Is your thought leadership strategy as solid as a rock? Let's get real—having a strategy…
Get Your Content to Those Who Care the Most
In order to build your brand and get your message out as a thought leader, you need to get your content out to the market on a consistent basis. Seems like a pretty obvious statement and with all of the great tools available today it is actually easier than ever to do so. The problem that I see quite often is that thought leaders focus too much on the tactics and not enough on a strategy. Ultimately, what you need to do is to have your tactics support the strategy. The strategy for getting your content out is actually pretty simple. You just need to know the important question of “Who cares?” Who cares most about your ideas, models, methods, processes, etc.? Get clear and get specific when answering that question. There may be several categories of people that care and that’s actually a bit of a problem. What you need to do is prioritize those categories against your current business model and offerings and focus on those that have the highest potential value to you. Once you’ve identified those that can have the highest impact on your business, it’s time to shift your tactics to insure that the effort you are investing in getting your content out is laser focused on getting in front of those that care the most (that you can be of service to). We’ve had a massive shift in how people not only consume information (videos, blogs, podcasts, etc.) but where they get that information. There are outlets devoted to almost any topic you can think of. While they typically have a much smaller following than traditional media outlets, the level of connectedness is exponentially higher than general or mass media outlets. Use the shift to your advantage. Understand who cares the most about your work and put yourself in their shoes. Where are they getting information from? What blogs are they following? What webinars are they viewing? Target those outlets with your content. It doesn’t take any additional effort and the results will be dramatically better than getting your work in front of those who don’t care.
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Peter, I would love some specific steps on how to (1) decide who cares about my work and (2) where to find who cares about my work. Please share….
I agree Heidi – I would like to see some steps as well.
“While they typically have a much smaller following than traditional media outlets, the level of connectedness is exponentially higher than general or mass media outlets.”
This is an excellent point for start-ups and writers trying to break into a niche. It’s easy to get caught up and distracted by the number of followers. But you’re absolutely correct–it’s not necessary about how many people care, but WHO cares.
I find that just developing individual profiles around my various client types, was instructive. I’ve now written profiles of four of the kinds of people I want to reach in my business — their education level, role in the organization, issues they face in their work, and how my work can help them avoid problems and reach opportunities. You might try this for your clients — or those you want to be your clients. One take-away for me, after this exercise, was that most of the people with capacity to send me business are female, 20s to 40s, educated, wired: This means that, among other platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter, I need to be on Instagram. Not my medium of choice, but then I’m not my client. So, ask yourself — if you construct some profiles of your client and prospects, what will you learn about their media? What publications do they rely on, both in print and online, where you can publish information that will show you to be helpful and knowledgeable?
Your article was very enlightening as I begin my own blog in the next several weeks. Understand not only the content of what I am trying to accomplish, but as you said, to make sure that I am engaging with the connections and people that will help me grow and entice is very important. It is the backbone of what I am trying to begin. Thank you for the observation and helpfulness.
PS By the way, one of the focused that I will be writing about is speaking about aphasia. Do you know what aphasia is?
A Few tools to find target audience.
1. Use targeted Facebook ads
2. Use Social Lead Freak to scrape top users on any Facebook page
3. Use LinkedIn groups.
4. Use Twitter with hash tags
5. Use Twitonomy to target Twitter users by interest groups.
6. Follow influential people on YouTube
7. Use Omgili.com to monitor online forums