Developing Thought Leadership

Your clients and prospects don’t want to read a laundry list of things you can do for them. Rather, they want you to share content that covers trends and issues that are important to them. By sharing this information, you can become a consultant people want to work with. The following areas can boost your thought leadership success:

  • Personal branding – People can brand themselves just like company’s do. This requires a personal branding strategy that pulls upon your strengths and becomes a guiding strategy for future actions. Should you be on Twitter? Should you write for X publication? Should you go to this event? Well, that depends on your brand. By identifying a personal brand strategy, you can be more confident, effective and successful by simply becoming “famous” for what you already do.
  • Content marketing – Content marketing is about developing and sharing content in order to win new clients and keep your current ones happy. As an accountant, your knowledge and expertise is what you sell, making content marketing a winning strategy for you. However, with all the channels on the web and within your firm, how do you know what you should be doing? A strategy that ties content to the sale funnel and to the channels where it will be best received becomes your guide to pulling more potential clients to you. And firms with more than one person striving for thought leadership need a firm-wide strategy to ensure everyone achieves their goals while not stepping on anyone else’s toes
  • Public speaking and writing strategy – Part of being a thought leader entails public speaking and writing. By developing a strategy that looks at where you should be speaking, what publications you should target for writing and what reporters you should befriend, you’ll know where to focus your efforts. The strategy will also spell out your need for public speaking coaching, a speaker sheet and possibly a ghostwriter to put that content together for you.
  • Individual social media strategy – You realize that you need to be on social media. But where should you be? What should you post? How often? Social media doesn’t have to be a time suck on you to be an effective strategy. By outlining what channels you and your firm use, with what frequency and things you’ll share, you can master this medium which is instrumental to building your brand and content marketing.