Thought leadership allows entrepreneurs to share valuable content and showcase their expertise in their industry, creating a lead pipeline, shortening sales cycles, and building trust and credibility with investors.

By using thought leadership content, founders can also save on marketing costs, especially in the early stages of building their business. The lesson also discusses the different types of thought leadership content, such as social media posts, eBooks, webinars, and original research.

Finally, the lesson suggests considering goals, target audience, and trending topics in their industry when creating a thought leadership strategy. The overall goal is to establish oneself as a leader in the field and build trust with investors and customers.

Why is thought leadership important for climate tech founders?

With the advent of social media came new ways to communicate directly with specific groups of people. That shift brought with it, multiple different ways of conducting business across the spectrum. From HR to sales a substantial shift happened. But perhaps, nowhere was this shift as great as in marketing. As a result, the power changed hands from the sellers to the buyers. 

As this paradigm shifted, many marketers continued their original strategies — pushing seller-centric messages to buyers. For example, they're still using the same content for TV advertising and sales conferences online. Pushing out sales messages to cold audiences without the velocity of the mass media. It's a challenge many brand founders grapple with today.

And it directly stems from the question: "What should I put on social media?" For many impact-driven founders, it's difficult to know what to post online, what to talk about, and what angle to take when you do. 

Thought leadership, one of the biggest up-and-coming concepts in marketing right now, developed to address this exact problem. It’s the professional equivalent of being a subject-matter expert. And it's driven by, you guessed it, valuable content.

What is Thought Leadership?

As the digital landscape evolved, marketing has become even more competitive and cutting through the noise for brands and multinational enterprises alike has become more important than ever.

One way to stand out is through thought leadership content. Thought leadership content is defined as “free deliverables (content), organisations or individuals produce on a topic they know a lot about and feel others can benefit from having their perspective on.

In this context, thought leadership content does not include content primarily focused on describing an organisation’s products or services.

And according to 2020 research from Edelman, “companies with the best ability to produce timely, thought-provoking thought leadership content are much more adept than their competitors at capturing their customers’ attention and turning that attention into positive results.”

That's the practical answer to "what is thought leadership". The emotive answer is that thought leadership, when used properly can be your smoking gun.

The Benefits of Thought Leadership Content

When used correctly, thought leadership, instead of product or sales-led communications can create a lead pipeline, shorten sales cycles, build trust and give your brand credibility with investors.

Nearly all (89%) of B2B decision-makers say that thought leadership content has enhanced their perceptions of an organization and half believe Thought Leadership influences their purchasing decisions.

There are three main reasons brand founders, especially those who put impact at the heart of their business should be looking to utilize a thought leadership strategy:

1. Investors are looking for founders with expertise: Most investors of early-stage companies don’t just invest in the product but the team behind the product. They want to know that the founders have the industry experience to pull of the next big thing. Developing thought leadership allows potential investors to learn about your market knowledge and industry expertise as they do their due diligence on your company.

2. It provides low-cost marketing materials: Let’s face it, most early founders are so busy building a product and building their team that they often leave marketing as a thing they focus on later down the line. Or worse, they put an intern on it. By building thought leadership — especially thought leadership content, which features the founder or CTO — in your early days, you are beginning your marketing efforts for next to nothing. Having a robust thought leadership and content strategy and featuring industry experts allows you to have some marketing material without heavy-hitting expenditures like SEM, advertising buys and tradeshows. 

3. Sales needs tools to build trust: Today, customers refer to online content instead of seeking help from a salesperson. This creates a defined need for specific, accessible material to help with decision-making to buy a product. While no single prospect is going to close early on because you have a great thought leadership strategy, but they will use the content that you generate as a result to research your company and you. 

The Different Forms of Thought leadership Content

Common forms of thought leadership content include:

• Social Media Posts

• eBooks

• Whitepapers

• Podcasts/Videos

• Webinars

• Blog Posts (on-site and guest blogs — more on that in the next section)

• Original Research

How to Create Your Thought Leadership Strategy

When considering what to actually write, consider the different touchpoints where your prospect's problems and your solution meet trending topics. Before we get there, there are a few more things to consider:

• The first step is to consider your goal: Do you want to showcase your ability to lead, warm up prospects or get in contact with investors?  

• Are you B2B or B2C? If you're B2B, then you'll be able to use your thought leadership content to acquire new customers. If you're mainly B2C, then your strategy may well be more focused on investors and partnerships.

• What are the trending topics in your niche right now? For instance, in branding, there is demand generation, conversational marketing, and thought leadership. In impact investing, there is impact measurement, climate finance and corporate impact. Hint: They're your value propositions or your "magic tools" as discussed in the narrative section earlier in the course.

Once you've determined the answers to these three questions, it's time to think about where they inter

People inherently want to interact with other people

Thought leadership, as a climate tech founder is about highlighting your ability to build and lead a team that can disrupt the industry.

The goal is to build trust among investors, customers, team members, industry peers, and decision-makers, and to do that, there needs to be transparency around who’s steering the ship. 

Publishing from a business account simply won’t create that same sense of transparency, because people inherently can’t connect to an entity in the same way that they can with a human being.

These stakeholders want to know what leaders in their industry think, where they see the industry going, and they want to know how it's going to affect them.

LinkedIn for Thought Leadership

Besides this practical insight into human nature, LinkedIn’s publishing system is only available for individuals and this is an integral part of a thought leadership strategy. LinkedIn is integral for thought leadership for two reasons.

Firstly, if your company runs a blog on its website and you as an individual share that piece of content, it’s much less likely to show up in your target audience’s feed (i.e., where they consume content). This is due to LinkedIn’s preference for content produced on its own platform vs. content that will take a user off the platform onto a third party site. Secondly, when you share that piece of content, it’s much more difficult to use a personal voice over a more neutral company tone. Of course, it is possible to create thought leadership content from a company perspective, but when you’re just starting out, I would recommend focusing your efforts on engaging on your personal LinkedIn account.

Secondly, you’re a founder or an entrepreneur and you’re busy building a company which will create systemic, lasting global impact. It’s natural to think that your company, the company that you’ve started, is your brand. Unfortunately, that’s only half the story. You as a founder are an integral part of your start-up’s brand. Whilst many founders like to hide behind their company’s image, consumers, customers, partners and investors believe that leaders who are active on social media are more trustworthy than those who are not. In fact, one study by the Impact Learning Center found that although consumers are 82% more likely to trust a company when the CEO is active on social media, only one in five CEOs are active on social media. And further, by some estimates, up to 50% of a company’s reputation can be attributed to the leader or founder. 

As we’ve discussed, sustainability entrepreneurs are more likely to be an academic or an engineer than an internet personality. But when so much is at stake, leaving personal branding up to chance is not a long-distance tactic. Personal branding at its core is about building trust. With trust comes credibility and with credibility comes growth. As such a robust personal brand will not only help your company grow, but it will also give you the opportunity to grow your network and share your story with the outside world. 

Because whether you’ve invested time or effort into it, you have a personal brand. 

Google your own name and see what comes up. What about on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram? Are they public? Do they represent you as a founder or an entrepreneur? This is the basis of personal branding and in a digital-first world, if you refuse to embrace this concept, you’re in danger of being consumed by it. To put it plainly, because of the internet, whether you like it or not, you have a personal brand. That’s now irrefutable. What you can control however is what it portrays. Luckily for some out there, it’s possible to shape this online persona. By creating content that you strategically place across digital mediums, you can actively play a role in determining what anyone searching your name will come across.