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In the business world, you focus on immediate actions and quarterly results, so giving low priority to the content architecture for thought leadership assets is easy—a challenge beyond the deliverables you plan to release in the coming year.

What is new: Great thought leadership assets without a matching content architecture can look mediocre in the eyes 👀 of your customers and target audiences.

Why it matters: A well-defined thought leadership content architecture increases audience loyalty over time and rewards recurring visitors.

The big idea: Anchor your thought leadership initiatives in a content architecture that is stable enough over multiple years to allow you to build a strong audience community.

🐀 The trap to avoid: A common trap when operating with a weak or non-existing content architecture is that customers struggle to follow you between your assets. The root cause is often that your default architecture is fuzzy and built around how you release assets rather than how they fit together by:

• Campaign – each campaign lives its own life
• Publication date – assets are grouped in chronological order.
• Home organization – each unit uses its own architecture, even if multiple teams add insights to the same broader opportunity.
• Topics in alphabetic order – centered around names of a specific technology or opportunity.
• Author – the grouping of contributions by the lead author or prominent thought leader in your team

⛔️ A common denominator for these “architectures” is that they focus on the publisher, not the audience. The problem grows as the number of assets grows, like how small software projects are turned into spaghetti 🍝 code as they grow.

Great architectures to copy: Fortunately, there are great metaphors to use to describe what you can aim for instead:

• 📚 Libraries and bookstores – travel, cooking, business, novels. Each has subsections underneath and by author in alphabetical order at the lowest level.
• 🥗 Sections in grocery stores – fruits and vegetables, deli, bakery, frozen food, refrigerated goods. Logical sections and where it is possible to build dishes around and across section borders

The library and bookstores are great for visualizing what to aim for in content architectures for thought leadership.

Think big: The best architectures have plenty of room for growth. They support the initiatives planned for the first year but should work for a 3-5 year horizon. Your corporate growth strategy is a great baseline when defining the total architecture scope.

🗂 Define multiple levels: Beyond addressing a 3-5 year scope of opportunities, you need an architecture supporting how you group content one or two levels below the top tier. Pressure test your architecture and see if it survives one or two double clicks.

Proposed starting point: As a starting point for your thought leadership architecture

1. Top-level – an outside-in perspective 🔄 on the broader strategic business opportunities you want to pursue. Avoid inside-out-centric product or technology views.
2. Second level – the critical conversations or topics 🔝 you invest time and money in to build thought leadership content and perception around.
3. Third level – concrete business opportunities 🔲 around the experiences, solutions, or services customers buy as part of one purchase initiative.
4. Fourth level – dividers on the final level can be coupled to the role each initiative plays ♠️♣️♥️♦️in enabling revenue growth, taking out cost, increasing competitiveness, or accelerating innovation.

You want to structure your assets in the order customer use them on their buying journey at the lowest level you pursue in your architecture. Excitement triggers first, and the realization details at the end.

Helpful planning support: Once you have a concise architecture in place, defining a blueprint for what you are great at creating with predictable outcomes and lead times is valuable. Tagging initiatives with size, small, medium, or large, is an excellent complement to knowing where in the architecture you aspire to make a difference.

What to expect: When you define an architecture with a superset of your intended business scope and, on top of that, with multiple levels, you will struggle to fill all target elements with attractive content. However, it makes it easier to understand what you need and which assets you would benefit the most from developing.

Bottom line: Investments in a thought leadership architecture pay off over time through loyalty in the customer community you attract/build. Just think about how hard you think it is to go to a different grocery store for your daily/weekly shopping than the one you usually go to.

Questions for you and your team

1. What does our current thought leadership architecture look like?
2. What are the broader opportunities we can extract from our business strategy?
3. How many levels do we need to support in our target architecture?
4. How much time can we invest in crafting the first complete architecture?
5. How frequently do we need to evolve our architecture?
6. Where do we place the borderline between thought leadership marketing and demand generation/sales funnel management?

Additional reading suggestions

• Content Marketing Strategy: Harness the power of your brand’s voice [BOOK] – by Robert Rose
• How content architecture shapes effective content pillars and engaging content topics [BLOGPOST] – by Ian Kirk, 1827 marketing
• Content architecture: Building the digital blueprint [BLOGPOST] – by Lucie Simonova, Kontent.AI
• Building thought leadership through content architecture [BLOGPOST] – by Liz R, Ranking Articles
• Three best practices of successful thought leadership architects [BLOGPOST] – by Buday Thought Leadership Partners