I'm constantly recommending thought leadership as a marketing strategy and, frequently, getting a lot of pushback. It started when I was a consultant, but continues to this day. It usually goes something along the lines of:
Other Person: It's easy to be a thought leader in the fields you just showed, but what are the rest of us ordinary businesses supposed to do?
Me: Actually, I'm a strong believer that there's virtually no such thing as an industry or niche where thought leadership, interesting/share-worthy content and great inbound marketing can't work. Marketers said personal finance was boring until Mint. They thought online dating couldn't be a thought-leadership play until OKTrends. They said elevator installation couldn't have anything good, then Grant (an Australian firm) launched their great news section including awesome infographics like this one and earned #1 rankings for "Home Elevators."
Other Person: But those fields all have existing examples to draw inspiration from; I bet you can't name anyone in my particular practice of XYZ
Me: That's the best part! If no one else has risen up to claim the mantle of thought leadership; it's an even greater opportunity. The early adopters in thought leadership and content marketing often receive a disproportionate quantity of attention from links, social media, press, etc. ROI may take elbow grease, time and patience, but if you find a way to earn the attention of the web, you have a chance to build a truly amazing brand.
Other Person: There's no way we can invest that much energy and budget in thought leadership for marketing. We'd need to build a platform to host the content, we'd have to do design/artwork, we'd need to brainstorm and research the ideas, run them past layers of management for approval and
Me: In five minutes, you can have a Wordpress installation running in a subfolder of your site. You can do the brainstorming and execution by yourself at first - let's dream up three ideas together right now; I bet we can do it. If you really need design work, look how Cyrus did it here (for under $500). If you can't get executive approval; create your own blog/site, show them the success you're having and then 301 it over.
Other Person: Well, OK, maybe.
Me: Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful marketing story.
Other Person: Umm... My name is Steve.
Me: Oh. Sorry.
I recently gave this talk on the Death and Rebirth of SEO at Webcam in Bend:
And right after the talk, had very similar conversations to the above with several folks in attendance. To be fair, I completely understand how challenging the process of building thought leadership on the web can appear. But when you get into it, it's fun, addictive and surprisingly effective. There's no better way, in my opinion, to create a great brand on the web and simultaneously supercharge your social media, SEO and traffic-growth than thought leadership.
p.s. I've been enjoying a lot of shorter blog posts from folks like Brad Feld (whose post on thought leadership partially inspired this one) and Fred Wilson, so I thought I'd try my hand at slimming down my usual 1,000+ word count posts. Hopefully it's just as impactful/useful. Oh, and slide 65 in the deck above is a duplicate; sorry 'bout that.
Truer words have never been blogged. Go big or go home!
And in terms of dealing with the challenge, remember that no one starts out as a thought leader. You get there over a long series of failures (and successes). It's OK to fail and learn from it, it's OK to iterate and do better each time out.
But if you never try, you'll never succeed. Or lead!
In my pre web marketing life, one of the funniest job I did was "creator of video collections": you know... 24 VHS collection about nothing. But it was a successful business, because you can make interesting practically everything (and video production at that time was perceptually more costly than the at least the 60% of inbound marketing nowadays).
The secret? Imagination and thinking out of the box.
Let's see 3 very boring or "what the he'll I can do" markets:
1) Pisciculture industry. To breed fishes for the food industry is not the sexiest job surely. But can offers great ideas. For instance creating a fishipedia and/or creating also a kid section because a) fish is important in the development of kids and b) because Nemo and Bob Sponge are telling us that you can create an universe under the sea that kids love.
And you have the knowledge in-house: biologists, nutritionists and you marketing/communication team
2) Earthworm breeding industry. I mean: they are worms! What the hell I can make to stand off talking about worms?! Really a lot, if you think well... just change fishes with bugs and you can reply the first case.
3) Funeral industry. Believe it or not, I would die to have a client in this industry! For the simple need to exorcise death, death can be really amusing and - admit it or not - death attracts the attention of people. The easy way should be to exploit all the oddities of the industry: orbital coffins, coffins with alarm button in case of apparent death, coffins for extremely fans of some stars, coffins for mascots... You can conquer the meme space with this stuff
But you can also create more "serious" content: antrophology, forensic, history...
As you can see, everything can be interesting and thinking out the box and not just in the strict terms of your industry and the canonical way to communicate your industry, you can stand and gain visibility.
