Thought leadership helps you to elevate your brand by establishing your authority in your niche. Instead of being just another player in the game, you can position yourself as an expert in your niche. There are many ways that you can become a thought leader, such as by publishing books and white papers, presenting at conferences, and leading webinars. But one of the easiest ways to establish yourself is through online publishing tools.
Here’s your next thought leadership lesson: LinkedIn Pulse edition:
How to Establish Thought Leadership
The methods for establishing thought leadership align with the methods for reaching your audience and providing value to them. One of the easiest ways to establish your thought leadership is to educate. Find out what problems your audience has and then help them find solutions.
You see this all the time in articles and videos in which brands teach their audience how to do something, such as get more followers on Facebook or get more conversions from their email marketing campaign. You can educate through blog articles, videos, webinars, ebooks, white papers, slideshows and much more. Try a variety of mediums so that you can reach more audience members by appealing to a large variety of learning styles and preferences.
The other methods for establishing your thought leadership are not as clear cut, but they can be just as effective. These include illustrating your expertise and your best capabilities, encouraging your employees to find ways to be of service, and finding ways to connect with, engage and serve your audience in a genuine way.
The same methods you use to educate can be used to show off your expertise and your best capabilities, as well as social media and your own website. The key to success here is to lead the conversation around trending topics that are important to your audience and to express a unique point of view. Of course, you’ll also have to be right, and you’ll have to be sharing something of real value with your audience.
You can encourage your employees to be of service by requiring them to blog. Writing regular blog posts will help them to better understand what your customers need and will put them in the frame of mind to find solutions to customers’ problems. Employee-written blogs also help to establish your brand’s authority — assuming that they actually provide unique insights and authoritative information.
Increasing user engagement is a little harder. However, one of the best strategies you can use for it is to present information that provides value, such as solving a customer problem. Users will automatically be more interested and engaged when you are solving a real problem for them.
LinkedIn Pulse
Now that you understand the importance of thought leadership and how to establish it, it’s time to look at LinkedIn’s blogging platform, Pulse, and how it can help. LinkedIn Pulse allows you to publish blog posts and articles on the site that can be distributed to your own connections and to others on the site. You can follow the same guidelines for establishing thought leadership above when writing your posts. Using LinkedIn Pulse in addition to your own blog or another publishing platform has many benefits.
Pulse allows you to reach more of your audience thanks to its inclusion on LinkedIn, which has 340 million members. Not only will LinkedIn promote your content, but users on the site will also go searching for your content based on keywords. Make sure you have optimized your post properly and that you have great information waiting when users find it.
Not only will your reach more people on LinkedIn thanks to the site’s promotion based on user interests, but you’ll also reach more people through organic search. LinkedIn is a major network with a lot of SEO pull, and the better your article performs on the site, the higher it will appear in general search with engines like Google and Bing. Your article can also rank on search just because it is included on LinkedIn. Think of it the way a video can rank when it is included on YouTube, but not necessarily if you host it exclusively on your own site.
Finally, Pulse helps you to reach more users by keeping your content evergreen. LinkedIn will gradually delete your status updates as they get older, but it does not delete Pulse posts. That longevity helps you to stay relevant with users and in search for longer. You can use LinkedIn Pulse to complement your strategy for establishing your thought leadership, or you can use Pulse exclusively. You will start to see results in either scenario.
By establishing your thought leadership, you will improve your brand’s reputation and gain your customers’ trust. You’ll increase sales and get more conversions with less effort. All of your future marketing campaigns will be more successful.
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