When I started writing thought leadership, I deeply misunderstood how to ensure it was relevant.
My misunderstanding held me back from truly connecting with my audience. It also made me feel like I needed to find relevant topics to write about — rather than creating relevance with any topic that excited me.
My problem was that I thought “relevant” meant “timely,” and that I was supposed to relate my thought leadership to the zeitgeist or latest news or research.
I was not completely wrong — timeliness can be relevant. But it’s not the most magnetic relevance.
The most magnetic relevance, I realized, is connection with your specific audience.
What Makes Thought Leadership Relevant?
Think about something you’ve read or listened to that had an outsize impact on you.
Perhaps it was a nonfiction book, an article, a podcast episode. Or, maybe it was a keynote address. Think about how it made you feel.
I’m remembering when I read The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. That book made me think. It had such an impact that I journaled about it and added its concepts to my meditation practice. I also recommended it to several friends and my mom (it was all I could talk about for a few days). I even wrote about it to my email list!
I’m an “ideal client” for that book. It made me feel understood and relieved and heard and inspired. It made me hopeful. It made me think differently and act differently.
That is magnetic relevance.
We’ve all had such an experience, right? Our role as women thought leaders is to provide that experience to our audience. We want our thought leadership to get our ideal client in the gut: to make her pause. Change her thinking. Make her feel. Inspire her to talk with her friends or journal about what she learned.
Whether powerful thought leadership was produced last year or a hundred years ago, it’s relevant because we feel the connection.
Relevance Is Not About Control
Does that sound… lofty? Impossible, even?
If you feel daunted at the mere thought of making your thought leadership magnetically relevant, what’s bothering you might be about control.
How can you make your audience feel the way I did when I read The Soul of Money?
You can’t. Of course you can’t control how anyone reacts to your thought leadership — that’s not your domain.
Your domain is what you put into your thought leadership, from a place of service, generosity, and authenticity. Your domain is what you give, from your years of experience, deep understanding of your audience, focus on your vision, and perspective on your industry.
Your job is connection. It’s holding out your hand to help someone see, feel, understand, or believe what you know will help them progress toward the action and impact they envision.
Your job is to build the bridge.
Building the Relevance Bridge
When my misunderstanding of relevance dawned on me, I was overwhelmed (that’s how my nervous system processes big revelations — by panicking first). But before I fell too deep down the black hole of how-do-I-find-what’s-truly-relevant I realized I was about to misunderstand again: you don’t find relevance, you create relevance.
Your role as a preeminent thought leader is to build the bridge.
You weren’t born yesterday. You know what your audience struggles with, because you talk with your people and read about your industry. You’re empathetic and observant. And since we teach what we need to learn, you’ve been there too.
But you, as the person dedicated to your field and not inside your client’s brain dealing with constantly firing synapses and juggling millions of things, YOU have a different vantage point. You can create connections for your audience from that place — connections that help them progress toward their vision.
Interlude: A Brief Diatribe About Pain Points
Relevance is about connection, but let’s not conflate it with this time-honored marketing method for connecting with your audience: speak to their pain points.
This marketing advice is hocked all over the Internet and leads many great-intentioned thought leaders to think relevance = pain. Pain points have their place in powerful copywriting, but connecting over pain keeps thought leadership unoriginal and definitely uninspiring.
Another layer to this misunderstanding is the advice to “use the words your audience uses to describe their pain points.” Again, it can be effective, but it can also block you from using your own words.
Your people need to hear YOU. It’s YOUR language and voice that will make your thought leadership as strong, beautiful, and sticky as a spider’s web (without making anyone shriek and wipe their arms and legs).
How to Create Relevance in Your Thought Leadership
You build the bridge by asking yourself, where’s the [insert your topic or niche] in this?
In my case: where’s the thought leadership in this?
That’s where you start, but usually that question is too broad. So you ask a deeper question, what’s underneath thought leadership?
- Self-belief. Confidence. Communication. Persuasion. Storytelling. Clarity. Focus. Rhetoric. Commitment. Impact. Relationships.
So I refine the question to, where’s self-belief in this? Or, where’s the story in this? Where’s the focus in this?
Tweak the question enough and you’ll find it’s impossible not to see the bridge.
The process of excavating what’s beneath your topic of niche brings relevance to the surface. When you dig deep enough, fundamental human needs are beneath all our topics and niches. So you build the bridge from that fundamental need, via your niche, to where your audience is.
And now she gets it. She feels seen and understood, inspired and validated.
Take this article you’re reading right now as an example. My niche is thought leadership. Relevance is important to thought leadership, but I knew my audience likely had misconceptions about what relevance means because I had those misconceptions. So I asked myself, what’s underneath relevance? What is relevance really about? How does it feel? What does it do?
Then I built the bridge from how it feels to read or listen to something that’s magnetically relevant, to how you can create that relevance in your own thought leadership.
Attract and Repel with Relevance
The beautiful flip side of creating magnetic relevance is that you’re simultaneously creating irrelevance for those who are not your ideal client. Your thought leadership isn’t for everybody it’s for her, that woman who hasn’t yet seen the bridge from where she is now to where she’ll be after working with you.
We return again and again to the people who create relevance for us: authors, coaches, musicians, CEOs, elected officials. You, thought leader, are one of that company.
The 5 Pillars of Magnetic Thought Leadership
Relevance is one of the 5 Pillars of Magnetic Thought Leadership that I teach in my free email course by the same name. If you’re curious to step up your thought leadership game and publish bold, relevance thought pieces, check out the course here:
The 5 Pillars of Magnetic Thought Leadership.
It’s free, quick, and it’s brimming with exercises, examples, and insights to make your thought leadership as irresistible to your ideal client as cold water to a triathlete.
Click here to join the free email course, 5magneticpillars.com
Image by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash. Art by Annabelle Wombacher, Jared Mar, Sierra Ratcliff and Benjamin Cahoon. Special thanks to Amy Wright for edits.
