Peter Winick argues that standard content-marketing rules backfire for thought leaders. Broad targeting, avoiding controversy, and constant mass distribution work against you. Instead, create tightly focused content that feels personal, introduce some gravitas, and distribute slowly across varied channels.
Hey there, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I wanted to have a conversation with you about what appears to be the best practices that exist in the world of content marketing, marketing, but in actuality are the worst practices when it is applied to thought leadership marketing. So what do I mean by that? Well, content marketing is great, and I don't have anything against it per se, But what I do have come to realize is it doesn't work when applied through the lens of thought leaders looking to use their content to market who they are and what they do and how they serve their clients. So for example, content marketing is designed to apply to everyone. We want to paint with as wide of a brush as we can because quite frankly everybody could use the proverbial toothpaste that we're selling. When it comes to thought leadership marketing, you want to go tight, you want to go narrow, you want to You know, really, really make that content feel bespoke to the target that you're speaking to. Content marketing—you never, never, never want to be controversial. You don't want to step outside of that really, really, you know, tight comfort zone. Thought leadership marketing—not that you need to be controversial, but you need to say something. It needs to have gravitas. It maybe needs to go against a little bit or stand on the outliers. Of what people think or believe to be true. Frequency— content marketers believe in drowning their prospects with information over and over and over and over again. Thought leaders that market well need to drip that content out in a thoughtful way across a wide variety of modalities so that it resonates with who they're trying to work with. So I guess the takeaway here is anytime we're applying the best practices from one domain or one, one domain of expertise into another, we really need to question if they're going to hold. And more often than not, those best practices are best used where they were best designed and yield the results that we know they do. Thanks so much.
