What makes good thought leadership?

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Many companies create content that they describe as thought leadership, but our observation after more than a decade working in this sector is that few do it well. All too often, this content lacks structure, is insufficiently engaging or does not seem to have a clear set of objectives in mind. The result is that a company’s thought leadership output simply gets lost in a sea of similar-looking white papers and reports without a clear purpose or benefit from a marketing perspective.

At FT Longitude, we help clients to create thought leadership assets that cut through the clutter and have a real, lasting impact. Although every project has slightly different aims and objectives, we believe that good thought leadership typically shares a number of common characteristics. It is:

Impactful
There is no point creating thought leadership content that fails to connect with people. An effective project requires content that resonates with its intended audience, sparks conversations and stands out from the crowd. To create impactful thought leadership, companies need to seek out the “white space” in terms of themes, and set research hypotheses that are likely to yield findings that cause audiences to sit up and notice.

Companies also need to ensure that they list of costa-rica cell phone numbers can measure this impact – either through the amount of press coverage achieved, or through analysis of the audience’s readership/usage patterns.

Insightful
We have all seen thought leadership that is bland, obvious or platitudinous. To really stand out from the crowd, good content needs to be provocative and surprising. All too often, companies are scared of expressing a strong point of view in their thought leadership. But without taking a stand, they will find that their content simply does not resonate.