A thought leadership strategy can come in many forms, with each having a different return and impact when it comes to amplifying your reach. By amplifying I mean, to expand the scope or influence of your body of work and specific conversations. While many believe this kind of thought leadership strategy should center on social media and posting content everywhere, we disagree.
Why Social Media Isn’t the Best Thought Leadership Strategy
The reality is that social media posts lose traction within seconds to minutes to maybe hours, depending on the platform. If your post “goes viral,” that time can be extended, but for the most part, social media content disappears into the noise nearly immediately.
And if your thought leadership centers around meaningful topics that address systemic and social justice issues, the platforms will suppress your normally abysmally low reach of 10% (usually less) of your audience to essentially nobody. This is because they want people to mindlessly scroll long enough for them to generate revenue from all the ads that populate their feeds.
Too much “real” conversation reduces people’s supposed “positive associations” with social media, so they’re not going to let you onto people’s feeds if your thought leadership content isn’t aligned with their goals.
Additionally, social media isn’t a secure or effective business hub. We’ve witnessed many clients, friends, and influencers lose their social media profiles out of nowhere and for no real reason (especially on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram). If you lose your social media profiles and can’t appeal or get them restored, you’ll also lose your audience and channel for thought leadership.
So, What is The Best Thought Leadership Strategy?
The best thought leadership strategy is one that puts you in front of as many warm individuals as possible, where ‘warm’ refers to those who are more receptive to your messages and offers than cold individuals, as they’re already familiar with your brand or have some level of interest.
This is where online marketers will once again tell you to focus on building “know, like, and trust” through regular social media content, and you can certainly do that if it feels aligned.
That said, our approach works much better…
Why Podcast Guesting is the Best Thought Leadership Strategy for Amplifying Your Reach
We believe podcast guesting is the perfect thought leadership strategy for amplifying your reach because you’re welcomed as a guest in front of a host’s already established, warm, and engaged audience—a host that the audience has already built trust with. And, by proxy, they already have a level of trust in what you have to say because the host has invited you to join their conversation.
How to Use This Thought Leadership Strategy
Podcast tours are something we recommend for clients all the time, and help them with in our agency. It’s something that’s best built into your regular weekly and monthly marketing tasks, and can be accelerated if you have a virtual assistant or team member to help.
If you’re working solo, we promise it’s not that much work!
Here are the steps for starting with this thought leadership strategy:
Create signature talks that align with your thought leadership topics. It’s crucial that these are compelling and stand out, including unique titles, descriptions, and key takeaways, so that show hosts understand the value you’ll bring to their audience and why they should accept you as a guest over others reaching out to them.
Research shows that regularly publish new episodes, featuring guest interviews and experts, and appearing to have an engaged audience. Tools like PodSeeker will give you actual listener statistics, but you can also get a sense by looking at their existing social media or YouTube following, or how many reviews they have on their podcast. If you’re just starting out, we recommend reaching out to relatively smaller shows so that you can gather solid speaking samples to use when reaching out to larger shows.
Customize your outreach to each host. While there are great templates available (we provide one to our Podcast Tour clients that has a 60%-80% conversion rate when paired with a unique topic), heavy customization is essential if you want the best chance of being featured on shows. This is because any host with a show that has been running for some time (six months to a year or more) is likely receiving a ton of outreach messages and pitches from potential guests. As podcast hosts ourselves, we know that those messages are mostly generic, canned, and often lack alignment with the show. Listen to a recent episode, leave an honest review about what you learned, and then reach out to the host with a custom message telling them why you love their work, how you’d like to support it and their audience, and a topic you’d like to bring to the table. Make it about them and their audience. They know you’re looking for visibility if you want to be a guest, but don’t center yourself!
Follow up if you don’t hear back, at least once. Many times, hosts missed the message or just hadn’t had a chance to reply, but wanted to. A simple nudge can go a long way, but please don’t spam anyone. If it feels right to follow up a second time, go for it! If you don’t hear back but really want to be on the show, continue to follow and engage with their content, support their mission, and stay top of mind by being a champion of their work.
Track your outreach and recorded episodes in a spreadsheet or project management tool, so you know who you’ve reached out to and the status of that show. We like to keep track of their name, contact information, website, show feed, the topic we pitched, when we sent emails, whether we’ve had a conversation, and whether the episode has been recorded. We also keep track of all the live episode links so that we can revisit and share them easily. This is also important if you use podcast tours as a primary thought leadership strategy. The more you do outreach (or if you bring on a team member to help), it can be far too easy to reach out to the same host twice, which isn’t the best look, especially if they said no!
Share your episode with your audience to help boost the reach and further establish your thought leadership. Social proof is one of the fastest ways to build trust and establish authority as a thought leader, and seeing you on other people’s podcasts goes a long way! Plus, this shows the podcast host that you support their work by giving them more reach with your audience as well. Consider keeping a Media or Speaking page on your website with these episodes embedded so that as you grow, you’ll receive more invitations.
Repurpose clips from your episode and share them on YouTube, the second-largest search engine behind sites like Google and Bing. Create clips that highlight the heart of your thought leadership ideas, frameworks, and concepts, and share them as Shorts and Reels. This is a great way to test which ideas receive the best response, allowing you to continue developing and evolving your thought leadership.
Speaking is a powerful thought leadership strategy, but speaking on stages can take more time than podcast guesting, which is why we believe it’s the best starting point.
Need Help Getting Started With This Thought Leadership Strategy?
We recommend grabbing our seven-step guide to eliminating the two biggest threats to your business in the AI Age, as it will walk you through the crucial first steps of developing unique and compelling brand positioning for your thought leadership.
