Introduction: What is ‘thought leadership’ and why does it matter?

Thought leadership is the practice of showcasing your company’s experience and authority in its field through content. At a time when brands are competing for attention and visibility via search engine optimisation (SEO) or on large language models (LLMs) via generative engine optimisation (GEO, or AI search), thought leadership has become critical.

Social media posts, LinkedIn articles, even trusted old-school blog posts are essential to demonstrate the values that search engines and LLMs are looking for, often summarised as ‘EEAT’, or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

From a content marketing perspective, these could include: 

• Experience: Case studies, tutorials, FAQs, walkthroughs, etc.
• Expertise: How-to guides, expert explainers, whitepapers, training, etc.
• Authoritativeness: Media citations, backlinks, guest posts, etc.
• Trustworthiness: Author biographies, clear sourcing, user reviews, etc.

Because recency is a big factor in GEO, especially, brands must publish consistently on topics that matter to them and their audience. 

People buy from people, so thought leadership offers brands the opportunity to feature their key spokespeople as human faces, rather than just generic branded content. 

It’s increasingly important to nurture and maintain an authentic voice. At a time when many brands are turning to AI to create masses of samey-sounding content, brands who resist the temptation to use AI and instead retain a human creator have a better chance of retaining a human voice and standing out. 

After all, if you’re turning to AI to come up with ‘thought leadership’, it’s not really your content; it’s a curation of other people’s surfaced by a machine.

Thought Leadership Formats

Thought leadership comes in several formats:

Short form: Media interviews and newsjacking comments, letters to editors, social media posts

Medium form (600-1,200 words): Blog posts, LinkedIn posts and articles

Long form (1,200+ words): White papers, in-depth reports, or podcasts (audio with transcripts)

Who should write thought leadership pieces?

Thought leaders rarely write pieces themselves; they do not have the time to do it, and writing may not be their forte. This is why they turn to PR teams and expert copywriters to craft the content for them.

Authority and authenticity are key. The company spokespeople should speak to topics within their realm of expertise, for example:

Founder/CEO: Top-level business topics, strategic direction and vision

CTO: Technical development and security

CFO: Financial matters

Product Marketing Manager: Product features and industry topics

As I mentioned at the outset, people buy from people, so they want to see and hear from people that speak to their exact remit and challenges. Matching company voices to a specific audience on specific topics makes perfect sense.

What makes an engaging piece of thought leadership content?

The unfortunate fact in the attention economy is that many people either skim-read content or even give up after the first paragraph. The age of AI summaries is changing reading behaviour, too. You have to hook people in early and keep them engaged.

Natural voice is essential here. It’s a differentiator in a world where so many brands are using AI to create their ‘original’ content.

The process behind thought leadership creation

It pays to have a content calendar with ‘known’ content tied to key events (e.g., calendar-specific events or annual reports) while leaving capacity to respond to events such as government budgets or news stories.

Content creation always starts with an interview. For short-form content, like a newsjacking opportunity or request for comment from the media, it can be as simple as leaving a WhatsApp voice note to the PR team for them to craft into a comment.

Medium-form comment requires more planning and insight. Medium-form content requires a story arc, supporting data and real-life examples, and takeaways, so an initial call to lay out the argument is critical. A comprehensive brief from the brand helps set expectations and makes the process easier, as the copywriter is clear on the objective. And, of course, there should be a clear call to action at the end. What do you want the reader to do with the information you have provided.

Even more planning is required for long-form content, like reports and white papers. This type of content will often be turned into a professionally designed PDF, which might be gated by an email for sales purposes. However, I have seen recent research from trusted search engine optimisation (SEO) consultants who have seen search visibility drop significantly for PDF material, so brands may be better off keeping content on webpages is search visibility is their objective.

For research, brands will often engage a third-party specialist research house. They will be able to guide on the wording of questions and the right target audiences. In a world where B2B opinion is increasingly generic, unique research becomes even more valuable and potentially newsworthy. They provide brands with exclusive data that they can analyse, thus showcasing their expertise.

Channel specificity is key

While content hosted on a brand’s website is valuable for search visibility, brands must also promote their spokespeople across channels. News channels and guest articles for trade publications are naturally important for thought leadership, but LinkedIn as a B2B channel requires its own strategy.

Why? Partly because that’s where B2B decision-makers are active, but also because LinkedIn’s algorithm favours content that keeps people engaged on the platform. So, brands should identify which spokespeople to promote and create regular, consistent, LinkedIn-specific content to build their profile.

LinkedIn requires its own content strategy, and brand pages aren’t that popular, so, again, it’s down to promoting the individual.

Measuring thought leaderhip

Once content is out there, brands must measure its impact. In the short term, look at social media engagement on posts, analyse genuine comments, measure click-throughs and assess intention thereafter. 

Over the long term, look at search performance and visitor performance. Consider the entire content campaign, not just individual pieces. Are your efforts increasing your visibility on search engines and within AI search (GEO)?

Conclusion

Thought leadership is critical to remain in the conversation and remain relevant. High-quality, relevant content gives brands a better chance to be found on search engines and LLMs when their potential customers search for their products or services. 

Given the lengthy B2B decision-making funnel, content plays a key role in informing and persuading audiences. However, it’s important to remember that thought leadership is not an opportunity to sell; it’s a way to demonstrate your value and that, in the long run, can help ‘sell’ you as a brand.

Be human, be useful, be consistent, and measure the impact of your work. It takes time to build up a presence and start to see results. 

If you need a content expert to help you with your thought leadership planning and creation, please contact me. I’ve been in B2B tech PR and journalism for 28 years, so I am a trusted pair of hands.

AI disclosure: I wrote this content myself and ran it through Grammarly to check for grammar/typos, etc.

