You’re the expert on the subject, Writers Who are the experts with the words. We create insightful content that educates, surprises and engages, firmly positioning you as the go-to authority on the topic.
An opinion piece or thought leadership article is a way to share your expert insights or views on a particular topic. It’s an amazing opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and build credibility within your industry. The idea is to build your exposure and become a trusted source of information.
If you’re a leader in any industry or any organisation, you probably have perspectives, opinions and views about the way the industry operates, what it needs to do to stay relevant and fix legacy problems, how people can succeed in your sector and case studies about what has worked and what hasn’t.
This is thought leadership - but only if it's published.
You probably have thought, I really should communicate my views on X,Y,Z but you haven’t had the time or the headspace to get it done. That’s where companies like mine come in - we capture your perspectives, your tone of voice and ghost write that thought leadership for you on a regular or one-off basis.
Thought leadership content is actually a crucial business tool today. It helps articulate yours and your organisation’s point of difference, builds credibility, authority and trust and when done well, creates change.
It is one of the most meaningful ways to shape brand perception, impacting client and prospective talent confidence in working with your company.
Successful thought leadership content contributes to building your brand, opening new doors with potential customers and closing deals in your pipeline. Thought leadership content can help you amplify your demand and lead generation strategy. Thought leadership is an integral part of your marketing strategy and improves the marketing and sales alignment.
The crucial component of any thought leadership is having a point to make - a contrarian or decisive view on a topical issue, reframing the conversation and being a catalyst for a change in the discourse on a particular topic.
Our job is to craft it and polish it to such a point that in the vast ocean of opinions yours is the one that is open-worthy, click-worthy, share-worthy, conversation-starting, change-making.
But it all starts with you, your idea, your experience, your view.
Writers Who have curated many opinion pieces and thought leadership articles for our clients. We've explained the implications of capital gains tax on farmland sales. We've helped brokers navigate the private lender market. We've paved a pathway for working mothers in a post-covid world. We’ve analysed the agri-tech landscape for Australian Agritech Association founding director and Farmbot managing director Andrew Coppin. We critiqued and advised on policy for financial advisors during a period of legislative change ghostwritten for wealth management CEO, Matt Lawler. We’ve produced historical background and market analysis on key prestige property suburbs in Sydney’s eastern suburbs for leading real estate agent Ashley Bierman. We've forecasted the shift in property styles in one of Australia's fastest-growing non-capital cities. We've identified Israeli innovations worth investing in and highlighted three of the biggest conundrums facing investors. And addressed the lessons young entrepreneurs need to learn.
Thought leadership content is becoming increasingly important in the world of search engine optimisation (SEO). This type of content can help to establish your website as a trusted and authoritative source of information within your industry, and can help to improve your search engine rankings as a result.
One of the key reasons why thought leadership content is so important is because it allows you to showcase your expertise and knowledge on a specific topic. By providing valuable and informative content on your website, you can demonstrate to both search engines and your target audience that you are an expert in your field. This can help to build trust and credibility with your audience, which is essential for gaining their loyalty and support.
In addition to building trust and credibility, thought leadership content can also help to improve your search engine rankings. Search engines like Google are constantly looking for high-quality, relevant content to display in their search results. By creating thought leadership content that is relevant to your target audience and industry, you can improve your chances of appearing at the top of search results for relevant keywords. This can help to increase your website's visibility and drive more organic traffic to your site.
Another reason why thought leadership content is important for SEO is because it can help to differentiate your website from your competitors. In a highly competitive online marketplace, it's important to stand out and set yourself apart from other websites in your industry. Thought leadership content can help to do this by providing unique and valuable insights that are not easily found elsewhere. This can help to make your website more attractive to both search engines and your target audience, and can help to improve your overall SEO strategy.
In conclusion, thought leadership content is becoming increasingly important for SEO. By creating high-quality, relevant, and unique content, you can establish your website as a trusted and authoritative source of information within your industry, improve your search engine rankings, and differentiate yourself from your competitors. If you want to succeed in the world of SEO in 2023, incorporating thought leadership content into your strategy is essential.
One of the best ways to stand out in your industry in a positive and memorable way is to be positioned as a thought leader - someone who speaks wisdom or shares insights into the most pertinent of topics to their industry in a timely fashion whether its via white papers, blogs, articles, press releases, podcasts, videos or ideally a mix of it all.
The actual execution is very easy in each of those mediums once you’ve determined the things about which you have thoughts to share, questions to clarify or philosophies to promulgate.
So, how do you work out what to become a thought leader on?
First: identify the major dinner table discussions in your industry (whether it's for workers in that industry or clients). What is everyone sceptical about? Worried about? What do they think needs to change? What do they think is changing too much? What are the regulatory or macro factors impacting your industry? What can people do to mitigate those or leverage them?
Secondly: determine which of these you have a strong position on based on your experience, insights, intelligence and exposure. That’s where the gold lies. Is it a piece of legislation that takes the industry backwards instead of forwards? Is it a process that isn’t being adopted but should? Is it an opportunity being ignored? It is a mindset that you’ve seen work and should be shared widely? Is a series of actions you’ve tested that provide a positive outcome?
Thirdly: think about what you want to be known for, what you want your thought leadership to represent, where you want to build a reputation. Because, at the end of the day, all the content and thought leadership needs to support this or it's just hot air without a balloon to inflate.
Opinion pieces are a great way to market and position yourself as an expert in your field so you can develop influence with a view to driving more income and more impact. Whether you’re publishing in trade publications, internal communications forums or on a website or LinkedIn, crafting compelling content in your voice with your position, view, experience or insights on a topic is a powerful modern marketing tool.
You could be shining a light on misnomer or myths in your industry, or a forecaster on they way your industry could shift and evolve, or a sage on how to succeed for newer participants to your sector.
The question for you is, what are you already at the leading edge of? What are you leading thought on? What are you asked about by your industry? What topics lead most people to you?
If you're not already, what is the area that you want to be a thought leader in? What is your unique take on that thing?
Attention grabbing headline
Introduction
Body
Conclusion
Reviewing your article is the most important final step before hitting publish. Once you feel that you’re finished, read it over again checking for typos or errors. Are all the facts correct? The purpose of this piece is to position you, or your client, as an industry leader so there is no room for errors.
We can become blind to our own errors after carefully crafting an article. Hearing the words out loud can help you to check that everything reads okay and makes sense. You can read it to yourself out loud, or paste your copy into a text to speech generator like Natural Reader to hear how it really sounds.
Finally, appoint an official editor or two to review the copy before publication. If this article has been written on somebody else’s behalf, make sure they are happy with how it sounds.