Does it cost? Yes, it is not for free. But not necessarely you have to spend thousands of $$, also because many times you have what you are looking already done. For instance, a client of mine printed a wonderful catalogue, literally filled with beautiful infographics about its products: obviously we will recicle them for the website in order to create original and different product pages.
And if you have produce new stuff, check if you can do it internally (as the case of the fishipedia above), or you can use many of the sites exisiting (freelancers, odesk, 99designs...), even though my warm suggestion would be to invest in a young skilled junior web marketer in-house to make grow in your business taking care of your online marketing actions.
Ok... sorry again for loooong comment.
The secret? Imagination and thinking out of the box. <--- not anything most companies are able to do, which is why they find it difficult.
When the decision maker is also the knowledge holder, then it is possible, but ithis is rarely the case
That is why, at the end, I suggest that the real investment in not online first, but offline, with human capital.
This deserve 2 Thumbs up sir! 'When the decision maker is also the knowledge holder, then it is possible, but ithis is rarely the case'
Can't agree more!
WOOT!! agree.... +1 for each of you!!
I have thought extensively about how "thought leadership" works in local search. For a while I jumped on the "it doesn't work in local" band wagon but i have to say I have learned otherwise. One thing to realize is that you dont have to be a thought leader amoung your specific industry folks, you can be a thought leader in a geo based community. Guest blogging for local news blogs or writing articles for papers and even speaking at chambers. Not many are willing but those that accomplish local thought leader status gain a key to the city. :-)
Totally agree to what you say...
" I completely understand how challenging the process of building thought leadership on the web can appear. But when you get into it, it's fun, addictive and surpisingly effective."
Inorder to establish the thought leadership it is essential to establish an identity and a brand awarereness first or the other way round also holds true that when you share knowledge and have a quality social media presence your identity and brand get established. But all this again has to be done in pace and sync with the constant changes emerging in the SEO field to have maximum outreach and benefit.
Google says, there is a combination of more than 200 ranking factors which determine the rankings of the search results and the priorities keep on changing, there are approx. 500 changes to the Google algorithm every year, and Google runs around 20,000 tests every year.
If there are atleast 200 ranking factors then there are atleast 200 variables which can be assessed over a period of time for the various correlations and causations in the SEO metrics you want to measure.
To keep pace with this in real time with as much accuracy as possible is surely a challenging task. That is the main reason why SEO is becoming more and more specialized and evloving more qualitatively for overall presence.
The presentation on the Death And Rebirth Of SEO is simply excellent !
I think as the awareness and understanding of the true meaning of SEO is getting more and more widespread people are gradually coming out of the mindset of getting quick results and now do understand that they have to work on it to earn them because though SEO is a form of marketing it is completely different from advertising and other forms of marketing .
Great blog post and I would love to implement what you are suggesting about thought leadership, the only problem is I am in the SEO industry like many readers here and my niche/industry already has a thought leader- SEOMoz!
Every discipline has/had more than one thought leader...
for instance psychology had Freud and Jung and physic had Eisntein and Heisenberg.
If there were just one thought leader that will be a "thought-dictature" :D
I remember when I entered the SEO field, it felt incredibly crowded with thought leaders as well. I'd say to pick a niche and win there. If you're huge on Google+, that still needs a thought leader. If you love SEO for web apps, there's no one in that space. Many countries and even individual geographic regions are in sore need of expertise. Any of those approaches can likely earn you great results over time.
The value that you produce through your contents and social actions must establish, differentiate and create a demand for your potential usefulness to your target audience. To create such type of value you either need to develop a high level of subject matter expertise or hire one. And developing or hiring Subject matter expertise is expensive. It require resources. Sometimes lot of resources: time, money, man power and above all creativity (how you can make a boring topic interesting). That's why 'Thought leadership marketing' is not for every business. That's why so many blogs fail. That's why social media and content marketing doesn't work for everybody. Another reason of TLM failure is the faith based approach while taking business decisions and measuring success or failure. Smart organisations take decisions on the basis of solid data and not faith or gut feeling. If we can overcome these two hurdles then it is possible to become a thought leader in any field.
Well said. In my experience, nothing worth having comes easy and the biggest wins are always those that require short term sacrifice for long term gains. That's precisely how thought leadership marketing works.
I think an excellent way of summing up thought leadership is a quote by Tim Ferriss,
"The conclusion, in retrospect, is simple… It all came down to learning how to spread a “meme“, an idea virus that captures imaginations and takes on a life of its own."