“We’ve worked with Eight Moon Media for more than two years, and we’re always impressed with the quality of their copy, their responsiveness, and their friendly professionalism.”

Sue Glanville, Co-founder and Director, Catalyst Comms

The post The Ultimate Guide to B2B Thought Leadership appeared first on Eight Moon Media.

I was in Brighton this week for the BrightonSEO fringe event, the PR and Link Building Show. I’ve been coming to BrightonSEO since the second edition more than a decade ago, but not attended in person since 2019, when I trained and spoke here. It was great to be back among the digital PR and search community and it was among the most valuable days I’ve experienced at the show.

Here are some key takeaways:

Google’s new priorities require a shift in tactics

Two key recent Google developments came to the fore: Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust (EEAT) as a quality rater (basically, Google wants to reward first-hand experience of a topic), and the Google Perspectives section on its search results page.

Firstly, let’s look at EEAT. To demonstrate authority on a topic, Lauren Hewitt-Crabb from Blue Array said that brands must:

• Create content that utilises their expertise 
• Showcase their internal experts
• Be relevant and topical, and get involved in the conversation

She included a great example of a pension client. The agency focussed on the rising cost of childcare using research to demonstrate how childcare costs often make it difficult for people to put toward their pension. The campaign gained 80 links for the client, and it even ranked top on Google for ‘pension’. 

Lauren concluded that to succeed at EEAT, brands should:

• Only use expert quotes that add value
• Don’t pretend to know what they don’t know
• Be the first to jump on a trend

Digital PR consultant Abbie Johnson of We Are North cited EEAT as one of her three pillars of reactive SEO, alongside Objectives and Reporting. Successful reactive PR relies on speed, budget and creativity, Abbie said. It’s about joining the relevant audiences quickly. Brands need to tick these three boxes with their content:

• Is it relevant to the target audience?
• Is it a topic the brand has authority to discuss?
• Is it an original angle?

James Hayward-Browne from Bottled Imagination added the “relevance sweet spot” lay at the intersection of “what you want to talk about”, “what journalists want to talk about” and “what the consumer cares about”.

Influencers’ role in EEAT and Google Perspectives

In his talk on search-integrated influencer marketing, Ashley Liddell highlighted that Google is looking to combat the increasing use among consumers to use TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest for search. Google’s new Perspectives search element emulate those influencer-led platforms, so there is an opportunity here for brands to work with creators to help build their search profile.

Liddell underlined that content should inspire, educate and entertain, citing the example of financial app Revolut’s partnership with YouTubers Sidemen, which generated more than 70 million impressions. 

Creativity is more valuable than ever

Given that both Google and journalists want original and engaging content, marketers are tasked with being ever more creative. My favourite talk of the day was Luke Cope’s funny and engaging talk on “how to generate ideas like an AI”. Luke talked the audience through several campaigns end-to-end, citing the data and thinking behind them. These included arguing that you can get better 4G on the moon than in some parts of rural Britain, to customised sneakers (trainers), and even creating a fake footballer to highlight the risks of gambling. All of which created coverage because they were interesting angles.

Finally, I also really enjoyed Zoe Burke’s talk on how to pitch to a journalist, which invited PRs to focus on…

• Personalised pitching
• Pitching before noon
• Summarising the story in 300 words max
• Exclusivity
• Follow-ups

…to stand a better chance of the journalist noticing you among their many hundreds of unread emails.

Thanks again to Kelvin and the BrightonSEO team for another phenomenal show.

The post How to EEAT Well: Summary of the PR and Link Building Show appeared first on Eight Moon Media.

Writing for the Web is an art in itself and there are three key reasons for this:

1) Attention spans are shorter than ever

In an era where a great deal of content is consumed on mobile devices, our attention span has now slumped to less than eight seconds, shorter than that of goldfish.

If that stat is true and you’re still reading, you’re doing well!

2) We have a global audience 

Our content – once consigned to print, radio and TV in designated geographies – is visible everywhere by people with a good level of English. Many of them are potential customers or advocates.

3) Search engines

When people use search engines they use plain English, whether it’s text or voice search.

The enemy of all these three is corporate speak. [Continues]

Kill corporate speak

Corporate speak is becoming less and less relevant.

I wrote an article for PR Week as long ago as 2008 appealing for an end to corporate speak. As a former journalist, I’ve been confounded by the ways businesses have found increasingly complex ways to describe what they do, as if using expansive language actually makes them sound more professional.

In earnest, the reverse is true; many organisations sound the same. They’re all global leaders providing a wide range of innovate business solutions and services.

The problem is that when we go online, we don’t search for ‘innovative business solutions provider’, we look for ‘accountancy software’ or similar plain English with a view to answer our query.

Plus corporate speak is just plain dull. Companies should be optimising more of their content around how they solve business problems rather than pushing what they sell.

As marketing legend Seth Godin said; “If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.”

This is what people want. And increasingly, as Google gets more intuitive, the people get what the people want served up to them.

Writing for the Web is an art

There’s more to writing for the Web than just plain English, of course.

There are two audiences to impress: humans and search engines.

How we break up copy to make it easy to read is key as we increasingly scan content to get what we need or want from an article.

You’ll notice that my sentences are short and that the opening, above the fold gambit that people are most likely to read is bulletised as a list. This is to impress the human audience. They get what they need.

To impress the search engine is also key. This means doing the search engine optimisation (SEO) housekeeping to make sure that search engines can read and index your copy, and deem it relevant and significant to potential searching audiences.

Data is key to success

The only way we can understand how our content is performing is through regular data analysis and iteration. Are people reading our content? When are they dropping off and why might that be? What is their click path? Are they sharing our content?

These are all questions we need to answer if we want to succeed.

We run training sessions on Writing for the Web. If your business is struggling to articulate its offering online, then please contact us.

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