This is the second, in a three-part video series on how professional services executives, within the technology services sphere, can make their thought leadership more visible. This video explores the second strategy, Writing.
Video Transcription
Hi, I’m Liz Harr and you’re watching the second of a three-part series on how technology services firms can raise the spectrum of visibility around their thought leadership. Now, remember if you watched the first video, you’ll already know this. But the reason we’re talking about raising visibility around something like thought leadership is because it is an excellent way to disseminate your expertise. And we know in the world of professional services how important expertise is in terms of driving new business our way.
So in the first series, I talked about the importance of direct contact and letting others experience your expertise directly, through either advising clients or working with a prospective audience through free assessments, that kind of thing, or even mentoring peers and colleagues. That all helps drive referrals your way and it helps secure visibility around your expertise.
Today I’m gonna talk about the efficacy of another strategy and that’s “Writing.” Now, let’s go back to expertise and thought leadership for a moment. The tricky thing about expertise in general and thought leadership more specifically, is that these are intangibles, these are invisible. You can’t tell a thought leader by the way they look or walk or talk nor does the claim that you are a thought leader make you one. The way that you lay claim around being a thought leader is through demonstrating it and that’s what I’m talking about in this video series.
So today I’ll focus on “writing” and how that contributes to raising visibility around your thought leadership. Now let’s talk about, “Why writing?” I wanna show you a chart here and this is from some research that we conducted recently. And look at the top three reasons here that technology services buyers find experts. The criteria they’re using, the first three are all directly attributed to writing online search, they’re going online and they’re looking for evidence thought leadership opinion content pieces on how to solve the problem they’re looking to solve.
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Second is recommendations. If you listened to the first video, you would have heard me talk about the importance of referrals in professional services. And getting recommendations are a primary way that buyers look for experts.
Finally, publications, reading your thought leadership and publications. Now writing has an impact on all three of these and this accounts for 70% of the ways technology services buyers indeed look for experts.
Now that we know why writing is important and how it contributes, let’s talk about what you do. I’m not just talking about a blog here or there or being in social media. For every writing tool and strategy that you have, there needs to be an entire system in back of it that would make it work. So when I talk about a blog, for example, sure, a blog is great but it needs to be properly optimized so that the search engines can find it. It needs to be in the proper channels on your website and in social media so the humans can find it. It needs to live on your website, it needs to live on other reputable online publications as a guest blog.
So there are a lot of pieces that need to be in back of every singular piece of content and thought leadership that you might write. And when you do it that way, you’re creating this whole system of visibility around your thought leadership.
Now, I think everyone in professional services would agree with me that there’s an awful lot of junk out there and that’s why writing as powerful as it can be, it can be powerful on the other end of the spectrum, and instead of making you a credible thought leader, it can actually raise skepticism about you as a thought leader if you don’t write consistently or if it’s not on target with the things that your audience cares about, or most importantly, if it isn’t in fact, a piece of thought leadership. If it doesn’t have an informed perspective or a unique angle on how your audience is trying to solve their problem.
So, I hope that you have found this useful and that you’ll think about incorporating writing as part of your overall strategy for raising visibility around your thought leadership.
