If you think thought leadership is simply about creating individual content assets, you’re leaving a heap of value on the table.
There is, of course, a long tradition of creating gated downloadable reports of all types. The best marketers sweat these assets for all they are worth. And yet, they’re still not realising the full potential of thought leadership for their businesses.
Why? They are thinking about it wrong.
They’re focused on creating thought leadership assets when they should be building an expert brand.
Is this simply semantics? No, the difference between treating thought leadership as a tactical content challenge versus a strategic brand-building engine is significant.
It is the difference between spending money on piecemeal content marketing and investing in building an actual competitive advantage. Between chasing novelty and constructing something that compounds over time. Between being busy and being effective.
Here is what I’ve noticed over the past few years: most organisations get this backwards.
Marketers sit in planning meetings and the conversation goes something like this: “We need to do more thought leadership. Let’s hit up our subject matter experts (SMEs). What format will work best? How many pieces can we produce this quarter?”
It is all about the stuff. Content creation. Assets.
Here’s the thing: the real value underpinning thought leadership is not primarily about creating assets. It is about building a distinctive brand based on what you know.
What you know about the market.
What you know about the key challenges your customers face.
What you know about how they can solve them.
Ultimately, it’s about showing that you are the people customers should talk to when they face a gnarly problem that you can help solve.
The problem is that most B2B marketers have never been taught to think about it this way. We have been conditioned to think in terms of content calendars, publishing schedules, engagement metrics and production workflows.
These things matter, sure. But they’re tactics. They may help power the strategy but if the strategy is confused, all the fuel in the world won’t get you where you need to go.
Does this sound familiar…?
You’re committed to thought leadership. You spend a fair chunk of your budget producing it. You have a team that taps into your SMEs. You have processes. You have metrics.
In fact, you’re producing multiple pieces of content each year. And, it’s pretty good too. But something feels… off.
You can’t shake the feeling that your thought leadership isn’t influencing who your customers are. You’re still stuck serving the same buyers you always have. You are not changing how the market perceives you.
Customers aren’t coming to sales conversations saying something along the lines of… “We found your thought leadership, you get us, we want to explore how you can help with our specific challenge.”
Essentially, you’re creating thought leadership content in a vacuum. Smart content, well-executed content, but content with no strategic direction.
You’re busy. But you’re simply not as effective as you want to be.
You’re not alone. Research shows that 86% of B2B marketers struggle with internal cooperation when building thought leadership. And some 90% are affected by workload and resource issues.
The focus becomes one of logistics. And the financial cost is staggering.
Research by IBM and Oxford Economics found that strategic thought leadership delivers approximately 156% ROI on average, that’s compared to around 9% for traditional marketing.
This means organisations stuck in tactical thinking are leaving massive amounts of value on the table. For every £1 you get using tactical approaches, you could be gaining over £17 by taking a more strategic approach.
What it boils down to is, when you view thought leadership through a content creation lens, you are asking the wrong foundational question. You are asking: “What should we publish?” when you should be asking: “What competitive position should we own?”
These are fundamentally different questions that lead to entirely different approaches and deliver radically different results.
Let me define a term that I see get confused constantly: the difference between strategic and tactical marketing.
Tactical marketing is about executing specific actions designed to produce short-term results. It’s publishing a report. It’s running a campaign. It’s hitting a content calendar.
Don’t get me wrong, tactics are important. You can’t execute strategy without them. But they are execution, not strategy.
Strategic marketing is about establishing a long-term position in the market. It is about building something durable that compounds over time. It is about creating a defensible competitive advantage that customers prefer and competitors struggle to replicate. Fundamentally, it’s about brand.
One is about this month or this quarter. The other is about the next five years.
Many B2B organisations confuse the two. They treat thought leadership as a tactical initiative. They allocate budget. They create a process. They measure how many pieces got published and what engagement metrics they generated. But they haven’t answered the strategic question: What position in the market are we trying to own?
This matters more than you might think. Our own B2B Effectiveness Engine research shows that those marketers who have a written marketing strategy that flows from the wider business strategy, significantly outperform those that don’t. They are, on average, around 50% more likely to be top performers across lead generation, demand generation and brand building.
The difference between strategic and tactical is not pedantic. It is the difference between building competitive advantage and wasting resources.
Here’s why most organisations stay trapped in tactical thinking: it feels productive.
You can measure publishing velocity. You can track engagement. You have something to show the CEO in a board meeting. It looks like work. But is it the right work?
