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Thought Leadership vs. Content Marketing: What Are The Differences (FAQ)?


By Daniel Rosehill

You’ve probably heard about content marketing recently.

Thought leadership has also been generating a lot of interest.

What’s so different about thought leadership that it’s worthy of its own name, you might have wondered?

The difference comes down, in large part, to selling expertise versus value to your readers.

Thought Leadership Sells Insights; Content Marketing Sells Value


Thought leadership is concerned with sharing original insights in order to build up a relationship and trust with an (often) expert, highly engaged, and peer level audience.

Content marketing, by contrast, is concerned more with providing value to readers as a means of marketing to them and thereby ultimately increasing sales.

Content marketing (like thought leadership) can be a highly effective enterprise when done well. But its focus is largely educational, conveying information that may already have been written about.

By providing useful information to readers, content marketing authors hope to develop a sort of symbiotic relationship with them.



Readers derive value from the content marketing resources you produce. And authors assert themselves as a trustworthy source in the minds of buyers who will develop confidence in them and ultimately become far likelier to buy from them when the right moment arises.

Content marketing these days is also heavily intertwined with SEO — and for very good reason. In order to forge connections with the right prospective audience, one has to be talking about subjects — and hitting on keywords — that they are actively searching for. Otherwise the messaging, and all that value-buildling, will be ineffective.

  • With thought leadership the ‘products’ leveraged to achieve a positive campaign ROI are one’s expertise and viewpoint on an issue. And the more compelling and disruptive those are the more effective it can be as a tactic.
  • With content marketing the main product leveraged is the education and the amount of sustained value that the author can provide to the reader. The effect might be arguably more direct than thought leadership. But in big ticket (and long) B2B sales cycles, establishing expertise might prove to be a more appropriate prerequisite to developing a relationship than attempting to facilitate an ‘educational’ buyer journey which might prove completely unnecessary or even counterproductive (sophisticated buyers likely already understand plenty about the nuts and bolts of your industry.)

Top Down (Content Marketing) vs. Peer to Peer (Thought Leadership)


Thought leadership is best understood as an activity designed to generate interest in a business’s activities among an engaged (and expert) peer audience in another business.

For instance, a CTO could publish expert thought leadership offering some valuable insights about a topic of great interest among companies who are operating in the same industry. Or he could offer the results of original proprietary research as a speech to a closed professional forum such as an industry conference.

Alternatively, this thought leadership might be conveyed through a trade media publication or a niche website which is read primarily by those in competitor organizations or by those holding senior positions at potential customers.

Readers are therefore already likely to be well-versed in the fundamental aspects of the business. An educational tone would not generally be appropriate. Instead, authors have to convey high level information to a peer readership.

Content marketing, by contrast, is more concerned with educating potential end-users about the value of the company’s product or service. Due to this, the transmission of information is typically more hierarchical than wold be the case with thought leadership.


Top Of Funnel (Thought Leadership) vs. Mid-Funnel (Content Marketing)


Thought leadership is often deployed by organizations looking to get ahead in the high-ticket item world of enterprise-level B2B sales.

In a specialized sales environment in which the potential vendor landscape is probably well-known to buying committees, getting a foot in the door — or an article in the recipient’s news feed — can be enormously valuable in and of itself.

Much thought leadership is concerned with doing precisely this: getting on the radar of a highly specific list of target organizations and individuals. Targeting influential recipients can therefore be much more important than achieving a distribution volume KPI.

Perhaps a well-received piece of thought leadership could open the door to a formal introduction which — down the line — could turn into a valuable piece of business.

By contrast, content marketing fits lower in the marketing and sales funnel. Its objective is (often) to steer end users towards making a purchasing decision in the short to medium term.


Onsite vs. Offsite (Guest Post) Distribution


Finally, thought leadership and content marketing are often distributed though different channels.

Content marketing is typically distributed through owned channels.

These are marketing channels over which the content author has total editorial control. These can be both on-site — shared over digital media properties which the company owns — or off-site, carried on third-party publications.

Channels can be both owned and onsite or neither:


Onsite vs. Offsite Distribution Channel Comparison

ChannelOwned? Onsite? Offsite?
Company blog✅✅
Medium account✅✅
LinkedIn profile ✅✅
Trade media publication ✅
(‘Owned’ = editorial control. ‘Onsite’ = owned digital properties.)

Content marketing is often explicitly promotional. This would make it unsuitable for distribution in third-party (offsite) editorial publications. Editorial publications are typically seeking to deliver interesting information to their readers that does not carry a company’s promotional messaging.

Contributed content and guest post submissions, as opposed to advertorials, are almost always not supposed to contain promotional content, although many publications will allow authors a bio and a backlink.

True thought leadership — being a peer to peer marketing exercise — should not be overly promotional. Moreover, it is supposed to deliver original insights which are often of interest to editorial publications. For this reason, it is typically much more suitable than content marketing for guest posting and offsite pitching.


Can We Use Thought Leadership And Content Marketing Together?


There’s good news if you think that both content marketing and thought leadership could be of benefit to your organization: there’s no need to choose just one or the other.

Content marketing and thought leadership can be used in conjunction. Some ways in which this could be achieved include:

  • Developing separate thought leadership and content marketing programs to be deployed in parallel. For example, the content marketing team could work on developing inbound marketing content designed to educate customers about the company’s products and use-cases for them while the executive communications / thought leadership team could author industry commentary outlining their views about expected trends in the industry. The former could target end-users while the latter could be aimed to establishing relationships and partnerships with other vendors.
  • Adapting content marketing for thought leadership. Content refurbishing is a popular trend in content marketing which aims to make it easier for content-producing organizations to reuse existing content. In some cases, content marketing pieces can be reworked to develop them into thought leadership pieces. This can also apply in reverse.

Key Takeaways

  • Content marketing and thought leadership are not interchangeable terms describing the same activity!
  • Thought leadership focuses on trading compelling and preferably original insights in exchange for (often) executive attention.
  • Content marketing focuses on providing value to end-users and establishing a relationship with them that will hopefully ‘convert’ them into becoming paying customers
  • Thought leadership is more often than not a peer to peer marketing activity whereas content marketing tends to be more hierarchical (businesses marketing themselves to customers)
  • Thought leadership fits higher in the sales funnel than content marketing.
  • Thought leadership is more suitable for distribution in offsite / unmanaged channels. An example of these would be editorial channels or guest post opportunities.


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