Introduction
**Unlocking Thought Leadership: Strategy vs. Sales**
Is thought leadership really about steering the conversation?
Or is it just another marketing disguise?
For most, the boundary between thought leadership and product push is hazy—leading to missed chances at genuine industry influence.
In this episode, Mikkel Svold, founder of Montanus content agency, cuts through the noise. He dives into the heart of thought leadership, revealing it’s not about chasing immediate sales.
Instead, it’s about establishing your brand as a beacon of authority.
Mikkel shows you how to be the go-to source for insight and innovation, not just another loud voice in the sales crowd.
Discover why stepping back from short-term goals is pivotal!
Focus on storytelling, tackling industry challenges, and sparking ideas that keep your brand ahead of the curve.
Are you ready to revamp your strategy from product-pushing to thought-provoking?
Join us for this engaging discussion and learn how to elevate your brand in the relentless race for authority!
Tune in now!
What You’ll Learn
1. Discover why thought leadership isn’t about promoting your products.
2. Learn how thought leadership can position your brand as an industry expert.
3. Explore the benefits of storytelling and thought-provoking industry topics.
4. Understand why branding is long-term and not about short-term sales boosts.
5. Get insights on tackling industry dilemmas to enhance your thought leadership.
Episode Transcript
Introduction: Defining Thought Leadership
Hello and welcome to the content universe. Today, I want to talk about something that I stumble across quite often. I want to talk about what thought leadership really is because I’m sorry to say, thought leadership—just to make this clear—thought leadership is not about you. Today, we are talking about what it is about them.
My name is Mikkel Svold and for those of you who don’t know me, I have the content agency called Montanus where we produce podcasts, social media blog posts, all this kind of stuff for knowledge-driven companies.
Thought Leadership vs. Traditional Marketing
I want to talk about today what thought leadership is because many of my clients, they are in fact thought leaders or they want to be thought leaders and that’s what we help them try to become. What they are already is, they are always experts in their field and what I meet quite a lot is thinking that thought leadership has something to do with your regular marketing modus operandi, so it would be oh, it could be selling another product or talking about your product, something like that. But the trouble with this is that when you see thought leadership, quote-unquote, like that, it really becomes just good old marketing, not thought leadership, not that kind of branding exercise that thought leadership was really meant to be.
Key Principles of Authentic Thought Leadership
So let me just make this very clear for you. Thought leadership is not about you and it should not be about you. It’s not about your products. Don’t mind your products, don’t mind your services, don’t mind all that stuff. Also, try and don’t mind your lead funnel; try when the chief revenue officer or whatever the head of sales is called at your organization, try to kind of ignore whatever he or she is saying to you because, you know, thought leadership is not about driving sales in the short-term. Thought leadership is all about positioning your brand as someone who knows something. Positioning it as the go-to person in the industry, a personal brand, or company, or whatever you call it. That is thought leadership and that is the purpose of that. It’s not to have a short-term sales boost because, for doing that, it will be much more efficient to do cold calls, will be much more efficient to do outreach targeted campaigns, all of that stuff. I’m no expert in that, but I’m absolutely not expert in that but having a thought leadership strategy is all about branding. And branding is a long-term thing so what you should mind instead, instead of focusing so much, oh does this fit our actual what we want to sell right now our sales plan, does it fit that?
Content Strategy: Engaging Industry Topics
Instead of doing that, what you should probably do is you should mind what are interesting topics in the industry, what would be interesting for people in the industry to listen to. What are interesting stories? It could be even personal stories, it could be something you know if you make a soldiers podcast, one of my clients do military equipment so if you do a soldier’s podcast it could be firsthand stories from soldiers that will be a brilliant podcast. It’s a good storytelling podcast that you could definitely brand yourself with, if you’re within that industry.
Provocative Ideas to Establish Industry Expertise
What you could also do is you can go thought-provoking ideas if say you’re doing something for the energy industry or the energy sector, instead of focusing on wind turbines which is also, yeah it can be very interesting, but instead of only focusing on that, also try and do something that’s a little bit more thought-provoking, like what happens if efficient energy suddenly becomes a real thing, right? I just recently had an interview with a fusion expert and it’s just so mind-blowing. So having those kind of thought-provoking ideas that can kind of be in your industry, that is also putting you at the edge of that knowledge in the industry, which is obviously really, really good for your brand if you’re a high-tech brand.
Leveraging Industry Dilemmas to Build Authority
And then the last thing, you can also go for is kind of like dilemmas so if you have, say, if you’re in the concrete industry in the building industry, use a lot of concrete and there’s a big dilemma there because concrete is actually quite efficient for building but it’s also not a green way of building because it has a lot of CO2 emissions and all this but tackling some of those dilemmas head on, that really sets you apart as someone who wants to tackle the industry problems, someone you can rely on as a supplier who would be critical towards whatever is happening.
Transform Your Brand into an Industry Medium
So when you are doing this, when you are looking into trying to build a thought leadership brand or trying to become that industry thought leader, that industry leader, the position high up in the market. When you do that, try and ignore what you’re selling, try and just instead of being a company selling goods and products, try to be a media, try to be the media that people would want to go to, the medium that people would want to go to. What if you were an industry magazine, what would they write about? That is what you as well should be writing about, that is what you should be interviewing about, all of your videos, all of your thought leadership content, that should be around that topic or different topics that are interesting enough that you could actually also publish a full-blown industry medium.
Closing & Invitation for Collaboration
And I think that is a good takeaway, it’s a good way of thinking about it. So when you want to build this think not as a company, think as a medium and industry medium, and that will take you a long way in terms of producing quality thought leadership pieces or real thought leadership pieces, not just whatever.
I want to be really happy to hear from you, see what you have to say, and also if you have a different approach to building thought leadership than I have, hit me up because I might actually be able to learn something as well, which would be very, very neat for me as well.
Alright, that’s it for now. Thank you so much for listening and see you on another planet in the content universe.
