportunities in a niche. If a topic is gaining traction in search, audiences are becoming more aware of it and are looking for answers. Create the content, secure the rank, and help your users.
- Thought leadership strengthens your brand’s visibility overall, and therefore, SEO data, like increased clicks, CTR, and brand search, are all indicators that thought leadership is paying off for your business.
- Original, authoritative content contributes to E-E-A-T signals, which can help your site overall because you write in-depth content, add information gain to SERPs and AI, focus on niche topics, and provide the content that AI search tools can synthesize, and gain natural backlinks from other authoritative sources.
AI’s role in thought leadership: balancing opportunity with over-reliance
Artificial intelligence is transforming thought leadership in two key ways:
- Elevating the thought leadership process through speedy analysis of large data sets and content writing or repurposing.
- Synthesizing niche perspectives that audiences are searching for, allowing even small businesses to claim their stake in groundbreaking industry advancements by earning mentions in AI search tools.
Here are ways in which AI supports the thought leadership process:
Analyze vast datasets and surface insights quickly
One of AI’s most powerful contributions to thought leadership is its ability to quickly process and interpret large data sets that would take humans weeks or even months to unpack.
For example, you can feed survey results, thousands of customer reviews, or extensive industry reports into AI tools and generate synthesized insights ready to inform your next thought leadership piece in minutes.
You can also use tools like Sybill AI to record the meeting and provide a complete transcript. Then, you can put the entire transcript through AI and ask for the key insights to be surfaced so you can decide which subject matter insights are deserving of a thought leadership piece.
Repurposing assets across formats and generating new content
AI takes the heavy lifting out of repurposing by synthesizing long-form content.
For example, AI can transform a whitepaper into a LinkedIn summary, complete with analyst-facing visualizations.
Or, you can create video scripts or other blog posts that help build your content hierarchy around a particular topic.
There are many pros to using AI for content generation, such as speed and efficiency, repurposing, and research, but there are some cons that AI users must be aware of. It lacks experience, hallucinates facts, and it can get repetitive, too.
Governed well, by human beings, and AI can be an incredible tool. We cover the warnings, risks, and governance in more detail below.
Anticipate industry shifts
AI tools like Exploding Topics use AI and human analysis to categorize trends for you. You no longer need to watch every single trend manually; you can rely on AI to do it for you.
Synthesizing niche perspectives
Beyond analysis and content creation, AI tools enhance your online visibility by synthesizing your niche perspectives.
When you’re ahead of the curve and have secured visibility across the search landscape with your thought leadership, there’s a higher chance you will be cited before the topic is saturated with ideas and perspectives from many people.
The beauty of AI search is that people search for specific and niche problems, and you can find a way in here by being the only person to address those niche problems in detail.
For example, instead of simply searching “thought leadership examples,” within AI, people get specific about their situation. Someone looking for thought leadership examples might ask for something like: “Can you send me some thought leadership examples for a small B2B marketing agency? The agency focuses on SEM strategies, and founders want to become thought leaders in this space.”
That space between the keyword and the query sentence is where you have a real chance of finding niche perspectives and getting found by searchers.
Personalization at scale
AI enables thought leadership to be more relevant to specific or niche audiences with personalization at scale. AI can segment audiences and their challenges based on their behaviors, pain points, and interests, then adapt content to meet each group’s needs.
A single whitepaper or article, for example, can be reworked into multiple variations: one tailored for executives, another for practitioners, and another for industry newcomers—without multiplying the workload.
The benefit?
Your thought leadership piece will address problems for multiple stakeholders, which will help with decision-maker buy-in, which is how you accelerate the sales cycle.
A warning about thought leadership and AI
Generative AI must never replace human expertise, and this is especially important in thought leadership.
Why?
Because AI cannot come up with new, unique perspectives, it can only synthesize what already exists, and consistently publishing these generic takes on thought leadership erodes trust.
Thought leadership must include unique insights.
AI is a content co-creator that:
- Accelerates research
- Summarizes reports
- Generates draft outlines
While human leaders provide:
- The unique judgment
- Storytelling and experience
- Credibility that makes content resonate
The solution to over-reliance on AI is governance. Your AI governance frameworks set boundaries about how AI is used for your company or organization. For example, you could specify that AI is not used to write thought leadership content. Full stop. Or you could outline a process for when it is used, such as requiring a subject matter expert to review and edit at certain stages of the process.