Strategic work is more difficult. It requires you to do hard thinking. It requires asking uncomfortable questions. It requires potentially saying “no” to content that does not advance your long-term position.
It requires patience. And patience, in a world obsessed with quarterly results, feels like a liability.
In reality, however, patience is actually your greatest asset.
Before we move forward, I want to address something that every B2B marketer complains about: subject matter experts are difficult to work with.
Getting their time is hard. Getting their insights is harder still. Getting them to articulate those insights in a way that is not technical jargon or internal bureaucracy is hardest of all.
Most organisations respond to this by creating better processes. Better templates. Better workflows. Better “SME extraction” frameworks.
This is treating the symptom, not the disease.
The real problem is not process. It is strategy. When an SME understands that their expertise is being used to build a competitive advantage for the organisation, suddenly they become much more engaged. When they see how their knowledge translates into market positioning and business growth, the dynamics change entirely.
But if you approach them and say, “We need your insights for our content calendar,” they have no reason to care. You are asking them to sacrifice time for something they do not see as valuable. It is like asking someone to fill out a form. No wonder they are hard to work with.
The answer? Flip this around to ask the strategic question: Why should our organisation’s expertise matter to our market?
Once you answer that, the SME problem largely disappears.
Let me take a step back and define a term that is often used but rarely well understood: brand positioning.
Brand positioning is not your tagline. It is not your marketing message. It is the place your brand occupies in the minds of your customers relative to all other alternatives they could choose. It is the territory you own. It is what people think of when they think of you. More importantly, it is the territory that competitors cannot easily occupy without looking like they are copying you.
This is what brand positioning is actually about: claiming territory.
Now here is why this matters for thought leadership: in B2B, one of the most powerful ways to establish brand positioning is through demonstrated expertise. When you consistently share insights that prove you understand something that others do not, you begin to own that territory in the market mind.
But this only works if the expertise you are demonstrating is actually distinctive. If you are sharing the same insights as everyone else in your industry, you are not building positioning. You are adding noise to an already noisy marketplace.
According to recent research, less than half of B2B decision makers say the overall quality of thought leadership they read is good. Just 15% say it’s very good or excellent. That is because most organisations are not demonstrating distinctive expertise. They are recycling conventional wisdom and calling it original thinking.
This is why brand positioning is the strategic foundation that everything else rests on.
When you know what position you want to own, your thought leadership strategy becomes a whole lot clearer.
When you know what competitive territory you are claiming, you suddenly know what to write about. You know which insights matter and which do not. You know which stories to tell. You know how to differentiate yourself from the noise.
Without this clarity, you get the opposite: random acts of content. Teams publishing because they have a publishing calendar. Teams wondering why their thought leadership is not moving the needle.
Here’s a framework for thinking about what “distinctive expertise” actually looks like in the real world.
There are broadly three levels of knowledge that matter when you are building a competitive position through thought leadership.
The first level is market knowledge. This is what you know about the industry dynamics, the trends, the forces shaping your market. This is understanding not what is happening today, but what is likely happen tomorrow and why it matters. Thought leadership at this level anticipates challenges before they become obvious. It positions your organisation as forward-thinking rather than reactive. It makes you the brand customers look to so they can capitalise on opportunities and avoid costly mistakes.
The second level is knowledge about customer challenges. This is deeper than market knowledge. This is what you know about the specific, gnarly problems your customers face. Not the surface symptoms, but the root causes. Not what they tell you they need, but what they actually need based on patterns you have observed across dozens or hundreds of customer situations. Problem-solving knowledge builds trust. It signals that you understand your customers’ world in a way that your competitors probably do not.
The third level is solution knowledge. This is what you know about how problems actually get solved. Your methodologies. Your approaches. Your frameworks. Your proprietary processes. This is knowledge that is difficult to replicate because it has been refined through lived experience. It is not theory. It is not best practice borrowed from someone else. It is what actually works based on your specific context and your specific expertise.
Thing is, most organisations get this backwards. They jump straight to solution knowledge. They want to talk about their product. Their approach. Their secret sauce. And they do this before they have built any credibility around the deeper levels of understanding.
But customers do not care about your solution until you have proven that you understand their problem. And they will not believe you understand their problem until you have demonstrated market knowledge that shows you are thinking ahead of where they are thinking.
The strategic work is to move through these levels in order. Market knowledge first. Then customer challenge knowledge. Then solution knowledge. When you do this correctly, customers begin to see you not as a vendor trying to sell them something, but as a trusted advisor who genuinely understands their world.
