April 15, 2025
Thought leadership isn’t just about having the perfect insight to post on LinkedIn. It’s more about being authentic, building trust with your audience, and, oh yeah, sharing your expertise. In our recent Brainfood webinar, “Be the Voice, Not the Echo: Winning with Thought Leadership,” we spoke with three panelists who regularly work with executives to boost their influence in their respective industries:
- Stacy Miros, Director, Integrated Marketing Campaigns, Microsoft Americas, who has worked within Microsoft to engage and leverage thought leaders and industry influencers.
- Haley Deming, Senior Community Manager, LinkedIn, who spends her time counseling companies on how to best build a LinkedIn thought leadership platform.
- Beth LaGuardia Cooper, Chief Marketing Officer, Advantage, The Authority Company, who helps executives and entrepreneurs share thought leadership through book publishing for Forbes Books, SXSW Books and more.
During the session, our panelists shared their advice for successful thought leadership, including how to get started, remaining consistent in your approach and differentiating your thought leader’s personal brand. Here’s a summary of what we learned during the Brainfood session.
Top Takeaways
Throughout the webinar, common themes emerged from each of our panelists’ expertise. Their advice and most important considerations for executing a thought leadership program or campaign included:
- Staying consistent: A regular posting cadence will build your following, rather than focusing on making each post insightful. Marketers must work with their thought leaders to determine what consistency fits best with their busy schedules and stick to it. Make consistency work for you.
- Don’t expect miracles overnight: Developing your executive into a recognized thought leader is a gradual process. Like many campaigns, it takes building credibility and engaging with the right audience over time. Patience, persistence and experimentation are key to achieving long-term impact.
- Don’t let perfect get in the way of great: Start with consistency over quality. Striving for the perfect post, a quotable moment or right way to say something may get in the way of sharing your thought leader’s authentic experience.
Getting Started
A successful thought leadership journey starts with an engaged and passionate executive or authority on a certain topic. They must be a willing participant who’s bought into the fact that sharing their expertise and experiences will help boost their visibility and the company’s brand.
Miros shared that for Microsoft, building influence in a certain market starts with finding someone who can relate to their customers, since Microsoft’s messages are rather technical. Miros looks for thought leaders who are close to their customers, understand their needs, can speak their business jargon and connect through relatable stories from their unique experiences. All of this helps build their following.
Creating Structure
Effective thought leadership means staying updated on the latest trends and news in your industry to contribute to the conversation. Deming, who works to spotlight the voices of C-suite executives in healthcare on LinkedIn News, said responding to timely events requires quick, clever writing and an expedited content approval process.
To support commentary on newsworthy topics, Deming advises to structure your team and processes to take swift action. For example, many Fortune 500 companies have assigned a marketing or communications team member exclusively to a C-suite executive to allow them weigh in on trending topics faster.
Generating Content
Whether it’s a LinkedIn post, an article or podcast, thought leaders are known for generating thought-provoking content and being a reliable source for other content generators. Ideas for original content can often start by asking your thought leader about the top three topics that they are consulted on most. What questions do they get asked the most? What do team members or customers frequently ask these individuals about?
Cooper, who works with CEOs and entrepreneurs to build authority through book publishing, has these conversations with thought leaders to shape their narrative across platforms. Discovery sessions with thought leaders help her and her team understand what inspires a person, their purpose or goal in their line of work and what stories and experiences they can share that have impact. She added that oftentimes, a leader’s personal stories, experiences, takeaways or viewpoints add value through lending a human perspective to a trending topic or paradigm shift. Telling stories also helps build trust and show a leader’s authenticity.
Amplifying Your Voice
Thought leadership grows through consistently sharing expertise, and marketing and communications teams can use a variety of strategies to expand their reach. Below are a few our panelists shared. Experiment and see which ones work for your brand:
- Build influence by association by pairing your thought leaders with other industry influencers to discuss trends on a podcast or other media channels.
- Publish vertical, short-form video to distill longer content into sharable, digestible clips—and use captions for accessibility.
- Serialize content and maintain engagement with various audiences through newsletters, both on LinkedIn and other marketing platforms.
- Take advantage of AI for efficiency to quickly gain insights on any topic, generate content ideas and refine your thought leader’s or campaign’s focus.
The Dix & Eaton team would like to thank our great panelists for sharing their time and expertise.
Interested in learning more about how to get a thought leadership program up and running in your organization? Feel free to reach out and we can chat.
