Marketers will focus more on content strategy

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When there’s a lot of content around, marketers need clear objectives, a deep understanding of their audiences, a plan to create distinctive messages, and a clear way to measure success.

It’s not a good idea to dive straight into content production without stepping back to consider these questions and having a clear strategy. Marketers will increasingly recognise the value of strategy as a regular exercise to build support from stakeholders and create better campaigns.

thought leadership trends 2022
Source: 2022 Thought leadership Trends Webinar, hosted on 1st December 2021. Watch on demand here.

Grabbing attention will become as important as sustaining it
In many campaigns, most of the effort goes into generating fresh ideas. Of course this chile mobile phone numbers database is vital, but before you can wow the audience with your clever ideas you need to grab their attention.

In our ebook Influence and Impact, we introduced our SURE framework. To capture your audience’s attention, your content needs to be:

Simple (and let’s face it, a lot of thought leadership isn’t)
Urgent (because people are short-termist and worry about their most immediate problems)
Relevant (this means your audience must instantly recognise that a piece of content is aimed at people like them)
Eye-opening (because content that surprises is more likely to get noticed and remembered).


There’s still no universal way to evaluate the success of a thought leadership campaign. Most marketers still cling to the metrics that are easy to measure, such as downloads, shares and bounce rates, without knowing the value of this traffic.

We expect a shift from the quantity of activity to quality. Influence matters, so there will be an increasing focus on getting thought leadership into the hands of the right people.

This means continued growth for influencer marketing (although many will continue to be sceptical about the paid versions of this) and a deeper understanding of what it means to really influence an audience.

So that wraps up our thought leadership trends for 2022. Which ones stand out to you? Drop us a line to let us know, or find us on social media and tag us in your comments.

Ready to get started on your 2022 thought leadership strategy?

We think we do a pretty good job of recognising new and emerging thought leadership trends. We also know how to sort the exciting game-changers from the gimmicks. If any of our thought leadership trends resonate with your business, speak to one of our team to find out how to apply them to your marketing in 2022.