Search this term and you’ll get a wall of agencies. Not one result in the top ten, when I looked, was a person describing work they’d done themselves.
The definition of the underlying thing lives on what thought leadership actually is. What follows is the commercial version, and how it behaves when the person marketing the argument is the one who tested it.
What is a thought leader in marketing?
A thought leader in marketing is the person whose published position on how their field works is the reason buyers arrive already convinced. They hold an argument of their own, they’ve run it on real clients with real money, and the marketing is mostly the act of publishing the results, including the awkward ones.
The distinction matters because the alternative is everywhere. A content team can produce thought-leadership-shaped material without any position at all. It reads fine and converts nobody, because there’s nothing in it a buyer could disagree with.
Agreeable copy is the most expensive kind. It costs you the budget to produce it and returns a reader who nods once and forgets you before lunch, which is a worse outcome than annoying them.
Reddit ranks second for this term, and I don’t think that’s an accident. People are looking for someone who has actually done it.
There’s a practical tell for which kind you’re reading. A practitioner will tell you what went wrong. They’ll name the client that didn’t work, the year they got the pricing badly incorrect, the argument they had to revise. A content team almost never can, because nothing went wrong in a piece nobody lived through.
Why the top of this SERP is agencies selling the service
Because the service is easier to sell than the position is to hold.
An agency can offer thought leadership marketing as a deliverable. Twelve articles, a point of view document, a ghostwritten LinkedIn presence. All real work, often skilfully done, and none of it requires anybody to stake a claim they could be wrong about.
The practitioner version costs more personally and almost nothing financially. You write what you believe, you publish the evidence from your own practice, and you accept that some of the market will decide you’re not for them. That’s a harder brief to hand to a supplier.
I spent years hiding behind dashboards and metrics rather than saying anything I could be held to, so I’m describing a road I walked. The relief when I stopped was physical.
What I’d been protecting was a business that looked successful from outside. Plenty of revenue, a great deal of noise, and a creeping suspicion that if I ever said what I actually thought about my industry, a good portion of it would stop returning my calls.
Some of it did. That turned out to be the mechanism rather than the cost.
What this looks like when a practitioner runs it
Fewer pieces, more evidence, and a market that self-selects.
People ask what is a thought leadership example, expecting a format. The strongest example I can give you is a jeweller who took every discount word off her own website.
Meaghan Young had been marketing herself as a discount jeweller. The first thing we did together was strip that language out entirely, because the marketing was telling her buyers exactly where to file her. Over seven and a half years she’s built multiple businesses off the back of the reposition, from the jewellery design work to the online rooms to the retreat business she runs now.
Her marketing got narrower, and then it got expensive in the way you want.
What she removed mattered more than anything she added. Every word about affordability had been doing precise, accurate work, telling her buyers where to place her, and they’d been believing it.
That’s the part experts underestimate. Your marketing is already succeeding at communicating something. If the number isn’t what you want, the thing it’s communicating is the problem, not the volume.
The mechanics underneath that are ordinary. One argument, published whole. Proof attached with names and numbers on it. A conversion path to the rooms where the work happens rather than to a newsletter. And a willingness to lose the people who were never going to pay.
That last one does most of the work and gets the least attention, mainly because it costs something the other three don’t.
Somebody will ask whether Elon Musk counts as a thought leader. He does by the test, for reasons I’ve set out separately, and he’s a terrible template for you, which is the more useful half of the answer.
Are LinkedIn thought leader ads worth it?
Sometimes, and only after the argument exists.
The ad format puts spend behind a person’s post rather than a company page, and it works exactly as well as the post it’s amplifying. Put real money behind a piece with no position in it and you’ve bought reach for something forgettable, which is a fast way to learn an expensive lesson.
Put it behind the one essay you were nervous to publish, aimed at the narrow group who can commission you, and the arithmetic changes completely. I’d rather spend on one argued piece for a hundred right people than on twelve safe ones for everybody.
The order is the point. Position, then publish, then pay to put it in front of the handful who matter. Reversed, you’re renting attention for an argument you haven’t made yet.
The targeting question is where most of this money is wasted. An expert practice with a short client list needs perhaps two hundred correct people to encounter the argument this year. That’s a tiny media buy and an enormous positioning job, and everybody does it the other way around.
You can test this without spending anything, by the way. Look at your last twelve posts and count how many a competitor could have published word for word. If it’s most of them, the ads aren’t the problem.
Where the money actually shows up
In what you get offered, not in what you post.
The offer page carries our own arithmetic rather than a claim about it. A short client list, engagements at $250,000, and margins the volume world never sees.
None of that gets bought by people who found us through a posting streak. It gets bought by people who arrived already persuaded. They read the argument, recognised themselves in it, and turned up to talk about scope rather than credentials. Marketing did that, in the only sense of the word I find useful.
For what the proof side looks like in practice, our client stories are the whole wall, names and numbers attached. The nearer read on the positioning that has to come first is authority positioning.
The Iconic Pricing Calculator is the cheap version of that conversation, and when you want the real one, the application is how it starts. We read every one.
Before either, do the twelve-post count. Whatever it tells you is the most honest brief anybody will write for you this quarter.
Kathryn x
FAQ
Are LinkedIn thought leader ads worth it?
They’re worth it once you have something worth amplifying. The format boosts a person’s post rather than a company page, and it performs exactly as well as the argument inside it. Spend behind a safe post buys reach for something nobody remembers. Spend behind the piece you were nervous to publish, aimed at a narrow group, is a different proposition entirely.
