Thought leadership was introduced in 1994 by Joel Kurtzman in the Strategy+Business magazine. A funnier person would say that that was the moment when B2B marketing changed for the better, but the truth is a bit more nuanced, as it always is.
It was a new thought being introduced to the world that enabled people to think differently, to structure their thoughts in a way that could make an impact in the world. In a way, the very first product or outcome of thought leadership was the idea of thought leadership itself, because it allowed a person to shape the very idea of thought into a concept that drives authority.
Cut to 2025, and we have every other high-ranking executive with “thought leader” in their LinkedIn header. With so much noise in the system, we need to cut through it and find the signal: what does it actually mean to be a thought leader in 2025?
What is Thought Leadership in 2025
Before we get into the meat of the article, let’s get one thing clear.
Being a thought leader is not easy.
It’s not posting on LinkedIn, responding to the latest industry report. It’s not regurgitating what industry leaders are saying. It’s not offering an unfounded opinion based on a gut feeling, although that’s where a lot of great thought leadership begins.
Thought leadership is, simply, showing your organization’s authority and expertise by telling stories that make sense to your audience. Whether that’s your users, your potential customers, or even your very own fan club, the thoughts you propagate must follow these core tenets:
- Shows your knowledge and nuanced perspective
- Must solve an issue, whether real or constructed, in the minds of your audience
- Must be an original thought (this is the most important)
Now that you have these 3 principles in your mind, consider what type of thought leadership you want to run for your company. From our conversations with customers and actual thought leaders, here are the 3 types of thought leadership we’ve identified for B2B:
- Product-focused: This is a great fit if you are a product company. You’re solving the customers' problems and anticipating their needs. This translates into two paths. The first is giving information about the problems your product solves, creating a natural funnel for future customers. The second is doing a bit of crystal ball gazing based on the problems your customers are bringing to you, anticipating the direction the industry is moving in as a whole.
- Services-focused: As the name suggests, this kind of thought leadership is perfect when you are part of a services company. Here, the technology you’re offering solutions for becomes a cornerstone. This naturally leads into your content offering new ways for customers to use that technology for their problems while subtly promoting your value proposition. In addition, you also need to focus on where your technology of choice is moving, by keeping an eye on the latest updates and its future outlook.
- Predictive/future-focused: This is the category where the Gartners and McKinseys of the world rule the roost. The key is to view the industry as a visionary and take a forward-thinking approach to what could be the problems and solutions of your industry in the future. This kind of predictive thought leadership is often restricted to analysts, with the best that organizations doing is predicting what will happen in the next year. Collaborate with SMEs to think beyond the next year and determine what the future in your domain could look like. This will help you come up with some actual insights that can help people at your level make informed decisions.
Thought Leadership for B2B Marketing: 3 Key Strategies
Apart from the approach you’re taking to thought leadership as a whole, you need to have a strategy that informs your content decisions. In the next 3 sections, we’ve covered what we think are some novel ways B2B marketers can start their thought leadership journey.
1. Content Democracy: From CXOs to Micro-SMEs
Thought leadership doesn’t have to be a marketing team’s problem alone. With the rise of AI, content has become a lot more democratized content, so even those without marketing training can contribute meaningfully to thought leadership.
For a marketing team, which balances thought leadership and expert content, AI means that they can do the work of hitting the right notes and targeting the right audiences, while using more of the SMEs capabilities. Teams can pick from a wider range of contributors across the organization, ranging all the way from CXOs to individual developers. Using AI also helps in:
- Cutting down the time required to create expert content
- Tapping into micro-SMEs who were overlooked before due to a lack of bandwidth
- Creating content with varied perspectives across the value chain
- Brings in newer perspectives in a stuffy market filled with recycled opinions
Now that we’ve figured out the ‘how’ of thought leadership, let’s look at the ‘where’:
- If you’re in a position where you have an eagle’s eye vision of your company and your domain, the industry-level is the right place to start. Usually populated with CXOs, this level involves taking a zoomed out big-picture view of where your industry is, where your business is in the industry, and where your customers’ problems are and talking about it.