Hahaha ! love the visual representation of "Microsoft" at slide 59 (with the guns)
Thanks for another heartfelt post Rand. We are struggling to find our thought leader niche. What we do know is that we love SEO (and always will) and will continue to find a place for it among all of the new noise that rises in current trends. We know the value of SEO and work every day to communicate it to our clients.
I read Brad's post on thought leadership and am taking this quote with me:
...“this is why we are doing what we are doing and why it is important” instead of “hey, look at me.”
Thanks for sharing. As always, we are proud to be part of the moz community!
Rand this was good!
Yes, the SEO that want lot of link building and link Spamming is dead and I truly agree with the concept of SEO Reborn.
SEO Change dramatically after Panda, People who were not actually flexible enough to change, actually breaks. Social and Search joins hand together for the better search results.
But,
I believe that core strategy is still the same design website and produce the content for users 1st and think for search engine after users. Produce viral yet valuable content for users and once user will love you, you will notice the constant increase in sales and traffic on your website.
I think this is the time when SEOs a.k.a link spammers have to decide ‘either change or die!’
Wonderful Read!
"I think this is the time when SEOs a.k.a link spammers have to decide ‘either change or die!’"
I agree with you about this one! The time when there were SEOs, Web Designers and Marketeers is DEAD. The new term should be "Web Strategist" or something like that :)
The idea of thought leadership is really the impetus to moving away from merely talking about creating a content strategy and moving toward actually creating something useful. The Grant elevator example was exactly what I needed to achieve "breakthrough" with a client!
My apolgies for just jumping in here. I need help answering an seo question and all i can find is archived answers that are three years old.
Here is the question. Is it ok to make 20+ domains that are specific to key words just to point back at your site. There is a local roofing company that has been around for 20 years and he has bought every keyword specific domain possible and built blogs with copy and paste useless content, some company videos, and amazon roofing products. All of the blogs are similar in looks and content and all point back to the main site. The biggest problem is that even the blogs are ranking in the serps. So he occupies 124 and say 78 of the Google search results.
Are these black hat tactics ? Door way pages?
Thanks do much in advance.
gabby
This amazing post inspire me this : "We SEO experts we need to be transverse as possible, we need to understand market needs, social interactions between people and we need to fix the technical challenge". Waouuuuuu
Wow, wow, wow - just an awesome deck! A trip down memory lane as well as a summary of everything that I have read of late. Thank you so much for compiling.
Fantastic post, Rand.
Along with your other comments, the one that hits hardest with me is "Marketers said personal finance was boring until Mint." I know a guy who was obsessed with Mint and due to its success, it was very easy to forget what topic it was about (a "boring" one).
Obviously we want our content to appeal to those in the industry, but when you create content that is interesting and engaging with everyone and anyone (whether they're customers or not) then you know you're onto something special...
Excellent post as per, although now I appear to have about 50 other awesome articles that I have to read.. It's a hard life.
you dont have a video of this somewhere do you :) I think this would be a great meeting presentation for my team.
Yup. 99designs, oDesk, there are great designers out there. Putting together a professional looking infographic is not hard to do (or rather, to find someone else to do!). The key as always is the marketing.
Excelent post, thanks
Thanks for the thought provoking post.
True words,Nobody start a perfect picture failures teaches us to get the perfect paths. Failures teaches us to learn what we lack.
So true, I've had great success with my content marketing/thought leadership strategy and it's just been a couple months. As a video producer I do have the somewhat unfair advantage of being able to produce weekly video content to illustrate my points and help with SEO and social media distribution. It's amazing what can happen when you start sharing yoru targeted expertise to people who are looking for it- somehow you become an expert! I'm curious how other people are using video in blogs effetcively, mayeb I can improve on my first round of success?
Dane
[link removed]
Spoken, errrr written, like a true entreprenuer! I like the term "thought leader" better than "expert". I wonder if one could become a self-proclaimed thought leader...with perception being reality and all.
Looking forward to seeing Rand here in Charlotte tomorrow for the Search Exchange Conference here!
Jay
I love the idea of thought leadership and think you're spot on. PS - Sorry about the lackluster crowd in Bend. Thought your presentation was great!
One thing marketing people forget a lot is that most companies are not going for a big win. This means that A) those that go for the big win have a big advantage and B) In-house marketers should be careful using the thought-leadership approach.
