This summer, I recently participated in a thought leadership workshop for Arizona CEOs (from which I was inspired to write an article for Upstart Business Journal on "3 Lessons Startup Founders Could Learn from Corporate America"). Molly Castelazo of Castelazo Content led this event at the annual Arizona Technology Council’s CEO Retreat. The audience was comprised of mainly well-established companies. However looking around the room, I thought of how thought leadership can still be achieved on a shoestring or startup budget.
Here are seven components to advance your thought leadership early on:
1. Use HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
HARO is an awesome tool that makes it easy to include your company’s ideas or opinions in someone else’s story. It is free—a clear appeal for startups—and only requires time to prepare the pitch. The trick is to be very succinct and answer the reporter’s query precisely.
In our early days, we answered the queries of others and successfully used HARO to appear in Entrepreneur several times. Today, we are posting our own queries on HARO as a way to gather IP Horror Stories from others (a big thanks to Stephanie Burns from CHIC CEO for that tip). There is a prerequisite that you have to have a top million ALEXA rating and we are finally there!
2. Enter Contests
Enter early and often. Honing your pitch is critical to your success and winning some cool prizes along the way is not bad either. Contests or competitions often require support and can be a good way of spreading your name around. We gained momentum from winning a few contests early on and this helped us to refine our message.
3. Use LinkedIn
Do not sell your business on LinkedIn. Period. End of story. Your LinkedIn posts should be informative or educational only. At the top of my list of pet peeves are those who post spam on LinkedIn as if it were something we all need to read. We used posts that prior to our software launch as a way to spread the word on our company and provided education on the value of IP.
4. Blog Regularly
Some sites blog daily and others blog weekly; more posting is definitely better but regular posts are best. Pick a cadence and stick to it. We learned this first hand when our website traffic fell when we stopped blogging.
Not convinced? Here’s a screen shot of our graphs that correlate visitors to our blogging during... [+]
To shake things up a bit, we like to exchange blogs with other sites and invite guest bloggers to write relevant content to share with our readers. We have found that sharing quotes and linking to others is great for raising our profile and providing legitimacy.
5. Social Media Strategy
Like blogging, it is important to be consistent with social media posting and follow-up with engagement. Re-purpose and recycle old blogs by linking to new articles and sharing on social media. Ask others to share your content. It can lead to guest blogs and that help establish you as an expert.
6. Read, Write, Read, Write
Respond to others’ writing and make sure you monitor your own comments. Sites like Quora and other “question and answer forums” make for a good place to showcase your knowledge. Like LinkedIn, this is not a place to overtly sell your products. Just demonstrate your knowledge.
7. Include Calls to Action
Hey, after all, you are trying to sell something! But this is the inbound marketing way of selling—get an email address and some level of engagement in exchange for all your education and information. Our new favorite tool is Wistia, which creates videos with calls-to-action built in (so no more random tile advertisements from YouTube at the end of our videos).
Thought leadership is not for the faint of heart. Creating quality content is time consuming. But like everything else, once you lay that good foundation of engaging information, you’re more than halfway there.
Lastly, I cannot write a blog on thought leadership without mentioning and thanking our PR person, Cari Sommer of Sommer Communications Group. Cari has been instrumental in taking us from relying on all the above tactics and building upon them with her professional services.
#onwards
