‘Thought leadership’ is one of those marketingspeak terms people love to hate. In the world of enterprise software marketing, however, it has a specific and useful meaning.
When we at Intellyx say ‘thought leadership,’ we’re referring to content that is creatively insightful. In other words, content that has insights that the author came up with themselves, rather than finding them in someone else’s writing.
As with other analysts, a good percentage of any piece we write contains definitions, summarizations, and perhaps some deductions. None of these elements qualify as thought leadership. The author must add some insightful icing on the cake – some bit of thinking that breaks new ground, giving the reader something they didn’t have before.
People hire us to create thought leadership content, but not everything we write is a thought leadership piece. In fact, we tell our clients we can write articles anywhere on the spectrum from pure thought leadership at one extreme to pure marketing content on the other.
A pure thought leadership piece may only mention our client in passing, or not at all. In contrast, a marketing piece is specifically about their product or products, plus some analysis providing our take on what they’re doing. Most of the time, the content we produce falls somewhere in the middle.
Each type of piece serves a different purpose. Thought leadership pieces are top-of-funnel articles that attract people and engage their interest. Marketing pieces are more mid-funnel, providing interested parties with a third-party perspective on a vendor’s offering.
For software executives wishing to become thought leaders themselves, creating insightful content remains the core challenge. Some executives have this ability, but many do not. Those insight-deficient execs (or their PR people) often turn to ghostwriters to produce the insights they lack.
The ghostwriting approach is riskier than you might think, as such execs are trying to fool their audience into thinking they’re someone they’re not. Such subterfuge often ends badly. This pitfall is one of the reasons Intellyx doesn’t ghostwrite.
One final note: ChatGPT and its ilk can come up with reasonably good marketing copy. It can summarize and conduct simple reasoning. But what it can’t do is generate true insights. Try as it may, ChatGPT will never be a thought leader.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. No AI was used to write this article.
