Effective thought leadership relies on a solid content strategy. And a thought leadership content strategy begins with a clear view of who your audience is, what their challenges are, what your competitors are doing, and fostering leaders who can share their expertise to serve the needs of your community.

How to build your thought leadership brand with webinars

Depending on your industry and communication style, there are many ways to build your thought leadership brand. The most successful thought leadership content strategies rely on a combination of content including webinars, events, workshops, social media, blog posts, and gated content.

Understanding how to create a webinar that's engaging and thought provoking can boost your brand's authority in a certain topic or industry. A webinar platform can also be an easy and effective way to connect directly with your audience wherever they happen to be. You can share your unique perspective, offer insights, answer questions in real time, all while confidently managing your broadcast.

Here’s seven tips on how to effectively build your thought leadership brand with webinars.

1. Offer a fresh perspective on a topic

Thought leadership requires a compelling speaker, deep understanding of your field, and insights people won’t be able to find anywhere else. Before you start planning your webinar, you’ll want to research widely.

Figure out what your competitors are doing, brainstorm questions that your audience might have for you, and use your company leaders’ combined experience in the field to guide your content.

You can use surveys and polls on social media to get an accurate picture of the challenges that your customers might be struggling with. Do regular content audits on Google comparing your existing content with competitors’ when it comes to specific topics, and internal audits to identify your top performing content to see what people are turning to you for.

Timely and relevant industry analyses, rich personal experiences, data that can’t be found anywhere else, insider knowledge, and thoughtful, perceptive case studies — these are all valuable forms of thought leadership content that can give you an edge on the competition.

2. Build a roster of thought leaders

Once you’ve gotten a clear understanding of what type of information could be useful to your audience, you can start tapping industry leaders from within your company or externally.

Thought leaders come from all different departments. Think seasoned sales professionals, project managers, engineers, or marketing executives. Their perspectives may be informed by a diverse background, race, age or identity. They don’t need to be naturally extroverted or camera-ready at all times — your leaders might express themselves best as blog writers, podcasters, engaging orators or thoughtful panelists.

You can also source thought leadership talent from industry events, networking groups, or by taking a look at who/what brands are gaining authority around your field of interest.

The best thought leaders are people who have deep knowledge and understanding of their subject matter and are constantly seeking opportunities to learn more. They are passionate about what they do and open to being challenged. Moreover, they should love sharing their insights and helping others.

3. Promote your thought leadership content

When you’re at the early stages of building thought leadership credibility with webinars, a promotion strategy is key. If your company is already well known among your professional circles, you have some advantage here.

First, the low hanging fruit: change your header images on social networks to promote the webinar, advertise your event with a great landing page, and start collecting email addresses from people who visit your blog and website, and send a video email out to your existing subscriber and customer base. Don't forget to create an easy-to-follow webinar registration page, too.

But it doesn’t end there. Thought leadership content is unique to content marketing in that you’re marketing the people, not just the ideas. You can look in areas where people expect insider knowledge — by using key hashtags on Twitter and LinkedIn, sharing articles written by some of your thought leaders on Medium, or engaging in industry-specific forums. Make sure your thought leaders are also actively nurturing and growing their own networks.

A well thought out promotional content strategy paired with networking doesn’t just help familiarize your target audiences to your thought leaders, but also helps to test new material. This will help you hone your voice and offer attractive, needed and relevant content for your industry peers.

4. Provide actionable insights for your audience

So you have a webinar date, and a handful of promotional materials. Your audience is engaging with information on social media channels or your company website. But creating a webinar is different from building short blog posts, updates, or quick-hit analysis. It’s a thought provoking and data-rich resource with the potential to disarm and inspire your audience.

Here are a few ideas to consider when scoping out your webinar content:

A successful thought leadership webinar should be data-driven and confidently delivered. It should help your viewers improve their internal processes, encourage new approaches to the topic in relation to their business, and leave them curious to learn more about what you do.

5. Rehearse your content

Expect the unexpected and plan for several run-throughs with all speakers present before the webinar.

Budget time for a tech run to test your tech and make sure everything is running smoothly. Closer to the date, do a dry rehearsal to make sure everyone is comfortable presenting content and to iron out any kinks. For this rehearsal, have a few members of your team watch along with the rehearsal to report any issues with stream, audio, or video quality.

6. Use engagement tools during a live webinar or event

A live webinar is a great way to deliver thought leadership content while keeping your audience engaged. After all, very few people have the patience and attention span to just take in information for an hour, no matter how riveting the message.

Instead, mix it up with engagement tools: ask some icebreaker questions and have a team member keep the chat going, post some polls, and include a Q&A either in the chat or at the end of the webinar presentation.

Remember that at the heart of thought leadership is relationship-building. Just as your audience is gaining useful information from you, you are also gathering inspiration from your audience about what they want to learn more about in the future.

Jessica Wei