Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
Most business content is boring and ignored.
I know, nothing new there.
If millions of posts are published daily, millions will naturally miss the mark.
Even the ones that do pick up engagement don’t typically lead to real business results for the author.
If we forget the spam and clickbait and just focus on the well-intentioned content from professional folk, I believe the majority of fails are a result of the author taking a narrow perspective, widely implemented.
What does that look like?
Let’s say you write about user experience.
A narrow perspective comes from the UX consultant spending the bulk of his ‘research time’ reading books and articles from other UX professionals. His head is full of pre-existing cliches and ideas swirling around the industry.
The writer comes up with nothing new because all inputs come from a much too narrow source. He simply re-surfaces ideas the UX market is already familiar with.
But, whilst his perspective is wide, his implementation is broad.
When he shows us his (borrowed) thinking in action, he typically maps ideas against the same old brands: Patagonia, Nike, Tesla, Slack, Apple, Red Bull, Hubspot, Liquid Death, etc.
No specificity to his ICP, personas, or examples we haven’t seen before.
Of little value to many, of great value to none.
Thought leader-style content does the opposite.
A client of mine runs an innovation studio. They help large corporates validate new product ideas.
They’re smart guys.
Yes, when they started out, they read all the books on startup innovation. Zero to One, Innovators Dilemma, etc.
But they read that foundational stuff long ago.
Now, they’re reading upstream - material that explains the core workings behind product validation.
It’s First Principles Thinking.
“[First Principle thinking is] a tool to help clarify complicated problems by separating the underlying ideas or facts from any assumptions based on them. What remain are the essentials. If you know the first principles of something, you can build the rest of your knowledge around them to produce something new.” Farnham Street, The Great Mental Models Vol.1
Systems thinking, behavioural psychology, science and technology, cultural anthropology, art and design, etc. He develops a broad perspective on the fundamentals that determine how and why users respond to new products.
But, as I mentioned previously, he focuses only on large corporates.
His implementation is narrow. He’s only interested in applying this perspective to the innovation manager of a large corporate.
When it comes to launching new products, large corporates have completely different challenges compared with startups (which most online content is concerned with).
So, with a narrow focus, he can obsess over a broad category (innovation) implemented on one very specific customer base (an innovation manager struggling to innovate within a large corporate).
He combines his experience with market observations, and he could take this in all sorts of different directions.
He could run case studies on successful and unsuccessful innovation in corporates. He could look at famous cases of successful innovation in firms, like when Adobe switched to a subscription offer, or when Lego innovated its way out of bankruptcy in the 2000s. He could look at failed innovation, like why Blockbuster failed with their streaming attempt in the 2000s.
Really get into the weeds of the innovation process for each. Not just tell us what happened. Tell us why it happened and how they might have done things differently.
He could interview current innovation managers at large firms for a podcast and develop a narrative-based show on stories behind new product launches.
He could predict what will happen and publish test cases, hypothesising an event or opportunity within Virgin Airlines (for example) and walking through the innovation process to maximise the opportunity (or mitigate the risk).
Do you know what happens when he does all of this?
He notices patterns only he could notice (because nobody is looking at this with such a narrow, intense focus). And some of those patterns will inevitably rub up against existing best practices.
He’ll find holes in popular thinking, or, if not holes, show how some best practices are counterintuitive when working in corporate innovation versus a startup.
His customer base, smart innovation managers working at corporates, are drawn to what he says.
He’s writing specifically for them, so it’s very relevant. And, whilst the topic of lean startup and jobs to be done aren’t new, his observations and application in corporate world are.
With this strategy, I’ve absolutely no doubt he’d become a one-of-one.
You open the hood, figure out how things work and follow your curiosity, in public. Provided it’s closely related to the thing (or things) that you sell.
“Good nonfiction [is] … a chance to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff that most of us don’t have a chance to do in our daily lives.” David Foster Wallace, Writer (via Austin Kleon)
It’s the approach I took with these case studies on thought leaders.
I spend around 50 hours making each case study. 40 of those hours were spent researching, curating, synthesising, and thinking, and ten were spent writing and illustrating.
I know, that’s a lot of time. But it worked.
I built relationships with big hitters and, to date, pulled in $65,000 through inbound as a direct result of those articles.
I uncovered patterns and observations that conflicted with content marketing best practices.
Part of that came because I broadened my research and moved upstream to First Principles. Those first principles helped me explain what I was seeing.
But maybe more importantly, I spent a lot of time studying a very narrow group of people: Thought leaders who sell consulting.
I didn’t look at people who are so ahead in the game that it’s hard for you and me to relate to them (e.g., Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, etc.).
And I didn’t look at people from ‘The Creator Economy.’ My narrow audience has an existing offering and expertise that they want to build an audience around. People in The Creator Economy build an audience first, typically a broad one, then figure out how to sell a low-ticket product on mass.
That narrow implementation gave me a shot at making something super relevant, useful, and interesting to a very specific person.
And this is strategic-level.
It’s not something you take with you in isolation when you’re writing today’s LinkedIn post.
You introduce it when you’re planning your content strategy.
You ask yourself two questions:
You do the research and make long-form ‘hits’ that show your thinking and narrative in its entirety. That’s for your home base (newsletter, book, podcast, etc.) Then, you apply that long-form thinking to short-form insights (LinkedIn).
Go follow your curiosity and share what you find.
Want to become a thought leader?
Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