This is when thought leadership moves from being a content problem to being a strategic competitive advantage.
One of the most powerful things in business is compounding. Not financial compounding, though that matters too. I am talking about strategic compounding. The idea that small advantages, consistently applied over time, become enormous advantages.
Strategic thought leadership compounds.
When you publish a tactical piece of “thought leadership” to hit a content calendar, it has a lifespan. It gets published. It gets some traffic. Then it fades.
The work is done. Start again.
But when you build a strategic position through consistent demonstrations of expertise, something different happens.
Your first piece of distinctive insight might get modest attention. But it establishes a starting point. Your second piece builds on the first. It signals that this is not a one-off observation but a consistent point of view. By your fifth or tenth piece, something shifts. People start to associate your brand with this expertise. Your organisation becomes the first one they think of when this particular problem or challenge emerges.
By the time you reach a year or two of consistent, strategic thought leadership, you have built something that competitors cannot easily replicate. You have built brand authority. You have built a moat around your competitive position.
This is what strategic compounding looks like. Over time, your expertise positioning becomes so strong that customers not only prefer you, they will pay more to work with you. They have gained confidence in your capabilities through your demonstrated expertise rather than through your marketing claims.
But this only works if you are thinking strategically from the beginning. If you are bouncing between random topics, chasing whatever seems interesting, jumping from format to format, you are not building compounding advantage. You are just being busy.
This is why so much of thought leadership success is about patience. It is about committing to a position and staying with it long enough for the compounding to kick in.
So how do you actually make this shift? How do you move from treating thought leadership as a tactical content challenge to building it as a strategic brand-building engine?
There are four components to this transformation.
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The first is gaining clarity. You need to be able to answer, with precision, what competitive position you are building. Not vaguely. Not “we are thought leaders in enterprise software.” That means nothing. You need to be specific. What expertise territory are you claiming? What do you know that your competitors probably don’t? What future do you see coming that others are not yet seeing?
This clarity is the foundation everything else rests on. If you cannot answer this question, do not proceed. Go back to the drawing board. And if you need help, take a look at our Fast-track Positioning service.
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The second is knowing what you know. This is documenting what you actually know. Your proprietary data. Your customer insights. Your methodologies. Your frameworks. Your lessons learned across dozens of customer engagements. You are creating an inventory of distinctive knowledge that belongs to your organisation. This becomes the material from which all your thought leadership is drawn.
One of the mistakes I see constantly is organisations trying to create thought leadership without doing this foundational work. They have not documented what they actually know. So instead they create generic content about industry trends or they recycle insights from other sources.
When you have clarity on what distinctive knowledge you possess, your thought leadership becomes much easier to create, and much more powerful. And if you really don’t have a sufficient level of distinctive knowledge? You should make it a priority to gain it. This may mean primary research, collaboration with established experts or hiring the brains you need to make it.
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The third is getting your people aligned. Strategic thought leadership cannot solely be a marketing department initiative. It requires buy-in across the organisation. You need agreement from product, delivery, sales and leadership. You need subject matter experts who are willing to engage. As already explained, you need SMEs who understand that their expertise is being used to build competitive positioning, not just to generate content.
This is where many organisations fail. Thought leadership is handed to the marketing team and the marketing team is expected to figure it out. But if the rest of the organisation does not understand the strategy and is not aligned with it, the marketing team is trying to push water uphill.
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The fourth is patience. You need to commit to a strategy and stay with it long enough for the compounding to work. This is the hardest part in a world obsessed with quarterly metrics. But if you abandon your positioning every time metrics dip, or every time you get bored, or every time someone in leadership has a new idea, you will never succeed in building a brand based on demonstrated expertise.
Strategic competitive advantage takes time. That is precisely why it is hard to replicate. If it was quick and easy, everyone would do it.
So how do we make this transformation a reality?
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Step one: define your expertise territory
Ask yourself these questions:
Write the answers down. Specificity matters. “Enterprise software expertise” is not specific enough. “We understand why traditional approaches to scaling data infrastructure fail when organisations have more than 10,000 employees, and we have a repeatable methodology for solving this” is specific. You get the picture.
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Step two: build your knowledge inventory
What do you actually know that demonstrates this expertise? This is not speculation. This is not what you think you might know. This is what you have observed repeatedly across your customer work. What patterns have you seen? What cause and effect relationships have you identified? What data do you have that proves your thesis?
Document this. All of it. This is your raw material. This is what your thought leadership will be drawn from.
