“Finding the time and being really targeted.”
The two biggest pain points when it comes to getting your thought leadership out there… and getting it in front of the right people.
Say you’re in the Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality space. It’s a cinch to get your thought leadership into VR/AR events and publications. But that’s an echo chamber of people who agree with you – it’s not where you customers are.
Your customers are diversity and inclusion specialists and human resources teams. What publications do they read? What events do they attend? Do they follow certain thought leaders or podcasts?
This is a tough nut to crack for two reasons:
1. Research is… frustrating
Of course you can research the publications, events, etc that your ideal customers follow. But research… it gets out of hand fast. There are SO many events – how do you pick the highest-quality one? Same with publications. Same with leaders.
There are many resources that you – and your ideal customer – can choose from. But which is the RIGHT one!? Where is your audience? What’s the best place for you to go, with the highest ROI? The challenge with research is it can lead to more questions than you started with.
2. So many variables
A lot of what will influence the success of your thought leadership is out of your control. Maybe you write a great piece in one of the leading HR publications. Then an HR scandal breaks out, and your brilliance is buried under the news.
And then there are relationships. If you happen to know the guy who runs the biggest diversity and inclusion event in the country (because his dad and your dad went to college together), it’ll be a lot easier to get your pitch accepted to be a speaker.
Even down to nitty-gritty marketing details: the title of your content, the temperature in the room where you present, how you feel that day, the imagery you choose, your paragraph layout, the questions you are asked… there are a lot of variables!
The harder it is…
… the more worth it?
“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard … is what makes it great.” Jimmy Dugan, A League of Their Own
(I haven’t seen this movie. When my weight lifting coach said it to me, I had to Google search it.)
In this case, I don’t know if the hard is what makes it great. The hard feels like an endless research slog, trial and error, watching other people with fewer receipts get great speaking gigs (hooooow?), uncertainty, spaghetti at the wall. In fact, it would be GREAT it you could bypass all that nonsense and just get it right the first time, wouldn’t it?
Sometimes, you can. Sometimes you know the right people or you get the timing just perfectly. So much of success is coincidence and luck and timing (and let’s not forget privilege, which can pave the way to the above) and… patience.
So if that’s not what’s happening, you’re normal. You’re not doing anything wrong. You’re not doomed. Yes, it’s tough and frustrating to find the time to produce your thought leadership, especially when you can’t know the ROI. It takes a large amount of faith and love. And that is what makes it great.
