Your Expertise Has a Shelf-Life Problem
Firms are publishing more content than ever right now.
Blog posts. LinkedIn articles. Quarterly "insight" PDFs that took three partners and a hostage negotiation over the word "cutting-edge" to approve.
And somehow... fewer inbound calls. Fewer "I read your piece" conversations. More content, less traction.
Here's why.
AI can produce a polished overview of any topic in your industry in 30 seconds. Which means a polished overview is no longer impressive. It's the floor.
Three firms in your category can now publish the same trend piece in the same week. Swap the logos and nobody notices.
Edelman and LinkedIn have been studying this for years. The number that stopped me: only 15% of decision-makers rate the thought leadership they read as very good or excellent.
Meanwhile, content production has more than tripled.
Three times the content. Impressing roughly... nobody.
But here's the number that matters if you're not the biggest name in your space: 53% of decision-makers say strong thought leadership can outweigh brand recognition alone. And 86% would invite those firms to RFPs.
Sharper pen > bigger brand...
The problem with most firm content isn't that it's bad. It's aggressively fine. Grammatically correct. Professionally formatted. And completely empty of a point of view.
It summarizes trends without taking a position. Explains what's happening without committing to what it means.
The content equivalent of showing up prepared and saying "it depends."
And the firms with the deepest expertise are often the worst at this. They see every side, so they present all of them and commit to none. Too worried about being wrong to say anything interesting enough to be right. (I'm guilty of this!)
Their competitors with half the expertise and twice the conviction? They're getting the calls.
THE MOVE
Pull up the last three things your firm published. Read them like a prospect would.
Could any other firm in your space have written them?
If yes... the problem is your actual expertise (the patterns, the stories, the opinions, the things you know from doing this 200 times) isn't making it into the content.
The stuff AI can't write is the stuff you're leaving out.
That's the thing about thought leadership. The word "leadership" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most of what's out there is just... thought.
That's all I have for you today :)
Dani