- If you’re a practitioner who’s getting down and dirty with providing solutions, the solution-level is where you need to be. Think cloud architects, middle management, or SMEs with double-digit years of experience. Here’s where you are closer to the problems people are trying to solve with your tech, which means that’s how you need to approach your thought leadership strategy.
- If you’re coding and building apps, the application-level is what you need to target. For every CXO, there are 100 developers, so go for the economies of scale, and really get into the nitty-gritty of how you solve your problems. This might become a great resource for someone else who’s facing that stupid little bug that took you 10 hours to solve, and make you relatable to them.
Tools like Yarnit can smoothen this process. A marketing team can collate insights from domain experts in the Knowledge Hub, and use that as a base, along with a preset brand voice, to create branded expert content in a fraction of the time.
No matter where your SMEs are in this matrix, the marketing teams’ role is clear; find the intersection between their expertise and customer challenges, and shout it out for the world to hear. This is what people want to know from thought leaders.
Let’s say you’ve ticked all these boxes, and you’re raring to go. But there’s one small problem, everyone’s using the cookie cutter thought leader playbook from 10 years ago. To shake it up, let’s go to an unlikely source for inspiration; social media influencers.
2. Using the Influencer Playbook to Become a Thought Leader
Now, before the audience starts throwing tomatoes at us, let’s look at the idea. Influencers are nothing but thought leaders of the new age. The tenets of social media influencers took a leaf out of the ideas behind thought leadership. Now, it’s time to close the loop and take a leaf out of influencer marketing to inspire new-age thought leaders.
To make it easier to digest, we’ve broken it down into 3 main categories.
How the Content is Presented
Take a moment to look at your child’s social media feed. Apart from the memes that don’t make sense, you’ll find widespread influencer content that they consume without a second thought, and the key is presentation.
Influencers make the content approachable and relatable. They make the product they’re selling more accessible. For SaaS marketers, the key takeaway is to make your content easily consumable. Drop the jargon, (it’s not making you sound smarter) and put your thoughts across in an easily consumable format.
The next thing to notice is the tone of voice. It’s very approachable, like they’re your friend and giving you an insight like it’s a secret. This creates a feeling of being an insider, which is something you need to cultivate in your audience too.
Influencer Content Tips and Tricks
You’ll usually come across a hundred-episode series when researching influencers. While it might seem overdone, this kind of episodic content builds audience loyalty, because their viewers know what they’re getting. Create a short video (or podcast) series of your takes on your domain.
Notice how something changes every 2 seconds? The takeaway here is don’t waste time in the intro; your viewers just want to watch a slick video.Now if you think, how can I do this while sticking to my brand guidelines? Influencers need to do it too. Known as the ASCI guidelines, this covers any type of advertising content that they create. That’s the level of subtlety you need to bring to showcasing your product or capabilities.
Take note of the way the video is put together. The content is easy to consume. This is your key to engagement; drop the boring PPT slides and blue overlays; you need single-word subtitles and quick, punchy insights delivered in a crisp script.
Different Approaches to Influencer Content
There are different genres of influencers, and there’s a lot of diversity in this field. B2B marketers should also find their niche, and dominate it. Your content will reach the audience it needs to.
Influencers are constantly being updated with trends in the world overall. Connecting your thoughts to current events makes it relatable to your audience. Find out how you can inject that trendiness into your content without overdoing it.
Another common trend is influencer collabs. Here, you see two influencers, coming together, bringing the expertise—and audiences—of both creators together. Bring this into your strategy by collaborating with your technology partners to create content that speaks to both of your USPs while delivering a double whammy of domain authority. More sources=more credibility.
3. Pervasive Thought Leadership: Beyond Blogs and LinkedIn Posts
Let’s be real. No one wants to read, and that fact doesn’t hurt anyone more than us. Now, it might seem ironic to say stop thought leadership blogs in the middle of a 2000-word thought leadership blog, but you need to adapt to the times. And how you can do that is through a concept we call pervasive thought leadership.