Your governance might also include rules and boundaries for content quality and assurance, transparency and attribution, tool valuation and ethical vetting, or bias detection, and guidelines for monitoring and measurement.
Further reading: New to AI governance? Read our comprehensive guide on AI Governance, including what it is and its key pillars, so you can establish boundaries that keep your team and brand safe.
Looking forward, the possibilities with AI and thought leadership are powerful. AI can enable predictive and interactive thought leadership, from forecasting industry trends to offering dynamic benchmarks and real-time dashboards. We’re already seeing this take place in real-time with trend tools like Semrush’s Enterprise AIO tool.
AI may take thought leadership from static reports toward living, evolving experiences that redefine audience expectations.
Measuring the impact of thought leadership
You cannot measure the value of effective thought leadership by metrics alone. Instead, evaluate its success across multiple dimensions because the success of thought leadership transcends the immediate impact of clicks or even sales directly after publication when the piece gets its initial engagement.
The true success of unique content includes reach, long-lasting authority signals earned, and tangible business outcomes.
It’s essential to consider both quantitative KPIs, such as traffic, conversions, and backlinks, alongside qualitative signals, including executive mentions, media coverage, and an increase in brand reputation. Together, these data points show whether your efforts are not only visible but also valued.
All that said, numbers and data are essential.
It’s what helps take gut feelings into tangible evidence that a specific approach is working.
Although the metrics alone cannot build a complete picture of the benefits, they help build a data-driven picture of the content’s success to build future buy-in from teams.
Here are some ways you can measure success.
- Brand sentiment refers to the overall understanding and emotions audiences associate with your brand. Brand sentiment is generally categorized as overall “positive,” “negative,” or “neutral.” You want your brand perception to improve over time. To discover your brand sentiment, use brand monitoring tools like Semrush, analyze reviews, and send surveys to your audiences and monitor how answers change.
- Share of voice is a measure of how much your brand is talked about in relation to others within your industry. You can track this metric using tools like. For niche thought leadership, try reviewing brand mentions in AI using a brand performance tool.
- Organic visibility refers to how often your site shows up organically, in Google. Free tools like Google Search Console allow you to assess improvements in rankings, SERP features, and what your thought leadership content is ranking for.
- Backlink acquisition refers to the number (and quality) of links to your website. Quality citations from trusted publications indicate your insights are viewed as authoritative and worth referencing. This is a strong signal to Google (and readers) that your site is an authority. Backlink analysis tools let you review the types of sites linking to your site.
- Engagement on key platforms refers to actions taken on your most important channels. For example, you might measure comments, shares, and meaningful interactions across LinkedIn, email, or industry forums.
- Lead quality refers to the relevance and potential value of the leads acquired. Look beyond volume to assess whether thought leadership is attracting the right decision-makers and accounts. Talk to sales or use lead scoring models to help vet the quality of leads.
Common pitfalls to avoid
If you rush your thought leadership or don’t provide the necessary value for thought leadership to be effective, then it falls flat and becomes just another article or content asset on your website.
The most damaging pitfalls include:
- Shallow content and generic insights disguised as thought leadership. If you’re repackaging surface-level information or age-old insights without adding new value, you’ll undermine your authority and waste your audience’s time.
- Overused clichés like buzzwords or predictable takes dilute originality and make your content forgettable.
- Disguised product marketing occurs when a piece reads more like a sales pitch than an insight, credibility erodes, and audiences disengage. Remember that thought leadership is selling a brand and an authority, not products.
The takeaway?
Credibility is earned when insights are fresh, forward-thinking, and genuinely helpful.
Thought leadership as a growth lever
Thought leadership is a high-effort, high-impact content strategy. And it’s a long-term investment in brand equity and competitive differentiation.
To drive impact on business objectives, consistency in production and quality is key. Just as important is authenticity and integrity. You must stand firmly behind perspectives that are useful for your audiences.
Don’t just play it safe.
Commit financially and with the right mindset for long-term growth, and thought leadership will help your brand stand out in the digital world through clicks, AI mentions, and audience engagement. It will also become a critical growth lever for your brand’s real-world influence as you develop real-life authority signals.
For more help creating and measuring thought leadership content, read:
- Content marketing strategy: A practical guide that covers everything about content marketing, including processes that help us publish over 40 articles per month on average.
- Master GA4: Google Analytics 4 tips & tutorials, which contain key metrics SEO specialists must track, and workflows that show you exactly how to do it.
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