Leveraging Thought Leadership

Thought Leadership can be very complicated, with nuanced ideas and industry jargon. Unfortunately, complex language and niche ideas won't catch your audience's attention! To explore how to take big thought leadership ideas to market, I've invited Jessica Duffield to join me. Jessica is a Senior Consultant at Thought Leadership Leverage. She's worked with clients for nearly 10 years, helping them create content, find their best audience, and go to scale with unique ideas. We discuss the most effective ways to take big ideas and turn them into bit-sized content, ensuring your audience will notice them - and easily remember the content. Jessica walks us through the process of finding the strongest core ideas of your thought leadership and focusing on those, creating a simplified vision of your content that can be easily grasped. In addition to breaking your content down, you need to know your audience - who do you want to work with and for? Jessica gives valuable advice not only for finding your audience, but understanding their needs, worries, and where they are within their organizations. Additionally, we discuss the need for a hook that will grab your audience quickly. Jessica shares how and why sharing your story authenticity can be the "hook" you need to get your audience to stop scrolling and want more. Three Key Takeaways: * You often only get a few seconds to grab your audience's attention. And if you can't evoke interest and curiosity in your idea in that time, you've failed. * When creating content, sometimes you'll have to "Kill Your Darlings" to maintain focus on the most important facets of your thought leadership and your audience. * Big ideas don't have to be complicated. In fact, making your ideas easy to understand means a larger audience will be able to consume your content and follow you to the next level.

Summary:Ever heard, "To be successful, you have to get out of your comfort zone!" But if your "comfort zone" aligns with your core values, what then? Can you find an alignment between those values and marketing that will allow you to stay in your comfort zone and find success? Our guest today is the "Go for Yes Gal!" Stacey Hall! Stacey is the founder of Success with Stacey Hall, a well-known success strategist, TedX speaker, and best-selling author with her fifth book "Selling from Your Comfort Zone: The Power of Alignment Marketing". Our conversation starts by covering the 23 years between Stacey's first and fifth books. She shares what has changed and what has stayed the same in the publishing industry and why she returned to BK Publishing for her newest book. Stacey discusses the content of her book Selling from Your Comfort Zone explaining how people want to stay aligned with their core values and are no longer willing to let them go. She covers how the current environment for sales can be confusing and why it is often better to stay in your comfort zone, expanding on it in alignment with your current values and skills. In addition to learning about the content of the book Stacey shares how she is marketing the book and what she is doing differently now. She gives us insights into using technology like social media, AI, and podcasts to market the book from home to create both free and paid offshoots of the book that you can use to lead people to the book or your other offerings. Three Key Takeaways: * Put tidbits of your book on social media. Don't just tell them the book is coming give them bits of the content as a teaser. * When creating free tie-ins to the book, they have to come out before the book to create interest and excitement. * It is important to publish your book in different formats. Paper, ebooks, and audio have all become popular methods of consuming books.

AI is a powerful tool that is growing at an astonishing rate, but can thought leaders trust the technology? Or should a human be keeping an eye on the process - and importantly, the output? Our guest today is Stephanie Grayson, a Content Marketing Leader and Thought Leadership Advisor with experience in the worlds of agency marketing, large consulting houses, and enterprise scale software. She is also an AI enthusiast with a creative view on how to best use this remarkable new technology. We start the conversation by defining the difference between thought leadership and content marketing. Stephanie helps us understand how content marketing focuses on the now, while thought leadership focuses on the future. Stephanie explains how the current limitations of AI make it unlikely to generate truly new ideas that could be considered genuine thought leadership. In addition, since AI can only learn from what we give it we have to be careful about introducing bias and be sure to fact check any results it gives to ensure it isn't a very convincing AI hallucination. So if AI isn't completely trustworthy, how can we best use it? Stephanie shares AI would be capable of sorting through huge datasets that might be too cost and time prohibitive for people to go through. From these datasets, the AI could deliver valuable stats and even pose answers to various hypotheses allowing the thought leader to spend more time asking smart questions. Three Key Takeaways: * AI cannot (yet) accomplish the level of thought leadership that gets executive response. Collation is not creation! * Great thought leadership should stop you in your tracks for a moment and make you say, "Now that is a unique and interesting #idea." * There is a need for more than one set of eyes on large company-level data-backed thought leadership - be it human or AI. Check your facts, your sources and make sure everything is correct.

