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As a thought leader, you face challenges balancing creating original content and promoting it. The more advanced you are, the more your challenge will move from content creation to the promotion side of the job.  

What is new: Thought leaders can take inspiration from authors and filmmakers to evolve their balance between creation and promotion over time.

Why it matters: Breaking through in an environment flooded with content is becoming increasingly complex, and your best ideas need extensive promotion efforts to reach their peak potential.

📚 Authors: Authors need to be good at writing books and getting readers excited about buying them. All authors go on book tours and target exposure through interviews.

If you write business books, you have likely pivoted to building fan communities around your theme with engagement far beyond reading the book. You aspire to connect with your audience deeply so they become your advocates and get ideas and inspiration for your next book. All steps after the book completion are part of a vital promotion job.

🎥 Filmmakers: Making movies is half the fun, but the best movies get the biggest marketing budgets. A 50/50 split between making and promoting is not uncommon.

Your A talent walks the red carpet during premieres, and trailers drum up momentum well before release. The budgets grow with the potential to win big, and investing big in marketing is vital for your big successes to materialize.

♟♟♟Early stage thought leaders: Thought leaders in their journey have qualified by investing 10k hours to develop expertise in a given area. That expertise enables research that you can turn into attractive assets.

Your personal and company brand limit the reach of such. At this stage, spending dollars to prop up personal brands is costly. A better approach is for thought leaders to build up their personal brands.

🧰 Building up your digital profile and accepting all speaking opportunities are two essential brand-building tools to leverage early. Growing your digital network and engagement for your posts are lead indicators that you are moving in the right direction.

Expect this stage to last three to five years, during which you conduct primary research, co-author papers, and work to increase your personal brand recognition in your field of expertise.

🔦 At this stage, your balance is skewed toward content creation

• Write articles or blog posts for owned channels.
• Co-author research papers
• Interview with industry analysts and trade press.
• Speak in customer meetings and at owned events.
• Building up your personal brand and digital network on LinkedIn
• Promoting own and third-party content on a personal digital platform
• Your LinkedIn SSI score exceeds 60

In the book world, this is self-publishing of books and actors who work for pennies compared to the dollars that A-talent gets.

🥈🥉 Established thought leaders: Once you are recognized as a thought leader, you start to spend more time on the promotion side of the game. You work with account teams to find customer-led innovations to build from and act as lead author for thought leadership initiatives.

Your promotion efforts increase, and you focus on developing your promotion techniques and promoting thought leadership ideas from industry and company peers. Outreach remains vital for your network build, and your increased activities on digital platforms drive an influx of connection requests.

🔦 Indicators you are at this level are:

• You lead research activities and are a lead author for content creation
• Your thought leadership initiatives are customer-led
• You interact with financial analysts and business press in your field of expertise
• You are recognized as a thought leader outside your own company
• Your LinkedIn SSI score exceeds 70

At this stage, it makes business sense for a company to leverage your elevated thought leadership role for paid speaking, writing, and advertising opportunities.

Think books published by a well-known publisher and talent co-starring in movies.

🏆 Top-tier thought leaders: The top tier is hard to reach, and your personal brand strengthens the organization you represent at this stage. Reinforcing a brand is a big task when you represent an enterprise or large corporation.

At this level, brilliant thinking, stellar assets, and great productions are table stakes and entry tickets to play. The promotion game is what makes you stand out and what is required to maximize the impact of your assets.

🧰 Expect the required promotion budgets to be an order of magnitude bigger than the previous level. The topics you develop and promote are your company’s strategic priorities.

🔦 Common qualifiers at this level are:

• You have authored a book
• You are part of an external advisory board
• You write articles for business publications
• You get paid to speak at third-party events or a part of speakers trading for corporate flagship events
• Your SSI score exceeds 80

Here, you compare with best-selling authors and lead actors in movies. You are also comfortable playing the director or producer of thought leadership programs, not just scripting and acting.

Bottom line: Expect your effort to move from 75 content and 25 promotions, via 50/50 to 25/75 as you play the long game and progress from the first to the third stage

Additional reading suggestions

• 5 steps to become a thought leader in 2024 [ARTICLE] – by Rachel Wells, Forbes  
• How to become a thought leader: Strategy, Tips, & Examples [BLOGPOST] – by Dan Sanchez
• 10 steps to establish yourself as an industry thought leader [BLOGPOST] – by Pamela Vaughan, Hubspot