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A fundamental thought leadership role is inspiring customers and partners to take action. This job is made easier when the material is up to date and reflects current insights and evidence.

What is new: A well-defined strategy for updating your thought leadership is key to staying relevant.

Why it matters: The refresh cycles 🔁 for thought leadership are getting shorter and shorter. Thought leaders respond with agile approaches with continuous development and integration of new problems, insights, and evidence of progress.

🎯 Moving target: Thought leadership is a moving target. Being on top of your game is vital to customers’ and partners’ perceptions of you as a thought leader.

You address their current problems and challenges with relevant insights and evidence that inspires them to take action. In fast-moving markets, this means your thought leadership needs to evolve continuously.

🧭⏳⏲️ Cadence: The cadence for thought leadership updates are different for different aspects of

• Your aspirations define the opportunities you want to influence as a brand. Aim for strategic opportunities with a strong 5-10 year horizon and evaluate them yearly.
• The second level is about what topic to build conversations around. Plan for conversations extending 12-24 months out and review quarterly for relevance.
• Once defined, the insights for talking points can be stable, but the evidence and proof points backing them up are evolving continuously.

🏹 Ambition setting – 1.0X, 1.X or X.0: Think through the refresh strategy as you work with the first iteration of your thought leadership initiative. A choice between small frequent increments (1.0X), mid-size additions (1.X), or big releases (X.0)

Small, frequent increments are suitable for extensive opportunities in rapidly developing markets. Additions can be about a new insight, a new topic that surges in importance, or new data that change the insight or make it more actionable. Strong external forces set the agenda for this approach.

In the middle of the road, you are dealing with manageable opportunities where the underlying problems, conversation topics, and facts are stable. Your competition and customer base are diverse.

An ambition for large, infrequent refresh cycles works well for smaller opportunities and stable markets. Both insights and the relationship between insights are stable over time. This approach is suitable when the underlying research is time-consuming and where you have a strong influence in shaping the market.

👍 As a rule of thumb, you should refresh your thought leadership one-click cycle faster than the cadence of your offerings. If you release offerings in significant yearly upgrades (X.0), your thought leadership should evolve in quarterly updates (1.X), etc. Opportunities defined by digital market logic need thought leadership with frequent incremental updates.

Question validity: To stay relevant, your content must match the questions your audience seeks answers to. As your industry addresses key questions and becomes common knowledge, you can remove them from your thought leadership program and shift focus to the questions your audience has now.

One benefit of being considered a thought leader is that your audience will ask questions that still need addressing in your industry. Pay attention to every question you get when speaking, presenting to customers, or interviewing with a journalist. That is where you find the seeds of what to address next.

Format innovation: Part of your refresh agenda must address whether your audience’s focus should evolve. Are you at a point where you need to expand to reach deeper or broader in the market? Is your base still adequate, or are you ready to add a new format you have piloted?

Expect the art of reaching executive audiences in 3-minute windows to evolve continuously. Digital format innovation and story-telling techniques are growing with the introduction of AI.

📌 News always sells: A final consideration is to ask yourself what is newsworthy. Have any numbers changed significantly? Do you see any indicators with steady sequential shifts? Have you added new data points that was not discussed in previous releases?

Nuggets of News increase the odds of getting noticed. Established channels/content with a known cadence and news nuggets are essential in building an audience. Search for News in numbers and data and the insights you can draw/articulate.

For data-intensive thought leadership, you can present the graphs and visuals in new ways. A tactic where you can tweak some existing visualizations to make your point of view more visible.

🛎 Relaunch: Think through the promotion strategy for updated material to re-engage with your initial audience and target audience growth.

The relaunch strategy can be purely digital or supported by face-to-face initiatives at events or digital third-party platforms.

Your supporters are an essential group for the relaunch. Great internal information helps accelerate the acceleration and secures all external-facing staff. Always build from updated material. Your internal influencer is a cost-effective way to ensure updates get along quickly.

Additional reading suggestions

• The power of thought leadership: How to stand out in a crowded news cycle [BLOGPOST] – by J|Konnely
• 5 things your board needs to know about innovation and thought leadership [BLOGPOST] – by Nicholas D. Evans, CIO
• Thought leadership strategy: A step bystep guide with examples for growth [BLOGPOST] – by Vinay Koshy, Sproutworth