Thought leaders have a passion for ideas, frameworks, and methodologies. But many struggle with defining their brand, finding clients, and maintaining a stable revenue stream. Don't worry - help is on the way! Today, we're talking with Vaughn Sigmon, the co-founder of Results Driven Leadership which specializes in helping businesses unlock their full potential through transformative leadership practices. Vaughn is also the host of The Business Mechanic – where he shares his expertise to improve the impact of executives and managers by enhancing their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Leaving a stable executive position to start his own leadership development business was a huge risk. We talk with Vaughn about the driving force behind his shift in career and why he chose the area he did. Leadership development is a crowded space to enter. Vaughn shares what he did to stand out and win clients. Acquiring clients is the hardest part that few want to talk about. We learn how it requires a multi-step marketing process that creates multiple touch points, allowing potential clients to get to know you, what you stand for, and the problems you are able to solve. Vaughn explains how the two main marketing platforms he has been using are LinkedIn and podcasting. We learn how Vaughn became smart and focused on who his audience would be and how to create awareness, interest, and a relationship with your audience on the platform. Finally, we learn about the advantages of starting a podcast or doing the circuit as a guest. Plus, he shares tips for getting your audience to engage and move further down the sales funnel. Three Key Takeaways: · You need to get in front of the right people so they get to know you. If they don't buy who you are they're not going to buy your concepts. · If you are smart and focused, your message is on point, LinkedIn can be a gold mine. · The title of a podcast or blog entry is of utmost importance. Having great content won't matter if no one reads it because the title does not entice them.

Authors tend to be very proud of their books and believe what they've written can help anyone, anywhere! Although that might be correct, the hard truth is you are going to have to focus on the .001% of the population that is going to get the most out of your book and that will in turn get the most out of your content. To discuss the ins and outs of marketing to your target audience we've invited first time author Michelle Gladieux to join us. Michelle is the president of Gladieux Consulting, which offers one-on-one executive and employee coaching and strategic plan facilitation. Michelle's first book is Communicate with Courage: Taking Risks to Overcome the Four Hidden Challenges. Michelle shares how she spent four years writing her book to ensure it was ready for publication. Then, her editor suggested that she rewrite the book and focus on an overarching message that would better resonate and pull the reader in. That message would become the four hidden challenges that prevent people from becoming fearless and peerless communicators Peter and Michelle discuss the hard task of marketing a book, and why you need to start marketing before you're published. We learn what personal touches Michelle used to give the book legs and what experiments she has tried and is continuing to do that have a low cost but potentially high impact! Three Key Takeaways: · For most people making money cannot be the main driver for writing a book. · Don't be afraid of failure when experimenting with marketing. Some ideas might not fly, but others could go further than you might imagine. · It is easy to fall into the trap of feeling like everyone can use your book. In order to get the best return on your investment you have to drill down deep into who your target avatar really is.

It's celebration time! The Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast is celebrating our 500th episode with our co-hosts, Peter Winick and Bill Sherman. In this special episode, Bill and Peter share news about their most recent white paper, "The OrgTL Canvas," and walk us through the deep insights they've gained by spending more than 20 years working with thought leaders, from Fortune 500 and Global 100 successes to new, single-shingle startups - all looking to get their remarkable insights out into the world. Over the past four years, Peter and Bill have spoken with more than 250 heads of thought leadership, many of them on this very podcast. Those conversations have given them incredible insight into the pain points that organizations face when creating, curating, and sustaining thought leadership initiatives. The OrgTL Canvas synthesizes their acumen into actionable steps that help organizations use thought leadership to gain higher visibility, greater success, and a strong, loyal following. In today's conversation, Bill and Peter share how organizations are changing the way they interact with consumers (and potential clients), and how thought leadership can bridge the gap that leads to "next steps" for their audience. They discuss thought leadership strategy (and how to create one), as well as the baseline criteria and metrics you should use, the warning signals that your strategy isn't working, and the importance of alignment across the organization. The OrgTL Canvas is a framework that can help your ideas spread beyond the walls of your organization, and create real impact. We're pleased to share it, and to join with our listeners in celebrating an amazing 500 episodes of Leveraging Thought Leadership. Thank you for listening to our podcast, and here's to 500 more! Three Key Takeaways: * Strategy does not happen by accident. It has to be purposeful. * You only need 3 - 5 core provocative ideas to bang the drum on. More isn't always better. * Thought leadership works to facilitate awareness, provoke curiosity, and serve as a call to education.

Many organizations want to formalize their thought leadership efforts and take it to the next level. But how do you turn a "casual thought leadership presence" into something more? Today, we discuss ways to harness a "casual" message and turn it into powerful thought leadership that you can take to scale. Our guests are Stacey Flax, Thought Leadership Communication Manager and Carlos Williams, Applications Development Manager from Hach, an organization that focuses on water analysis. Stacey and Carlos share how people at Hach had been doing thought leadership on their own, before Hach chose to formalize it and amplify the expertise the organization had to offer. Carlos explains how part of the job of a thought leader is to convey your message in relatable terms but also somehow make it fun, through story or anecdotes. Stacey further explains the need to take a step back and think about your message. Who are you trying to reach? What's the core essence of your insights? They discuss how to convey your thought leadership message in different ways, using different media forms and different techniques. We also learn how Stacey aided in putting the formal structure in place, getting a baseline of subject matter experts, cataloging all of the previously produced content, and gaining further support from the leadership by being able to show the impact thought leadership was having. As a bonus, we take a look back at John Snow's discovery of cholera in the water in the 1920s - perhaps some of the first thought leadership on the topic of water analysis - and how those insights still affect us today. Three Key Takeaways: * When formalizing thought leadership within an organization, start by discovering the experts in your organization, and curate the material they have already produced into a usable catalog. * When creating thought leadership for technical or niche topics, it is important to use storytelling to spice up the content and make it somehow relatable. * Ensure any information you distribute in your thought leadership aligns with the organization's strategy.