Pervasive thought leadership is basically a content strategy that goes beyond blogs and social posts and to reach all formats, especially video. Oral storytelling has existed through the ages, so make use of this powerful medium of storytelling through audio and video format. This also carries the additional benefit of making your content more interactive and dynamic, instead of a boring wall of text or a bland post.
Take an example of a 2-hour thought leadership deep dive podcast. This is a great resource for anyone who wants to spend hours learning about your ideas, but it’s even better to split into shorts. These shorts serve for the micro-needs of the audiences, so structure your podcast before recording to make sure it split into mini-takeaways. What’s more, these shorts can go on all social platforms (thanks to the rise of short-form video) and drive traffic to the main video.
Repurposing content is a cornerstone of pervasive thought leadership. Whitepapers become insight-driven short blogs, expert long-form blogs become carousels, and so on. Brainstorm on new formats of thought leadership content, like digestible social snippets or interactive data visualizations.
If you’re running short on ideas on how you can repurpose content for thought leadership, check out our blog.
Measuring ROI of New-Age Thought Leadership
Now, it’s no use measuring ROI with single-outcome KPIs if you’re going with our brand-new (not really) pervasive thought leadership strategy. Here, we propose the 3R measurement model; resonance, relationship, and results.
- Resonance: How well does your thought leadership shape perception in your field? Are enough people agreeing with what you’re saying—or disagreeing, in case of contrarians. Is it making an impact in how people are thinking?
- Relationship: How does your communication change relationships with your partners? What’s the response from your customers, potential clients, and industry leaders (and even your competitors)?
- Results: The word that all executives love to throw around. What are the bottom-line results that your content contributes? Whether it’s uptick in social mentions, direct conversions, or a growth in your following, this needs to be quantified.
The matrices of measuring impact should move from from simple KPIs to a snowballing approach that encompasses repurposed content. Drawing on our previous example, it’s not enough to simply gauge the views on your 2-hour podcast. What’s the footprint that the rest of the content has? How much content did you get out of it, and how did that content perform?
It’s necessary to take a big-picture view of the impact of your content to truly guide your direction in the future.
10 Thought Leadership Tips: Quick-Fire Round
Now, enough of the how and the why and the repurposing and the buzzwords. Here are some tips we’ve collated to give you a shortcut to begin thinking like a thought leader.
- Focus on the “Why”, keep it grounded and down to earth instead of giving jargon-filled tirades.
- Challenge industry “truths” and give an opinion that stands apart from it by telling the story of your experiences. Don’t be afraid to go against the tide.
- How can you be original in an age where everything is being spoken about? Answering the question is the key to a thought leadership journey.
- Your domain expertise is your calling card and your playing field. Don’t stray from it to give information you don’t know about, and only give information that truly must be yours.
- Identify your niche and stick to it. What is something you are personally passionate about in your business? What is something that awakens your curiosity? What do you think are things that people should know about in your domain?
- Stop relying on AI for thought leadership, it will only regurgitate existing ideas. Come up with your own thoughts based on your experiences and then use AI to refine it.
- The ‘why’ of thought leadership is more about actually saying what you want to say about the things you are good at, instead of going with the flow and accepting what is already there.
- Break new ground constantly to show how new ideas work. You may be maligned for it, but if you spot a trend, you position yourself and your followers for success in the future.
- Don’t come up with random ideas. Even if you do, make sure that it’s based on some data. It’s a data-driven world, so draw on data like customer experiences, an overall shift in the ecosystem, or something completely new that you’ve found out through trial and error.
- There are very few things that are considered to be “common knowledge”. Break out of the idea that people already know this. It may be a heuristic for you, but may also be a new insight for your customers.
There you have it, a complete guide on adapting to thought leadership in B2B marketing in 2025. Bookmark this guide; we know it’s not a read that can be consumed the first time around. Share this content, or keep it to yourself, as your secret key to a new world of thought leadership.