To me, SEOmoz is actually an example of a company going for the big win. It's no surprise to me to find this viewpoint on this blog. For example, SEOmoz probably invests more than others in stuff like branding and conferences, which makes many people scratch their heads. To me it just seems like it wants to dominate the market of SEO knowledge and software, which means being everywhere that SEO is.
However, I think the reality of business is that you don't need to have thought leadership to be successful, if succes = making money. In fact, I think many companies waste money and resources to create thought leadership. SEOmoz (understandably) promotes its own methods because they know they work, but I'm afriad marketers will follow this approach blindly.
In the enterprise market, for example, companies often fight over 100 customers. Once they have them, the costs of switching are usually too high. If you think B2B buying decisions are driven by rationality, I recommend reading the Buyersphere Project by Gord Hotchkiss. Being the thought leader in the broader industry isn't as important as leveraging knowledge of buyer behavior and funnelling in customers accordingly. The narrower your market, the less broader market recognition matters, and the more targeted tailored interactions matter.
I love the slide, thanks a lot Rand! :)
I also love the way how Google update this year. But most of people in my country who are working on SEO still just know very basic things like: Optimize websites for SE, target keywords and link buidling. O.o
I'm so bored of the way people doing SEO in my country. Everyday I search on google.com.vn, most contents are spammy. >.<
Excellent Work Sir Rand, I am still trying to Look into the matter that how fast the Process of SEO is growing thanks for the Share......!!!
Wonderful presentation, Seems like ...I have just travelled back in the past of SEO ....that slideshow is much like Time Traveling machine and apart of that it's informative to show the difference between The SEO of past and SEO of Today. thanks for it.
amazing presentation, already downloaded it and ready to use it.
thanks a lot , Rand.
wonderfull post, wonderfull infos, and creative thinking! what emotion reading it because you get it all ! thanks for it!
Truly said regarding thought leadership. When we promote our new idea to our manager or respective person i think it's one type thought leadership. Thought leader can focus on minor scale changes and get innovative ideas to the existing projects. They are requiring for huge organizations.
Brand awareness and social media marketing is required now because of rapid changing in current market. In SEO perspective things are changed and we need to update our self for the each and every small point which is impact to our business. I must say “presentation on the Death And Rebirth Of SEO is merely exceptional” Thanks Rand for this wonderful post.
tôi không biết tiếng anh.đang làm SEO cho web htt://techmartdanang.vn
đó là một doanh nghiệp đà nẵng
I couldn't agree more with this - some superb ideas and a great overview of where things are likely to be heading.
We see a huge number of "SEO is dead" posts but few actually go on to say what the future of SEO is about...
I particularly liked "Winning the SEO battle at every step in the purchase path" I hadn't seen the graphic before but it is a very interesting visualisation of the necessary process.
yes i agree with the post as seo that need a lot of link bulding and spam is no now that attractive it needs to be reborned thanks this link also provide excellent seo information i like it https://seowebsitepromotions.com
I went through SEO Reborn presentation and there is ton of data in it. Problem is that unlike SEO, social media related efforts are still very much immeasurable.
Are there few key steps that can yield 80% results? (Of course, KPIs need to be defined first)
Interesting concept saying SEO died and was 'REBORN'... Things have certainly changed since i started in the industry years ago!
It's amazing how many profitable niches STILL don't have any though leaders. As an seo, it's a great time to help companies step up to the plate. The best part about content marketing is that you don't have to be a large company to succeed!
I completely agree with everything in this post, Rand, but there is a difficulty. One that larger organisations in particular have to deal with - sign off. Unfortunately in many companies who focus on traditional media, this kind of strategy is hard to implement for a number of reasons:
Aside from going things alone with an unofficial blog, do you have any tips for overcoming these issues?
Thought leadership is about unintentionally throwing down bad-ass, memorable quotes without even trying... "If no one else has risen up to claim the mantle of thought leadership; it's an even greater opportunity."
This moment deserves a BOOYA.
This was a great post on not only the direction of where SEO is heading but more of how I should be proactive in an internet environment. Thank you very much .
It's only as complicated as you make it to be! Becoming a leader in your industry takes work, there is no doubt about that. But I think businesses psych themselves out of even trying because they can't connect the dots from one point to another. They don't think they have the time/budget/guts to get it done when they really do!
Top class post Sir, or you can say "All in one SEO pack" after this every SEO will get confidence him or herself and will feel some proud that we are belong to one of the major field of business...