BTL 9: Setting goals and measuring progress

As you start to work through ideas about thought leadership, it can start to feel like an end in itself. It is, however, important to think about why you want to use thought leadership, and set out some goals for your thought leadership work.

In the early days, you may want to set yourself process-related goals: publishing a certain number of blogs or articles per month, or sharing other people’s content at least x times per week, for example.

However, you also need to be thinking about the outputs and outcomes that you wish to generate. In other words, what is the aim of your thought leadership itself? This will need to be consistent with your organisation’s goals for your thought leadership. It should also be consistent with general good practice for goals, such as making them SMART and reviewing them regularly.

Success is very much an individual thing. However, some ways in which you can measure how much you are recognised as a thought leader include:

• Whether you are invited to speak at external events and conferences on your chosen topic, and if so, in what capacity;
• The number of followers and connections that you have on your chosen social media channels, and the amount of engagement occurring with your audience.
• Whether those that you recognise as thought leaders are sharing your content.

There is more about how to measure the success of thought leadership programmes here, which may give you some ideas. You may also find it helpful to read about David Ogilvy’s ideas on advertising.