Thought leadership can take many forms—byline articles, white papers, keynote PowerPoint presentations, and more. One of the biggest trends in thought leadership is the blog post. Blog posts can highlight a point of view in a brief, easy-to-absorb format, using links to direct readers to more detailed information on your website.
Here are five useful tips for creating compelling thought leadership blog posts:
- Keep it short. Blog posts should be easily read in a few minutes—and short enough to digest on a mobile phone without going cross-eyed. (Our blog posts are typically in the target range of 300 to 600 words). If you have a lengthy, complex, or highly detailed topic, chunk it up. Have your writing agency create a series of posts to tell the complete story.
- Feature a great subject-matter expert. Executives and other subject matter experts—such as those in industry or product marketing—are fountains of new knowledge, and often keen to be known as thought leaders. A focused 30-minute phone interview can provide the point of view and data your post will need.
- Repurpose. Reuse. Recycle. No subject-matter expert available? No problem. Do you have a white paper that has good content, but is too long? Did an executive just give a keynote on a hot topic? Do you have a fabulous customer case study that isn’t getting enough traction? These are just a few examples of places to look for thought leadership content that can be repurposed, reused, or recycled into a blog post or series of posts.
- Link to deeper, richer content. You don’t have to cover all the latest ideas in the blog post—in fact, you want readers to be intrigued enough to learn more. Give highlights or a few examples, but leave some additional content accessible via links.
- Shop around. Think creatively about where to post. Ideally, you can post it to both internal and external blogs. Consider trade publications or customer blogs, in addition to your company or department blogs.
Thought leadership blog posts are a versatile, cost-effective way to showcase your company’s ideas and talent. As an agency, we’ve seen that blog writing is a hugely growing area for us. For more blogging best practices, here are some related posts:
