Your next client is not looking for you yet
Most of the people who will eventually buy from you are not looking right now. They have a supplier, a plan, or simply other priorities. According to the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, around 95% of potential B2B buyers are not in the market at any given time.
That is the real challenge for most businesses. Advertising and sales outreach work on the small group who are ready to buy. Everyone else is busy. But they are still reading, and what they read shapes who they call when the time comes.
This is where thought leadership earns its place.
What thought leadership actually is
Thought leadership is a slightly grand phrase for something simple: sharing what you genuinely know, in a way that is useful to the people you want to work with. It is the founder who explains why most projects in their industry run late. The manufacturer who writes plainly about choosing the right materials. The consultant who shares a framework they actually use.
It is not self-promotion dressed up as advice, and it is not posting for the sake of posting. Good thought leadership teaches something, takes a position, or makes a reader see their own problem more clearly.
What the research says
Edelman and LinkedIn have studied the effect of thought leadership on business buyers for several years, surveying thousands of decision-makers. Their 2024 report found that:
- Nearly three-quarters of decision-makers said an organisation's thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities than its marketing materials.
- 86% said they would be likely to invite a company to bid on a project based on its thought leadership.
- 60% said good thought leadership makes them more willing to pay a premium.
- 70% of C-suite leaders said a competitor's thought leadership had led them to question an existing supplier relationship.
But the same report contains a warning. Only around 15% of decision-makers rated the quality of the thought leadership they read as excellent. Most of it is forgettable. The opportunity is real, but only for content that is actually good.
Why founders are the best people to do it
For small and mid-sized businesses, the founder is usually the most credible voice the company has. They have the experience, the opinions, and the stories. Buyers increasingly want to know who they will be working with, and a founder's perspective answers that better than any brochure.
The problem is time. Founders are running the business. Their best ideas come up in client meetings, in conversations with the team, or in a voice note on the way home, and then they disappear. Years of hard-won knowledge never make it onto the page.
How to do thought leadership well
Write about what you actually know. Your strongest material comes from your own work: the mistakes you see clients make, the questions you answer every week, the decisions you would make differently now. Specific experience beats general advice every time.
Take a clear position. Content that agrees with everyone is forgotten by everyone. You do not need to be provocative, but you should be willing to say what you believe, and why.
Write for one reader. Picture a specific person you would love to work with, and write something that would genuinely help them. Content written for everyone is useful to no one.
Be consistent, not constant. One thoughtful post a week, sustained for a year, builds far more trust than a burst of daily posts that stops after a month.
Sound like yourself. Readers can tell when something sounds generic or ghostwritten in the wrong way. The best founder content captures how the founder actually talks and thinks: the phrases they use, the way they explain an idea, how strongly they would say something.
Choose the right format for the idea. A quick observation suits a LinkedIn post. A framework deserves an article. A story might work best as a newsletter or a short video. Let the idea decide the format.
Making it sustainable
Most founders do not lack ideas. They lack the hours to turn them into finished writing. A few habits help:
- Capture ideas the moment they come up, in a notes app or a voice memo. The raw material is the hard part, and you already have it.
- Batch the work. One focused conversation can produce a month of content if someone is there to shape it.
- Get help with the writing, not the thinking. The ideas must be yours. The drafting, editing, and publishing do not have to be.
This is the model behind The Draftory, our content studio for founders: we listen, find the ideas worth sharing, and turn them into writing that sounds like the founder, not like us.
The bottom line
Thought leadership is one of the few ways to reach the buyers who are not looking for you yet, and to make sure they remember you when they are. The research is clear that it works, and equally clear that most of it is mediocre. The founders who stand out are the ones who share what they really know, consistently, in their own voice.
If you have more to say than you have time to write, our content and marketing team can help you say it.
