How to Become a Thought Leader, According to HubSpot

The gist of being a thought leader is you’re a trusted expert in your field that people want to hear from, someone who has a sense of what’s important now, and what will matter next. But how do you become this person or company in your industry? Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot—an online marketing and content management site—knows from personal and professional experience that thought leadership requires consistency in three key areas. Here’s what they are and why Volpe thinks they’re important:

Have Good Ideas

Coming up with good ideas—thought leadership itself—isn’t really about focusing on your product or service. Instead, look at the larger industry you’re in, so you can figure out what matters to people now, what’s next, and focus on that. Good ideas also have to challenge conventional wisdom because it means you’re thinking beyond what everybody already knows. But be prepared. Most novel ideas will often be discounted by people in the same space.

An example of how that played out for HubSpot is we had our co-founders write a book. The title wasn’t Lead Generation or B2B Marketing. It was Inbound Marketing, which was something new. The whole notion of inbound marketing implied that there was something called outbound marketing and that it was probably bad. Not everyone, especially early on, thought it was right. Having our thought leadership center around this concept of inbound marketing, and writing the book, and writing related blogs, didn’t make everyone love us, but it made a lot of people respect and trust us. That was a big building block in our thought leadership.

Publish Early and Often

Too many companies expect that if they do one article, white paper, or e-book per year, that it’s going to be so smart and interesting that everyone will find their way to their doorstep. My experience is you need to maintain communication with people that is much more regular, across all platforms. (Although to start, a blog is the right place.)

We have certainly found, during the last five years, the more often we publish, the more success we have. When I first started here, the company was five people and we were publishing twice a week. Now we publish two to five times a day. We’re not a media company. We’re a software company, but we have an aggressive schedule for a reason. We’re up to 2,500 blog articles, we’ve got 500 videos, 300 presentations, and not all of them become a big hit. But by making this part of your business cadence, you’re having a constant discussion with people, and you will have some great hits. For example, of our 300 SlideShare presentations, we have two that have been viewed more than 100,000 times each, and five to ten that have been viewed more than 50,000 times.

Another example of a company that’s done publishing right is Indium Corporation. They make solder paste. I know, how much could you write about solder paste, but they have nine blogs. They may not get the popularity of, say, Justin Bieber, but to people in that industry they are the go-to spot, the thought leader.

Build Your Reach

You’re publishing often. That’s good. But you also need to build an active network of people who are paying attention to what you say. To do this, you need to talk to followers on a regular basis, get ideas from them, and present ideas to them. Why? If you write a blog post, the idea could be the best piece of thought leadership ever written, but unless it gets presented to enough people, it has a low chance of being spread. The idea that great ideas spread on their own is a myth. It requires great ideas plus exposure. It’s really hard to predict who will spread your ideas, which is why you have to build that network. Ongoing discourse and publishing is what helps make that happen.

For us, five years after starting the company, we have 120,000 Twitter followers, 45,000 people have subscribed to our blog, and we have 25,000 fans on Facebook. As a result, every piece of content we publish today has a much better chance of succeeding because we have developed this reach.

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