Thought Leadership Redefined: Transform Your Existing Content Into a Trust-Building Machine

“We’re spending $8,500 a month on ads. But the leads are too small and not ideal fits. We need a better way to attract prospects.” A friend shared this over coffee recently.

“Are you publishing thought leadership?” I asked. “Not really. I know we should be. I know it’s important for our marketing strategy. And our team has solid subject matter expertise. But we don’t have the time to create it,” he said, looking dejected.

“Do you have a unique take on the industry?” I asked. “An angle that brings a different perspective?”

“Yes,” he responded. “Several people on our team are Microsoft MVPs and they do webinars and speak at conferences.”

Excellent, that’s a great place to start.

Thought leadership is vital for tech firms. This type of content doesn’t just attract leads already looking to buy. It can also stimulate demand by prompting business leaders to rethink their strategies and challenges.

TL;DR: While thought leadership is crucial for business growth, it’s hard to produce. That said, there are some easier ways to get started, especially now that we have AI tools to help. Most firms have a goldmine of existing content that can be repurposed to jumpstart their thought leadership program. This article walks you through the steps to transform existing materials, such as webinars, courses and presentations into a robust thought leadership strategy, without the need to create entirely new content from scratch.

Thought Leadership can Stimulate Demand

He’s right. Thought leadership is crucial for their marketing strategy. As a systems integrator selling in the Dynamics ERP space, they’re in a highly competitive market. They need to clearly differentiate. 

My friend knows it’s crucial for their marketing strategy. However, he and his team are swamped. They don't have time to figure out a strategy, create content, and work out how to get it in front of their target audience.

ISV = Independent software vendor that offers an add on to a 3rd party product. 

ERP = Enterprise resource planning software like Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. 

MVP = an award from Microsoft recognizing exceptional community leaders for their technical expertise, leadership, speaking experience, online influence, and commitment to solving real world problems.

According to the latest Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, thought leadership does far more than just create a favorable impression of a brand. It “spurs business leaders to rethink their challenges [and] is a powerful tool for stimulating demand.…”

Here are just a few of the details from that report: 

• 73% of decision makers trust thought leadership more than regular marketing content. They view it as a more reliable basis for assessing a provider’s capabilities and competency.
• 75% of decision makers say thought leadership has led them to research a product or service they weren’t previously considering.
• 60% said thought leadership has made them aware they were missing out on a significant business opportunity.
• 29% said they realized they were more vulnerable to a potential threat than they previously thought.
• 60% say good thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium price to work with that organization.

What is Thought Leadership?

“But wait,” you might be thinking. “I’ve heard the term ‘thought leadership,’ but isn’t that for the really big names? We’re not thought leaders.” I hear this a lot from small B2B tech firm owners. But here’s the thing - you probably have thought leaders on your team without realizing it.

Thought leadership isn’t about having a massive LinkedIn following or delivering keynotes at 50 conferences a year.. It’s about sharing your hard-earned insights to help your target audience solve real problems.

Your founding team and key people probably have combined experience totalling 100s of years. That’s a goldmine of knowledge. You’ve weathered tech storms, guiding clients to safe harbor. You’ve conquered implementation and integration nightmares. You’ve solved problems that would make most people’s heads spin. That experience is thought leadership material.

Many small businesses get stuck thinking they need to create groundbreaking content from in-depth studies that are the stuff of TED talks. But that’s not true. Often, thought leadership is about taking complex ideas and breaking them down, or connecting dots in new ways. Your team does this every day for your clients.

Remember that supply chain management course you teach to help onboard new manufacturing clients? Or how about those webinars you host to educate leads and build awareness of problems you help solve? Do you have MVPs on your team who share tips and approaches with technology at conferences or in blogs? Do you have consultants who seem to be always in demand to solve issues for clients? That’s thought leadership in action. You’re already doing it – you just need to capture that content, repurpose it, and get it in front of the right audience.

As you saw above, the Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that 73% of decision makers trust thought leadership more than regular marketing content. They view it as a more reliable basis for assessing a provider’s capabilities. Your thought leadership helps your prospects TRUST your organization.

The goal of thought leadership isn’t to show off. It’s to demonstrate that you understand your clients’ challenges and have the expertise to help them navigate from where they are to where they want to be. It’s about building trust and credibility, which ultimately leads to more meaningful conversations with potential clients...and more sales.

