Why CEOs Should Outsource Thought Leadership Content
By: Kiara Williams
Tags: Social Media, Marketing, Thought Leadership, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing

Why CEOs Should Outsource Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership is a key component of your company’s content marketing strategy.

Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels

It’s fair to say that business leaders need to have vision. Without a distinctive take on the dynamics of the business landscape and a target market’s pain points, CEOs can’t lead thriving businesses for very long. But it’s also fair to say that executives often struggle to share their vision with the general public in a way that’s optimized to help achieve business goals. This has a knock-on effect on the company’s marketing abilities.

Many simply don’t prioritize creating and distributing media assets that express vision and insight in the form of thought leadership. This deserves to be a key component in any company’s content marketing strategy, but it all too often falls by the wayside, making for a major missed sales enablement opportunity.

One of the most interesting aspects of thought leadership is the disparity between how vendors versus buyers view it. While the majority of decision-makers say that reading well-produced, well-thought-out content about a company’s thoughts, ideas, and products makes them think more highly of a company, only about 23% of content creators are able to demonstrate sales lift as a result of thought leadership activity with their analytics reports, according to the most recent annual Edelman-LinkedIn study on the topic.

The fact is, many CEOs simply don’t enjoy the vital task of creating thought leadership, which often puts their companies in a precarious position compared to the ones that do enjoy creating it, and enjoy creating it well. Well-produced content demonstrates vision, passion and direction. It lets your customers know who you are, what you do, and why you do it.

A lot of CEOs simply get hung up on what thought leadership actually looks like.

While it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that thought leadership content has to be bold, controversial and different from everything else out there, the fact is, it just has to answer the questions your audience is asking.

Michael Brenner, CEO and Founder of Marketing Insider Group, explains it well in his blog post on what thought leadership is: “Your audience isn’t looking for your content to be differentiated all of the time. They are just looking for the best answers to the questions.”

The best CEOs know that it’s important to share their thoughts with the world. But they also know how tough it is to find time to do it in an impactful and meaningful way all by themselves.

Why Thought Leadership Is Vital For Your Company

It’s not just about brand awareness — the purpose of thought leadership content is to establish your brand as a player in your industry, yes, but also to foment a deeper and more meaningful relationship between your company and your potential buyers.

The Edelman study mentioned above found that more than half of decision-makers believe that the thought leadership content a brand puts out is the best way to evaluate their abilities and capacities as a company — more than marketing materials and product sheets. The content your audience consume coming directly from your brand is often the first stepping stone in beginning a relationship.

Theoretically, anyone can produce thought leadership content, but when it comes from you, the CEO, it gives your audience the bird’s eye view of the issues your product solves, and the position you occupy in the market from a more holistic perspective. As CEO, only you have the experience and knowledge necessary to create meaningful and thoughtful content.

Denise Brosseau, CEO of Thought Leadership Lab, puts it nicely in her article on who a thought leader is: “Thought leadership takes time (sometimes years); knowledge and expertise in a particular niche; a certain level of commitment and a willingness to buck the status quo or the way things have always been done.”

What’s more, it humanizes your brand. Thought leadership content demonstrates you’re not just a faceless organization out to make money. You have actual people at the helm, who have higher goals, passion and vision. You care about your company and your customers.

So why don’t more CEOs prioritize creating thought leadership content?

Why Thought Leadership Falls by the Wayside

The primary reason is that many CEOs simply don’t believe in the power of thought leadership. Even if they respect its potential, they have trouble seeing how it can impact their relationships with an audience — or they do see how, but don’t feel it powerfully enough to make it a strategic priority.

As a result, you have decision-makers eager to read high-quality thought leadership, using it as a measure of your product’s potential value, but these people don’t find the content your company publishes to be consistently valuable.

The second main reason is time. CEOs typically are exceedingly busy running a business, after all. Do you think you’d find an hour or two a week, regularly, that you could dedicate to a new, and very important task, especially when the risks of doing it poorly are as bad as the risks of not doing it at all?