Executives often feel they need to be the ones creating thought leadership, but true thought leadership needs to move beyond a single person. That's how insights goes the distance; it needs to be elevated by others while you are not in the room. In order to fully understand how organizations build their thought leadership teams, I've invited Will Milano to join me. Will is the Chief Marketing Officer for Integrity Solutions, which focuses on sales training for organizations. He is also the host of the podcast "Mental Selling". Early in Will's career, he found that content and insights could drive conversations, increase credibility, and create strong brand affinity. Since then, he has been encouraging organizations to move their thought leadership beyond the C-Suite, bringing senior consultants into the game and allowing clients to see the full extent of what your organization has to offer. While many fear saying too much or "giving away the magic," it actually works as a sneak peek that shows clients why they need your services. One of the hardest parts of creating a thought leadership engine is keeping it going. Will shares how having a knowledgeable team can make it easier to keep that engine going and take your ideas to scale. In addition we learn the importance of by-lines, which give potential clients a name they can seek further content from and grow to trust, and why you'll want to not only meet your audience where they are, but also meet your content creators where they are most comfortable. Three Key Takeaways: · Thought leadership is about relationship building. Building trust and credibility and authenticity as a brand (and individuals in a brand) above anything else. · Early in the sales cycle customers care far more about what you have to say than what you have to sell. · More and more people are seeking to know exactly where their information is coming from. By-lines on articles allow the audience to build trust and know it isn't simply AI-generated content.

Ever thought about writing a book to support your thought leadership? Or maybe you have already written a book - and now you're trying to get the word out! Either way, a book can be an incredible investment for an entrepreneur, but to get the full return on that investment, you'll need a marketing plan and a product roadmap. Today, we've invited Stephanie Chandler to be our guest. Stephanie is an experienced consultant, specializing in content marketing, internet marketing, social media, search engine optimization, and publishing. She is also the founder and CEO of Stephanie Chandler Enterprises, and the author of The Nonfiction Book Publishing Plan and The Nonfiction Book Marketing Plan. We start our conversation by discussing the huge changes in the publishing industry during the last few years. Stephanie shares that physical books are still being read (as well as a surge in e-books), but sales of audiobooks are rising, and expected to grow exponentially through 2030. In addition to audio, self-publishing has exploded - bringing more than 1 million titles to the market each year! With so many books being published, having a strong promotion strategy has never been more important. But what does that look like? Stephanie walks us through the best methods to include in your marketing plan, from podcasts and Amazon promotions to book tours and speaking gigs, as well as giving us surprising insight into one method that might not work as well as you think! In addition to promoting the book, entrepreneurs will want to create additional products to support that book, and give customers something to put into practice right away. Stephanie shares insights around workshops and webinars, and explains an underutilized method that can actually make more money than your book - with less effort! Be sure to listen in! Three Key Takeaways: * Well-written, well-produced, and well-promoted books will always rise to the top. * Social media isn't a great way to sell books. It's great to build a platform and your e-mail list. * To give your book the best chance of success, spend as much time on preparing the promotion strategy and supporting materials as you do in writing the manuscript.

When you start a new thought leadership project, what's the first question you ask? Do you look at who the project is for? What does it mean to your organization? What the ROI could be? Today's guest asks the question, "What is universally true about this topic?" Our guest today is Mark Miller, Vice President of High Performance Leadership, Chick-fil-A Inc. and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do and his newest book Culture Rules: The Leader's Guide to Creating the Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Mark takes us back to his first book and how it was born out of necessity: Chick-fil-A wanted stronger leadership, and took it upon themselves to do the research to find out what that takes. During the process, Ken Blanchard realized the work being done not only articulated what great leaders do at Chick-fil-A, but more, it touched on the things that distinguished great leaders throughout history. And thus, Mark created The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do. With every project, Mark starts with the seemingly simple question, "What is universally true about this topic?" The question acts as a guideline to create a point of view on emerging business issues, and builds a foundation that can serve their organization and the world at large because the viewpoint created reaches beyond any one industry and to the heart of topics like leadership and culture. Having authored and published books for twenty years, Mark has seen a lot of change. We discuss the strategies Mark is employing as an author, to keep landing on the Wall Street Journal Best Sellers list. We explore prelaunch campaigns, creating a personal army of enthusiastic ambassadors to share the news about your book, and more. Mark gives us the inside track of how he used incentives, gamification, and helping non-profits, to promote the book and find his audience. Three Key Takeaways: · With most projects, try to start with "What is universally true about the topic?" · Everything rises and falls with leaders. If you can help them grow their capacity, impact, and influence, then everyone wins. · Multi-faceted book launch campaigns that recruit champions, incentivize their participation, and generate Amazon reviews are just a few ways to have a successful book.