Thought Leadership’s Role in Dark Social

It’s important to note right up front that the impact of thought leadership is not always easily measurable. Much of its influence occurs through what’s known as ‘dark social’ - private sharing in channels like direct messages, emails, Slack, conferences, and face-to-face conversations. While these interactions can’t be tracked with your marketing automation, they’re where your thought leadership has its most profound impact. Keep this in mind as we discuss strategies for creating thought leadership content. Worry less about analytics and more about creating quality content that gets people talking.

The Challenge with Creating Valuable Thought Leadership

Clearly, thought leadership is important. But despite recognizing its importance, many businesses really struggle to create consistent thought leadership content. Some doubt that they have something meaningful or original to say. Others don’t think they have the time or resources to produce the content. 

And I agree. Creating high quality thought leadership is not easy. 

However, there’s probably a solution hiding in plain sight. If you’re like most firms, you probably already have a wealth of knowledge embedded in your training materials, webinars, and presentations made to prospects or at conferences. By strategically repurposing this content, you can quickly establish a strong thought leadership presence without starting from zero.

So in this article, I’m going to propose a way you can repurpose existing content to create valuable thought leadership material.

You Probably Already Have Content. It Just Needs to be Repurposed.

As we talked, I learned that my friend has been teaching a multi-week course on supply chain management for his clients and prospects. He also speaks regularly on webinars and at conferences. His course and talks are highly valued by his manufacturer and distributor clients.

This is a perfect place to start repurposing content for a thought leadership strategy. I’m betting you’re in a similar position. So let’s dig into how you can use this type of content to get started.

Start with Short Takeaways from Long Form Content

Start by taking the recording of one of those webinars and breaking it into smaller, bite-sized topics. From this, you can create blog posts, LinkedIn posts, and even video snippets to share key takeaways.

Develop Lead Magnets 

Next, are lead magnets. Lead magnets should be more comprehensive than posts and serve as the logical next step for leads who find the shorter form content valuable.

If that webinar is recorded, put that behind a registration wall and use it as a call to action for people who read the smaller articles.

If it’s not recorded, plan to offer it live (virtually) and have leads register for the event. This approach helps build a lead list without starting from scratch. Then save that recording for an “evergreen” lead magnet.

Alternatively, you can use the AI suggestions I’m giving below to turn the full webinar into an e-book. 

Use AI Tools to Help with Repurposing

AI tools like Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude.ai can help streamline the process of creating both the short-form and long-form content. Here’s a step by step approach. (Note - my purpose here is not to teach you how to prompt the AI. That’s a whole different article.) 

1. Transcription: First, get a transcript of the recorded webinar using a tool like Otter.ai. It can both transcribe and give you summaries and key takeaways. This step turns spoken content into text, making it easier to repurpose.
   
   For example, with his permission, I recorded the conversation I had with my friend. I used Fathom.video to record, transcribe, and provide me with AI-generated notes. The paid version of Fathom gives me several different options for the notes. I’ll look at several to find the most important takeaways. I can also ask it’s AI questions about the recording to dig deeper. (affiliate link) 
   

• Summarize key points: Next, review the original slides and AI notes to identify key takeaways. Don't just focus on major points—minor details can also make great content. Your clients live in the detail weeds. So highlighting both big-picture and detailed insights demonstrates that you know what you’re talking about, building credibility and trust.
  
  For this article, I reviewed the notes from Fathom and picked one specific part of our conversation to focus on. This entire article was spurred by just 5 minutes of a 50 minute call..
  
  

• Create bite-sized content: Take each of the key topics, themes, and insights and work them into short, digestible pieces of content. AI tools can help here too. I like to feed it the entire transcript and ask it to outline the points around the topic I’ve selected (for best results, work on one point at a time). Then when you’re comfortable with the angles, ask it to draft content, mimicking the voice of a specific speaker from the transcript.
  
  For this article, I first had it give me an outline of what we discussed about thought leadership. After a bit of revision, I had it draft the article. It took 3 drafts before I had something I could work with.
  
  

• Train the AI to mimic your brand voice: Your prompting strategy is super important to using AI effectively. You can train AI tools to better understand your voice and style by providing them with examples of your past work.
  
