How to Position Your Content as a Thought Leader

Positioning is how your content is perceived in the mind of your ideal audience and the marketplace. Positioning greatly affects how quickly your content, whether it’s a course, a podcast, or an ebook, will gain traction and produce results.

Ideally, you want your unique content to be positioned in the marketplace in a way that will attract your ideal audience, gain the trust of your ideal customers, and drive forward your most important business and thought leadership goals.

While you can’t ultimately control your position in the marketplace (because it’s based on the perceptions of others), you can certainly craft a content production strategy that will increase the chances that you’ll gain a position in the marketplace that you desire.

This requires being clear about what you want to achieve with your content, and how your content will serve your audience. Let’s take a look at the insights you need to uncover to help define a strategy that is in alignment with your desired positioning.

Positioning Venn Diagram

This diagram is from my Thought Leadership Business Model design process. It describes how I help my strategy clients plan and align the next evolution of their business model. We can apply this same approach to any content you create to find the “sweet spot”.

This is important so that you can:

1. Stand out in the marketplace and gain attention
2. Keep attention and earn trust so that your audience grows
3. Support the body of work you want to create and the thought leadership goals you want to achieve
4. Align with your unique vision, perspective, and strengths so that your content feeds your energy, fuels your creativity, and is fun to create!

Your ideal positioning falls in the cross-section between the three circles of the Venn Diagram. The most important elements to delve into first are those contained in the circles labeled You and Your Ideal Audience. We’ll dig into those next week!