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Step three: create strategic thought leadership themes
Do not create a thought leadership calendar yet. Create themes. These are the storylines that demonstrate your expertise. For the data infrastructure company I mentioned above, their themes might be:
Each theme is a story. Each story demonstrates a dimension of your expertise. Do not try to tell all stories at once. Layer them over time. Let each one compound on the others.
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Step four: build repeatable frameworks
The mistake most organisations make is treating each piece of thought leadership as a one-off. Strategic organisations build frameworks that can be reused. Frameworks for articulating customer challenges. Frameworks for presenting your approach. Frameworks for structuring case studies or research. These frameworks become templates that make content creation faster and more consistent.
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Step five: establish measurement that matters
This is where most businesses go wrong. They measure publishing velocity. They measure website traffic. They measure engagement metrics. These are all fine, but they are not strategic metrics.
Strategic metrics are the ones that actually matter to your business:
These are harder to measure. They require work. But they are the metrics that actually matter.
Before I wrap up, I want to emphasise something that I think is at the heart of this entire issue:
The shift from tactical to strategic is fundamentally a mindset shift.
It is shifting from asking, “What content should we create?” to asking, “What position should we own?”
It is shifting from “How do we meet our publishing calendar?” to “How do we consistently demonstrate distinctive expertise?”
It is shifting from “What format works best?” to “What content best demonstrates our understanding?”
It is shifting from measuring publishing velocity to measuring competitive positioning.
These are not small shifts. They require you to let go of some things that feel productive but aren’t actually strategic. They require patience. They require comfort with ambiguity.
Fundamentally, they require believing that long-term competitive advantage is worth more than short-term marketing metrics.
But here is what I’ve observed: organisations that make this shift don’t regret it. They begin to see thought leadership actually moving their business. They begin to see it influencing customer decisions. They begin to see it supporting their sales team. They begin to see it building something that actually matters.
And over time, they realise they’ve built a competitive moat. Something that is difficult for others to replicate. Something allowing them to charge a premium. Something that is genuinely defensible.
This is what strategic thought leadership looks like when you get it right.
Here’s what I would suggest as a practical next step.
Take a week. Sit down with your leadership team. Ask yourselves: what competitive position are we actually trying to build through thought leadership? Be honest. If you do not have a clear answer, that is the problem you need to solve first. (Cheeky plug: we can help.)
Do not start with content. Do not start with process. Start with strategy.
Once you have clarity on the position you are building, everything else becomes easier. Thought leadership content creation becomes easier. Measurement becomes easier. Decision-making becomes easier.
The hardest part is not execution, it’s thinking about this strategically. And too many organisations skip this step entirely. This is why so much thought leadership fails to deliver the value it could and should.
The good news is that if you do this work, you’ll gain a significant competitive advantage. Because most of your competitors probably won’t. They’ll remain stuck in tactical thinking, chasing content calendars, wondering why their thought leadership isn’t moving the needle.
You will have built something they cannot easily copy: a brand position grounded in demonstrated expertise. A moat around your competitive territory. A strategic asset that compounds over time.
That’s the difference between creating content and building a defensible brand.
That is what separates the organisations that get thought leadership right from the ones that do not.
Thought leadership isn’t about creating content assets. It’s about building a distinctive brand position grounded in demonstrated expertise.
Strategic thinking compounds over time. Small advantages, consistently applied, become enormous advantages. Tactical thinking produces short-term results that fade quickly.
Your competitive position matters more than your content calendar. If you can’t answer what position you’re trying to establish, you’ll be creating in a vacuum.
Three levels of knowledge build defensible positioning: market knowledge (seeing what is coming), customer challenge knowledge (understanding their gnarly problems) and solution knowledge (how problems get solved in the real world).
Strategic metrics are different from tactical metrics. Measure brand authority, competitive positioning and business impact, not just publishing velocity and engagement.
Organisations that get this right build something competitors cannot easily copy. They earn customer preference and the ability to charge premium prices based on demonstrated expertise.
The hard work is strategic thinking, not execution. Most organisations skip the strategic thinking and jump straight to tactics. That is why most thought leadership fails.
Well done for making it this far. Hopefully I’ve got you thinking differently about how you could evolve how you use thought leadership in your organisation.
Of course, I fully recognise that this can be a challenge for even the most aligned businesses with the most supportive leadership.
There are three broad ways we can help:
Speak soon.
Jason Ball is the founder and managing director at Considered. With a multi-decade career in B2B marketing, he’s worked with world-leading brands such as Adobe, Google, EY and Cisco together with niche specialists in technology, manufacturing and professional services.