Becoming a thought leader in your industry can be instrumental in generating substantial amounts of business. To become a thought leader you’ll need to slightly alter your approach to marketing and develop thought leadership products that you can communicate to your audience.
When you search for thought leaders in any industry, the one thing that they all have in common is that they have built up a substantial following on social media. Therefore it is essential that you develop a sound social media marketing strategy that focuses on encouraging people to engage with you.
Branding your page
The branding of your social media pages is of paramount importance because they are essentially your shop windows! A few things that you need to think about when it comes to branding your page are:
- Developing a strong cover photo that instantly tells people what you do
- Completing the about section to properly sell your skills
If you are just getting started with social media and could do with a bit of help with getting to grips with everything, this social media cheat sheet will help you a lot!
Create and share valuable content
You won’t be the first person who has decided to have a go at becoming a thought leader in your industry, and chances are that there are tons of other people thinking about it as you are reading this. However, what can set you aside from everyone else is your content.
Think about the sort of content that your audience will be most interested in and make sure you produce compelling content that is centred on those topics. The chances are that you will be able to identify ways to improve on what is already being done and by providing industry leading content you will be well on the way to establishing yourself as a thought leader.
A valuable skill of any thought leader is the ability to work and interact with other people. A great place to start learning how to work better with others and captivate audiences is to focus on engaging your own employees. If your own employees are motivated to work for you and respond well to your management and leadership styles, it should be that wider audiences would also be very receptive of the content that you amplify.
When a customer calls you or you receive a question via email or over social media; you are going to respond! People will be much more likely to pay attention to what you have to say if they can see that you are open to interacting with them.
If you find yourself becoming extremely popular and being inundated with questions, identify key customers, influencers and advocates and make sure that you prioritise responding to them. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how well received you will be just because you interact with people.
Getting your content and thoughts out there in the early stages can be tough, and if you don’t have an advertising budget war chest, you could do with a little help. A great way of doing this is to contact other thought leaders who share your target audience (but don’t offer the same content you do).
An example is digital marketing bloggers. Each blogger tends to focus on a specific aspect of marketing, such as SEO, PPC or Social Media. However, their target markets will largely overlap as they are essentially sharing content with digital marketing professionals. Therefore, there is an opportunity for various bloggers to help push each other’s content so that they all benefit and increase their profile. Just remember to only contact thought leaders who don’t talk about the same topics you do.
Through hard work and implementing the suggestions in this post, you’ll find yourself rapidly becoming a thought leader in no time.
