Unless you have a marketing background, you may not have considered the difference between thought leadership and content marketing. Isn’t all marketing about finding the optimal way to sell my product or service?
Well, yes and no.
It’s true that most small businesses spend their marketing dollars on content marketing. They write blog articles, post on social media, send emails to their subscribers, create videos, and maybe run ads. The goal of all of this is to build awareness, increase customer engagement, generate leads, and ultimately, drive sales.
So why do small businesses need thought leadership?
Thought leadership often arises out of a desire for something bigger than driving sales. Sure, thought leadership pieces like in-depth industry articles, keynote speeches, and business books can also build awareness, increase customer engagement, generate leads, and yes, drive sales. But the primary goal of thought leadership is to build credibility, authority, and influence within your industry. It’s about sharing unique insights to SHAPE the conversation.
Content marketing is essential to running a successful business, but nothing boosts your return on investment like having a well-thought out thought leadership strategy.
90% of c-suite leaders say they are more receptive to sales or marketing outreach from companies that consistently produce high-quality thought leadership, according to the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report. And yet 30% of producers of thought leadership say their organizations underutilize thought leadership as a marketing tool. This is a huge opportunity for smaller, more agile organizations that can think outside the box.
So, let’s look at five key differences you will want to keep in mind as you build a thought leadership strategy for your company:
1. Thought leadership aims to educate, pioneer ideas, or spark conversation, while content marketing aims to sell.
If you have ever tried to pitch an expert article to a publication like Forbes, Business Insider, or Harvard Business Review, you may have noticed in the guidelines they warn against submitting anything overtly promotional. This is because the readers of these publications want to read thought leadership, not content marketing.
Thought leadership doesn’t push a product or service. Instead, you want your idea to stand on its own. You want to challenge your readers to think about something differently and then seek you out so that they can have a conversation with you. By sharing your point of view on a controversial topic within your industry, you increase your credibility as an expert in your field.
On the other hand, content marketing is often very formulaic. It identifies a pain point, offers actionable solutions, and then positions the organization as the best solution. There is always a call to action at the end. And there’s a good reason to stick to a formula when you’re creating content marketing. Formulas work!
2. Thought leadership is not something AI could write, while content marketing can be AI-generated.
AI doesn’t have a point of view. So while it’s pretty good for writing technical, formulaic stuff, it’s not going to sound like a human wrote it. I believe this will always be the case. No matter how smart technology becomes, I don’t think it’s possible for computers to capture the depth of human experiences, emotions, or empathy.
This is another reason there is increased demand for thought leadership. We crave content that connects with us on a human level. Because thought leadership must have a point of view—your readers want to know what you think, not what others in your field think, about your area of expertise—it stimulates our brains in exciting ways.
We have all the articles we need about the 10 best ways to scale your service-based business or the 7 apps you need to organize your business. What we don’t have is enough articles from business people in the trenches sharing their experiences and lessons learned and analyzing the nuance of each recommended technique.
3. Thought leadership solves big picture, future problems, while content marketing seeks to solve specific, present problems.
Content marketing can help you meet your immediate revenue goals. This is why whenever I meet with a prospect to talk about our thought leadership services, I make it very clear that the strategy we’re developing is not designed to increase sales immediately.
With thought leadership, we’re working on a long-term visibility strategy. Of course, as any good coach (sports, financial, business, etc.) will tell you, a long-term strategy is best when paired with a short-term strategy. So we prefer working with clients who have a clear content marketing plan that they know how to execute.
Even though the writing we do on the thought leadership side covers different topics, it’s still important for us to know what the content marketing strategy looks like so we can amplify it. For example, we worked with a team that was selling a software product. They had plenty of content marketing designed to engage customers and move them through the sales funnel. Our job was to write articles on behalf of the leaders to show that these leaders were experts in software development, not just spokespeople for the product. We made sure that the thought leadership related to the value proposition and highlighted key differentiators for the company as well.
4. Thought leadership allows you to steer the industry narrative, while content marketing shows where you fit into the narrative.
For as much as marketers talk about the need for brands to stand out from the competition, there is a limit to how much you want to stand out in your content marketing. Different needs to be intentional, not just different.
This is one of the reasons why we prefer to write thought leadership over content marketing. In many industries, you simply can’t be disruptive when it comes to your content. Or at least if you want to be disruptive, then you also have to be willing to risk confusing a good part of the market. A better marketing tactic is to lean into the ways in which your company fits the narrative, but in a surprising way.
On the other hand, thought leadership gives you the freedom to test boundaries and push the industry forward. You can be the champion of underrecognized groups and challenge the big dogs without worrying about confusing potential buyers.
5. Thought leadership creates a halo effect that boosts company recognition, while content marketing increases the credibility of your services.
When you regularly share thought leadership, you start to catch the attention of people with bigger platforms. We have had clients for whom we’ve created LinkedIn posts get local and national media attention because journalists are often looking for little known experts on social media. They may want to be the first to write a profile on an up-and-comer or to interview a local thought leader about a particular news angle.
We have also written and pitched articles to publications that have led to offers to become a regular, monthly contributor. This kind of recognition for you as a thought leader certainly won’t come from content marketing alone. Even if content marketing ensures that prospects come to sales calls primed with a certain level of trust, it’s trust in your product or service, not necessarily trust in you as an industry leader. To create that level of credibility, you need to think about your content differently.
Make sure that your thought leadership is not just sad content marketing.
Finally, it’s important to know the difference between thought leadership and content marketing, so that you avoid writing bad thought leadership. Successful thought leadership is not just content marketing with the references to products and services removed. If you want to stand out as a thought leader, you have to find the idea that you want to be known for and hone it until it feels like yours—uniquely yours.
This explains why so many thought leaders put themselves out there by talking about their work. When you create presentations, keynote speeches, even LinkedIn posts, you practice sharing your big idea and you get invaluable feedback that you can use to shape that core message. Everything comes back to finding that Big Idea and then sharing it with CONFIDENCE.
At the Pocket PhD, we turn subject matter experts into Big Idea Experts. We do this by pulling out your best ideas and giving you the thought leadership strategy you need to build your empire. Want to know how? Get in touch with us.
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