When it comes to standing up an effective thought leadership program, there isn’t a clear path that works for every company. Great thought leadership emerges from a confluence of factors - the minds at work within your organization, the conversations you want to be a part of shaping, the objectives you’re working toward, the audiences that will help you achieve them, and the channels those audiences can be found in.
The thought grid - an intentional matrix charting these five essential elements and their relationship to one another - is an essential cornerstone to any thought leadership strategy.
Once assembled, the thought grid serves as a guide and gut check for what comes next. It informs the content you create and the opportunities you pursue. As important? It makes clear where not to focus. Taking the time to intentionally choose your players, themes, objectives, audiences, and channels protects you from sinking valuable resources (i.e. your founder’s time or your PR budget for the month) into random opportunities that don’t get you to where you want to go.
This step-by-step workshop is designed to generate the necessary components of your thought grid. If you’re the marketing lead at your company, you may find it useful to go through this exercise alone before involving your principals or spokespeople. The result of this exercise will: 1) Generate the component parts of a thought grid; and 2) Serve as the foundation for your thought leadership program going forward.
Note: Before embarking on this workshop, we suggest reading through “7 Questions to Answer Before Attempting Thought Leadership.”
First, choose your players.
The most essential elements of any thought leadership program are the people actually providing the thoughts. For most early-stage companies, it’s likely your founder is the natural choice to lead these efforts. As the primary spokesperson and face of your business, your founder is a natural extension of your brand. But don’t overlook the other people within your organization - these players can serve as valuable surrogates that open up new opportunities through their unique experience, credibility, and expertise. Having more people involved in your thought leadership program helps distribute the workload away from your founder’s desk. As an added bonus, offering star employees the opportunity to develop their personal professional brands can help with recruitment and retention.
This said, don’t just throw every exec in your company into your thought leadership strategy. It’s important to be intentional about the way you use your principals. Consider what role each individual can play, what audiences they can best appeal to, and which themes they can credibly own. For example, if you’re a B2B insurance company with a charismatic head of sales - that person may have an insider perspective on your primary customer and may be better equipped to speak to that audience than your founder or head of product.
A good target for early-stage companies is a thought leadership roster that includes 2-3 principal players. This gives you enough individuals to divide and conquer, while keeping your players limited enough to support without a large PR team (for every hour a principal spends on thought leadership, estimate that three support hours will be necessary for pitching, scheduling, prepping, content creation, editing, and distribution).
To identify the best players within your org to include in your thought leadership strategy, try asking yourself these questions...
Once you identify which individuals within your company should be part of your thought leadership program, you have the beginnings of the first column of your thought grid. To finish out this column, craft an elevator-style pitch for each player that demonstrates the reason to believe in this person. This sentence should answer the question “Why is this person credible and worth listening to?” Finally, consider what “role” this person should strive to play externally. Their role should be authentic to their character while defining the lane it makes sense for them to operate in. Are they most useful as a rabble rouser? An optimistic cheerleader? A design genius, data wonk, or industry forecaster?
Now, develop your themes.
After you have your players in mind, it’s time to develop your themes. Adding your voice to broad conversations is unlikely to make the kind of impact that concentrating your efforts on focused, strategic themes can. Consider the difference between being an expert on “tech startups” or “design” versus being a leading voice on “seed-stage investing in direct-to-consumer brands” or “building habit-forming mobile products.” It’s much easier to contribute to and move a specific conversation.
Explicitly connecting your thought leadership work to your company’s ethos is the reliable way to make sure your strategy is aligned with the overarching mission of the company. Taking the time to develop your brand book and articulate your ethos will help surface the right thought leadership themes to concentrate on (here’s our guide to doing just that if you haven’t yet).
Once you’ve gone through the exercise, see what patterns and through lines exist. What can you bucket together? Which ideas most compel you? Which ones most align with the abilities and interests of your principal players? Finally, which ones can connect directly to your objectives? Try to narrow your list to no more than 2-3 total themes. Add these to the second column of your thought grid.
Now articulate a company position on each theme, identify any relevant subtopics, and not any guardrails or limits (areas you’d like to avoid). Revisit and evolve this section after articulating your objectives (see below) to be sure your themes are marching in the right direction. Revisit and evolve again after assembling your principals.
Next, articulate your objectives.
Your thought leadership objectives should align pretty closely with your business objectives for later in the year. Keep in mind that thought leadership is a long game - the actions you take now can open up opportunities or lay the groundwork for six months or a year down the line. To articulate your objectives in a strategic way, think about where you want your company to be in four quarters.
Now that you’ve converted your company objectives, choose the three you feel are the most aligned with your players and themes. Rank them, then add to column three.
Then define your target audiences.
Once your objectives are set, you’re ready to tackle the easiest column in the thought grid - audience. It’s as simple as asking the question - which audiences are most relevant to your articulated objectives?
After identifying the target audiences associated with each of your three objectives, add to column four.
Finally, identify your channels.
The key question to answer once you understand which audiences you’d like to prioritize is: Where are these people located? Meeting your audience where they are is essential to communicating with them. If you’re a b2b company with the objective of building credibility to an audience within an entrenched industry - let’s say, insurance or shipping - speaking at startup conferences isn’t going to help you reach them, because they simply aren’t in the room.
Once you’ve answered each question, force yourself to choose the two channels that seem most feasible given your abilities, resources, and interests. For example “start a dedicated newsletter” and “pursue speaking opps at industry conferences.” Or “pursue contributed byline opportunities in business publications” and “launch a podcast.”
Why two? If you’re just starting a thought leadership program, it’s great to try out multiple channels to see what works best, but it can be an enormous resource drain to try to focus on too many channels at once. A good strategy is to start with two channels, adding more only after an existing one becomes established. Don’t be afraid to kill a channel that isn’t working for you. Maybe your founder figures out she actually hates traveling for speaking engagements - that’s a good indication that you may want to try switching that channel to “pursue guest spots on industry podcasts and webinars.”
Next steps.
The five elements above combine to form your thought grid - the living document that helps achieve the consistency necessary for an effective thought leadership strategy.
1. Play around with the format of the grid to make it work for your org - if you have several people working on the same themes, it might make more sense to organize your thought grid primarily by theme. So long as you’ve considered each of these categories, your thought grid will serve as a solid foundation to launching a strategic thought leadership function.
2. Assemble your principals to review the thought grid. Lead a discussion on each theme, iterating your position, subtopics, and guardrails accordingly.
If you're interested in learning more about how Fuel can help you develop your thought grid, please reach out to me at jamie@fuelcapital.com. As always, I'm available to chat about your company’s thought leadership efforts or anything else marketing related.