  For instance, I gave ChatGPT samples of 10 of my articles plus several emails and blog posts. I also asked it to review every page on my website. I had it to analyze the style, tone and voice. From there, I prompted it to create a style guide for use in future prompts.
  
  This creating the style guide will involve some trial and error, but it’s worth the effort to ensure the content sounds like you. Once you have it, reference it every time you want AI to help you write something in your voice.
  
  For this article, I used our brand guidelines. I also told it to mimic “Candyce” from the transcript. It doesn’t automatically know that “Candyce” is me.
  
  

• Drafting and editing: AI will not give you the final product, but it can at least get you started. Plan to do some heavy editing. It’s not an easy button, but it does speed up the process.
  
  Writing this article might have taken me 6 hours without AI. With AI, it took about 3 hours. After quite a bit of back and forth prompting to get a decent draft, I got something I could work with. Then I rewrote it to “de-ai-ze” it (can I coin that term?). And I went back and forth to the AI to find better ways to express my thoughts.
  
  Incidentally, ChatGPT also played a big role in writing this AI section. I asked it to evaluate the writing on an early draft, and it suggested that I add a brief tutorial. So I asked it to write that section. Then I rewrote and added these examples from how I’m writing this article.
  
  

• Enhancing Visual Content: Of course, AI tools aren’t limited to text. You can also get help creating visual content. That said, use caution just adding an AI image. They’re generally pretty obvious. You might have better luck grabbing an interesting slide from the webinar to incorporate in the content. My partner, Phil Donaldson has been doing a lot of experimenting with AI image generation to find a way to express our brand consistently. He’s making good progress. Can you tell which images on our website are AI vs not?
  
  
• Creating Video Snippets: Since that webinar recording is a video, you can also create video snippets. AI tools like Descript allow you to edit the video by editing the text. It can also create video clips and much more. Those clips are perfect for sharing on LinkedIn and YouTube as well as embedding in your related blog posts.

Using AI tools can dramatically speed up your content production and allow you to reuse the thought leadership content you’ve already created. It won't give you the final product, but it can help you produce high-quality, engaging content.

Repeat the Process with Additional Content

That webinar is going to get my friend part of the way along. I’m betting he’ll find 10-12 topics that he can turn into 30-40 pieces of short and long-form content. 

But his course is also a potential goldmine for additional content. He can follow the same steps to mine the course into additional content. He’ll be able to create several months worth of content from that.

Now for a Thought Leadership Distribution Strategy

Publishing thought leadership content on your blog isn’t enough to draw attention. You need a distribution strategy. Consider these four channels:

1. Industry trade publications like the ERP Software Blog attract tens of thousands of visitors monthly, offering a larger audience for your content. They also host webinars. Pick publications that attract your ideal audience.
   
   There’s a strategy behind what content performs well on these platforms. If you’re writing about ERP, CRM or related technology, Anya Ciecierski is the perfect person to coach you on what works. 
   
   
2. LinkedIn is an ideal platform for sharing short snippets, slide decks and video. Understanding how the LinkedIn algorithm works is crucial if you’re going to attract your target audience. More on that below. (This is exactly what we teach, so if you’re trying to figure out how to leverage LinkedIn, let’s chat).
    
3. YouTube is The second most popular search engine behind Google. Use video snippets from your webinar on YouTube. There’s a strategy to using YouTube too. I don’t have the ideal resource for this…if you do, please share them with me, and I’ll update this article.
   
   
4. Conferences and industry events are where you can get in front of your audience. Pitch your webinar topic in calls for speakers for upcoming conferences.

Leverage LinkedIn to Grow Your Audience

LinkedIn is one of the best organic platforms to share snippets, mini-blogs, and video clips derived from your course. And engaging regularly on LinkedIn will help build your authority and reach. However, the algorithm is changing, and content won’t get seen if you don’t use the platform properly. Here’s a brief overview of a LinkedIn strategy. 

Focus on Engagement and Conversation

As of 2024, the LinkedIn algorithm prefers fostering genuine conversations and engagement. It’s demoting content that is promotional, especially posts containing links offsite. 

For a post to gain reach or impressions in your target audience, it needs engagement in the form of comments, likes and shares. 

Here are tips to work with the algorithm instead of against it:

1. No links in the post: Instead of adding a link in the post, place it in the comments. Posts with external links in the body tend to get less visibility. Ideally, have someone else comment and ask for the link before you comment to add it.
   
   
2. Post from individual profiles: Generally, individual posts get more reach and engagement than company page posts. (there are exceptions to this rule)
   
   
3. Create conversations: Encourage comments and discussions. To do that, your post needs to spark a conversation in the comments. Make your posts somewhat controversial. Ask readers to supply additional points. Ask questions or solicit feedback. Every comment you get boosts your post’s reach and impressions.
   
   
4. Engage with commenters promptly: The initial hours after posting are crucial. Respond promptly to comments to increase visibility and foster more interactions.
   
   
5. Post native content: Videos, images, and documents uploaded directly to LinkedIn perform better than those linked from other sites.

Use a Team-Based LinkedIn Strategy

Instead of relying on your company page or a single individual to share content, a team-based approach on LinkedIn can exponentially increase your reach and build awareness more quickly. 

Here’s how to approach it:

1. Empower your team: Encourage team members to share content on their personal LinkedIn profiles.
   
   
2. Incorporate their personal perspectives: Have each team member add their take or personal experience to the content they share. This makes the posts more authentic and relatable. Note - you can provide drafts for them to edit and post.  
3. Have them create original posts: There’s a temptation to just repost company page content. That’s not effective on LinkedIn. They need to be publishing original posts, even if your marketing team helps write them.
4. Get multiple points of view: Have everyone on your thought leadership team join a recorded call to discuss the topic and get each of their perspectives. Use that recording to create additional content in the unique voice of each team member.
5. Coordinate efforts: Use a content calendar to ensure a steady stream of posts from different team members on similar topics. This helps build more awareness. This can also help when you’re promoting lead magnets like a live webinar.
6. Engage with each other’s content: Boost visibility by having team members regularly like, comment on, and share each other’s posts. This signals to LinkedIn that the content is relevant and engaging.
7. Create conversations: Aim to spark discussions by starting posts with questions or controversial takes on industry issues.
8. Track performance: Monitor which types of posts generate the most engagement and adjust your strategy accordingly. AuthoredUp can help you monitor the team’s performance and even gamify your posting strategy. (affiliate link)
   

By adopting a collaborative approach and engaging with each other’s posts, you amplify the reach of your thought leadership content and effectively build a stronger brand presence on LinkedIn. Remember, don’t try to boil the ocean—start small with manageable steps and scale up based on what works best for your team.

Track and Iterate 

Finally, measure the performance of your thought leadership strategy. Look at engagement rates, traffic to the site, lead conversions, and conversations. 

There is no perfect attribution model for tracking the impact of thought leadership because much of it is in “dark social” channels where we can’t directly attribute the lead to a particular piece of content or campaign.

“Dark social” refers to how people share and discover content through private channels. For example, a buyer might have a conversation with a friend. They might forward your PDF to a friend or colleague in an email or Slack. They might attend a conference where you’re a speaker.  

Traditional tracking tools can’t see these interactions. A lot of your thought leadership content will be shared this way, meaning it influences leads and decisions in ways that don’t show up in your marketing attribution. That doesn’t mean your marketing isn’t working; it just means the impact is often hidden.

So you will need to use secondary attributes to track a thought leadership program’s effectiveness. When a lead registers for an asset, include a field in the form asking “how did you hear about us?” Make it a text only field, and you’ll collect more meaningful information. When you get on a call with a new lead, ask them the same question and log their answer. 

Track website visits, and visits to specific topical pages related to your thought leadership themes. It’s likely that much of that traffic originates from people hearing about your content and then searching for the topic. In this case, the search may not be their first encounter with your content.

It’s easy to dismiss the value of thought leadership if you use explicit lead attribution models. So these secondary approaches will give you evidence of the effectiveness of your strategy.

For more information about dark social and the importance of this strategy, check out Chris Walker’s LinkedIn posts and podcast

Keep Creating, Iterating, and Evolving

By following this approach, my friend can transform his rich course content into a steady stream of thought leadership material that attracts new prospects and builds trust. This method ensures that efforts are manageable and sustainable, turning even a single course into a powerhouse for inbound marketing.
If you want help figuring out how to implement this thought leadership strategy, please reach out. We provide private training and coaching as well as our public courses to help you accomplish your goals.