Great content won’t happen without a leader.

Few organizations are born with an instinct for thought leadership. It’s more common to find technical expertise related to your products and services, expertise in selling, or both.

Unfortunately, neither of these is sufficient to turn your brand into a thought leader.

Thought leadership content must check several boxes:

• It offers value to the audience whether or not they do business with you.
• It’s not primarily for entertainment—rather, education.
• As much as possible it should be applied—and related to specific problems that your audience faces in their jobs.
• It ISN’T salesy… or else it saves the sales pitch for the right moment.

It takes an expert in thought leadership content to translate these best practices into your scenario. This is one of my favorite parts of the job!

Your SMEs are geniuses. They’re the heart of your business. Yet because they work so deeply with technical challenges, they may not be able to see the forest for the trees. This means that their perspective has to be translated into material that makes sense to the uninitiated (or to the less-initiated).

There’s a balance to strike here. The content needs to work at the right level of detail, be technically correct, and lead the less-initiated into a deeper understanding—all while positioning your organization as the thought leader in your space.

This is one of my passions as a content leader. I love drinking from the technical firehose, then engaging a process of discernment, culling, and rewriting to produce work that educates the layperson and contributes to the sales funnel.

When it comes to content, every individual contributor has their own strengths and weaknesses. It takes a discerning mind (and a kind heart) to lead each person toward an even better contribution.

I have extensive experience in editing, content leadership, and creative project management:

• Editing of content writers
• Art direction (web design, ad creative, etc.)
• Advising and editing C-level executives
• Editing book-length fiction for other novelists

An organization doesn’t know about that next great idea until someone thinks of it. While ideas certainly come cheap (and the devil is in the execution), I’ve always had tons of ideas. (Remember, I also write fantasy!)

The more I get to know your organization, the more you’ll spark my creativity and imagination to take your content farther than it’s ever gone before.

Not every stakeholder will understand the essential role of content in the pipeline. Sometimes, an organization desperately needs to make a content investment, but leadership doesn’t understand the impact of taking action (or of not taking action).

In other scenarios, leadership may be focused on content that actually sells too hard—rather than allowing marketing to create thought leadership content that breaks down the user’s natural barriers against talking to sales people.

The key here is to relate a content investment to 1) its place in the funnel, and 2) hard numbers. How many leads or opportunities can the content be expected to produce? What’s the opportunity cost of doing nothing?

Some organizations have deep, granular data that helps make the business case for a content investment. Others have less helpful data. Whatever the data situation, I can pitch content projects to leadership in terms they’ll understand. It’s one way I advocate within the organization on behalf of the organization. My goal in these types of exercises is to advocate to the organization on behalf of the organization, ensuring we leverage the full power of strategic content marketing.

It’s easy for an organization to strike the wrong tone in their content. Corporate messages can end up sounding cold, stiff, and boring—or overly slangy, pretentious, and meaningless.

Most organizations should find a voice that starts with relatable honesty and falls between these two extremes. As I get to know your company and your current customers, I’ll start to understand how best to write for your future customers.

This is where my work as a fiction author really helps. The same imagination that lets me write different characters allows me to “get in character” for your brand. This is how I deliver messaging that resonates with your target audience.

Now, it’s not enough to have a great voice or technical correctness. You need both.

I have extensive experience translating technical complexity into compelling material that fits a specific market. As needed, I can assist others in maintaining this voice in different contexts.