Taking your thoughts to market with Sam Kidd

In marketing terms, thought leadership offers a different approach to how a company has traditionally promoted itself. There’s no hard sell, no bells and whistles or in-your-face tactics, no blatant product displays. Thought leadership is more cerebral, it is about engagement and connection, the promotion of ideas and ideals, building connections and offering insights. And innovation is key.

Although the term ‘thought leadership’ has a 21st century ring to it, its origins date back thirty years. The term was conceived by editor-in-chief of magazine Strategy and Business Joel Kurtzman, who said: “Thought leaders are those people who possess a distinctively original idea, a unique point of view, or an unprecedented insight into their industry.”

Perhaps it is the upheavals experienced in the business world by the recent global pandemic coupled with seismic societal shifts which have thrust thought leadership into the limelight. The old ways of doing things are just that – old – which has created the perfect environment for thought leadership to become an authentic marketing tool. These days, many businesses are eager to share the story of their journey and happy to encourage people – staff and clients – to join them on their company’s voyage of discovery. 

Legal tech company LawVu personifies thought leadership. Co-founder and CEO Sam Kidd says, “Thought leadership is about education. Legal tech is one thing, but what we do at LawVu, our idea of being a holistic workspace, is a journey that we want to bring people on. 

“When we started out, the concept of what we were doing was new. Initially we were regarded as the weird kids in the corner and our challenge was, and continues to be, about normalizing what we do. It is about demonstrating to those working in the legal space that LawVu is about changing the ways they do things: from businesses doing nothing, or that have a variety of point solutions, to them having a platform and looking at the way they report and run a corporate legal team. All those concepts seem new and strange – until they’re not.”

“Whether you’re the CEO of a large corporation or an individual running a small business, thought leader marketing tactics build credibility”. 

Having a deep understanding of your business is integral to thought leadership, as is your willingness to share your insights with others. Think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. Digital marketing expert Neil Patel is another. Co-founder of the digital marketing agency that bears his name, Patel has established himself as an expert on social media, SEO, and content marketing through his thought leadership strategy. 

In a blog post he wrote: ‘Thought leadership marketing is the process of sharing valuable knowledge about your field with others to establish a reputation as an industry expert. Whether you are the CEO of a large corporation or an individual running a small business, thought leader marketing tactics build credibility.’

Patel’s prodigious content creation output and mastery of social media – earlier this year he posted on LinkedIn that he has 3.8 million followers across numerous social media platforms – has helped his business to boom.

From a thought leadership perspective, it’s important to be clear about how best to showcase your industry expertise. Sam says that from the outset LawVu’s aim was to establish itself as one of the main players in the ELM (Enterprise Legal Management) market – which it has done – and that its approach has always been long rather than short term. An integral part of the company’s marketing strategy has been its creation of InView, a community where in-house legal professionals can ‘learn, connect and share’. 

InView is a multi-function forum – online (articles, podcasts, and webinar), print (magazine) and conferences (currently held annually in Australia and the UK). Its content is wide-ranging with topics covering anything from tech, including AI, to profile pieces, professional development advice, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and health and wellbeing.

The aim of InView is to speak to those involved in the in-house legal and legal ops space, and there is no prerequisite that anyone – conference guest speakers and attendees or subjects of profile articles – be LawVu clients. 

“Nothing in InView speaks to our product, instead it speaks about the way we think teams should run,” says Sam. “It’s about thoughts and behaviors, it’s about finding people who are aligned to our way of thinking.”

Because, in marketing terms, thought leadership is a subtle way of marketing ideas, Sam says it has worked well for LawVu as it continues with its quest to radically modernize the legal industry, a notoriously conservative environment. “We knew from the outset that we’d be controversial, so we had to arrive on the scene with an opinion and a decent story as to why adopting our product was a good idea. We had a strong conviction as to why our product was needed but initially people struggled to grasp what we were about because what we were offering was so different, as was our approach.”

A Faster Capital article entitled Understanding psychology of building trust with thought leadership content makes the point that ‘thought leadership content has become an integral part of building trust and establishing credibility in today’s digital age. By offering valuable insights, expertise, and innovative ideas, thought leaders can position themselves as industry authorities and gain the trust of their target audience’.

Trust is integral to being a successful thought leader, which means individuals and/or companies must be authentic, transparent, empathetic, innovative, engaging, and able to demonstrate their expertise. 

“Being a thought leader is about being real and approachable and not hiding behind corporate jargon or a logo.”

Sam says authenticity is crucial, especially in a world which places great importance on social media – and where the demand for more visibility, more transparency (of companies as well as individuals) is insatiable. “It is about being real and I do wonder if there’s more emphasis being placed on that since Covid when people were Zooming from their bedrooms and their kitchens; it made companies seem more authentic. 

“Prior to Covid, people generally dealt with massive organizations from a slightly removed perspective and the pandemic changed that – companies weren’t about faceless people anymore, suddenly they were real people who had families – and we got to see their messy kitchens, a glimpse of their day-to-day lives, when they jumped on calls. It brought home the fact that business is about people dealing with people.

“Being a thought leader is about being real and approachable and not hiding behind corporate jargon or a logo – it’s about genuinely wanting to let people in on the journey your company is undertaking. People want to feel noticed, want to feel that they belong and that they are aligned with the people they are doing business with.”

The authors of the paper New Leadership Dynamics in the Information Age: Lateral Leadership and Thought Leadership conclude that ‘thought leadership focuses on meeting the challenges of a globalized world through new thinking, innovations, new ideas, and transformational solutions to meet customer expectations, reflect social change requirements in business life, and differentiate companies regarding marketing share’.

Thought leadership is not only about making a statement – it’s also about making one’s mark on the world.