Depth, not breadth: Decoding the thought leadership distribution paradox

We've all seen it happen: the same piece of B2B thought-leadership content being paraded across LinkedIn, X, the company blog and a dozen other platforms. It’s easy to see the appeal of this scattershot approach – it saves time and effort – but its drawbacks, while less easy to spot, are also very real. There are better ways to engage.

The core problem is that thought leadership is about depth of impact, not breadth of distribution. This is how it differs from awareness campaigns, where volume can drive results. The paradox of thought-leadership distribution is that a piece tailored to a certain audience can never be “one-size-fits-all”, and that trying to make it so can be unproductive.

This observation now coheres with a second paradox. While Gen AI has made it easier than ever before to churn out superficially plausible content and post it everywhere, the technology is also being deployed to weed out AI-created content and instead zero in on artisanal, specialist human knowledge.

As my colleague David Line explains in his primer about optimising content for AI-powered search, or AIO, search engines these days are trawled by Large Language Models (LLMs), and these, ironically, tend to prefer material that demonstrate originality and authenticity. In other words, they are looking for genuinely authoritative content, not low-effort, generic slop. If identical content crops up in a dozen different places, it could end up being ignored by these LLMs.

Smart marketers are therefore best advised to leave the platform buffet alone and instead take a targeted approach. It’s more effective to be seen as an indispensable source of knowledge on a couple of platforms than serve the same content everywhere. Here are some approaches that we have seen to be effective:

Research your audience. Granted, this is a resource-intensive exercise that time-poor marketers may be tempted to skip, but don’t give in. Don't guess where your target decision-makers consume their information; instead survey your existing clients, analyse your competitors' most successful bits of insight, and track where meaningful industry conversations happen. Plus, you can address your AI FOMO (fear of missing out) – a real thing for both companies and employees – by putting the tech to good use, as this piece from GWI notes.

Embrace the Pareto Principle. Or the 80:20 rule as it’s more commonly known. Identify a couple of platforms where your audience is most engaged and intellectually present. Remember, this isn't about follower counts, it's about attention quality. A well-executed newsletter with 500 subscribers who forward your content to their network beats a social media audience of 5,000 passive scrollers.

Play to each medium’s strengths. While platforms like LinkedIn are ideally suited for presenting insights through a range of formats (text, images, videos and carousels), research and analysis driven by hard data should preferably be showcased in industry publications. They may attract less attention there, but those eyeballs will likely be the ones that truly matter.

Podcasts are ideal for a nuanced deep dive into any topic, successfully offering a level of human connection missing from most B2B thought leadership. However, avoid the temptation to have someone simply read out the same piece of text you’ve posted online.

Instagram and TikTok, typically associated with B2C marketing, can also be leveraged for humanising the brand – as these examples highlight – and engaging with upcoming generations of corporate decision makers by delivering bite-size pieces of insight.

Repurpose but don’t replicate. Instead of posting the same content everywhere, develop a style that capitalises on the unique value offered by each platform. For instance, if you are promoting a research report or white paper, you could tease the headline stats on LinkedIn (and X), publish the full analysis in an industry journal and discuss the implications of its findings on a podcast.

The power of compounding

When you distribute your content in this fashion, you start being associated with specific platforms in your audience's mind. This in turn creates a compound benefit.

Your audience knows where to find you, publishers start reaching out proactively and even speaking opportunities – a highly impactful yet often overlooked medium of thought leadership – can follow. Your subject matter experts become the thought leaders who "own" certain topics on certain platforms. Equally importantly, you can spend time crafting insights that matter, building relationships with industry editors and understanding the nuances of what resonates with your audience on a particular platform.

The urge to reuse the same content everywhere is created by the fear of missing out on opportunities. But the biggest opportunity cost isn't the platforms you're not on; it's the depth you're not achieving on the platforms where your audience actually pays attention to what you’re producing. Doing so will also help you address a major preoccupation of businesses these days: optimising your content for SEO as well as AIO to get LLMs to surface your content on increasingly AI-powered search engines.

So, choose your battles (and your platforms) wisely and make them count.