Another key reason is preconceived notions about what thought leadership content should look like. Traditionally, it’s true that it took the form of long-form article writing. But today? It can be anything — a simple LinkedIn post, an ebook, a thought-provoking podcast interview slot, a presentation at a conference, or just influencing the overall flavor of all messaging a brand produces. Anything that explains why your brand does things in the way that it does things can be thought leadership.

Even with all this flexibility, however, most CEOs eschew the opportunity for social media-based, thought leadership-focused personal branding. In one informal poll by Privy CMO Dave Gerhardt, only 39% of respondents said their CEOs actively present themselves well on LinkedIn, and nearly half said their CEOs are totally inactive.

While not producing any thought leadership isn’t great, creating poorly-written content is just as bad, if not worse. Therefore, it’s paramount to commit to a successful content strategy — not just writing a single hastily-written blog post and then giving up on the whole endeavor when you run out of time.

Should CEOs feel shame over this state of affairs? Hardly. It’s the reality of running a business. The challenge comes when executives do understand that thought leadership is critical, they want to do it well, and they simply can’t figure out how to make it happen at scale.

Collaborative Thought Leadership in Balance

The ideal situation would be if you created the thought leadership content yourself. You’ve got the vision, the experience and the insider’s view of the entire business. But for a lot of CEOs, this just isn’t feasible, due to numerous other responsibilities. Instead, as we’ve seen, too many choose to simply not do it.

At this point, you should understand the benefits of thought leadership, and why it’s most compelling coming from you. But instead of trying to find a 25th hour in the day to actually sit down and get it done — or worse, doing it haphazardly — consider the somewhat counter-intuitive solution of outsourcing.

Sitting down with a professional who can understand your vision and create content in a way that transmits your passion, be it in blog, social post, podcast, or even cartoon format, will help your company establish their messaging and position in a compelling, humanized way.

The best outsourced executive ghostwriting is a long-term collaboration. You won’t be able to give three bullet points to your ghostwriter on day one and receive a perfect piece of your own mind on day two. To do this well and sustainably, you want someone on board who understands enough of your vision to iterate on it, who can absorb a concept you provide and run with it, ultimately creating something with your flavor, personality and passion.

The more natural the extension is, the better the content will be, and the better off your brand will perform. Spend time ensuring that you and your ghostwriter are both clear on objectives, tone, schedule and even type of content you want to create. Remember, this thought leadership represents you and your brand — it’s going to be a close relationship.

Spending the extra time and care to ensure your ghostwriter can act like an extension of your brain and writing voice is worth it.

Elise Bauer, founder of Simply Recipes, says in her timeless 2003 blog post on the subject that a distinguishing characteristic of a thought leader is “the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates.” To get your ghostwriter to that level, it’s going to take a good amount of investment and even some trial and error.

When it comes to keeping the content pipeline in motion, there are several different strategies, any of which might be best for you and your ghostwriter’s relationship. You can have a running email thread that you drop ideas into; you can start a Trello board that tracks ideas from suggestions to full-blown content; monthly audio braindumps that get turned into drafts; weekly batches of curated content from the industry that provoke executive reactions.

The main idea here is simply to ensure your ghostwriter has a channel to get ideas from you, suggest thoughts to you in turn, and exchange feedback and critiques.

It’s something that takes trust and time. But the benefits — increased selling power, deepened relationship with both prospective and current customers, and a greater sense of who you are as a company — are worth building that relationship.

Thought Leadership Has to Be Done Right

Thought leadership matters to your audience. Most potential buyers look to thought leadership to help them decide whether to begin a relationship with a company or not. Right now, there’s a scarcity of quality thought leadership because many CEOs simply don’t see the worth or can’t find the time — yet. The natural solution is to invest in working with a trusted collaborator.

The benefits of outsourcing thought leadership are that you can dedicate your time to growing your company, but you’ll still be able to share your vision with your audience of potential customers. A good outsourced relationship means your brand’s content can be produced on a very authentic basis, on a regular schedule, and you can guarantee it will be high quality.

There are plenty of factors that might stop you from investing your own time in this endeavor, but just because it’s hard to do well doesn’t mean you’re better off skipping it.