Digital Marketing

Thought Leader Ads: Boost the reach and influence of your brand content

Published on 20 June, 2024

Sabine Danielle Petersen

Senior Communications Advisor

Thought leadership pieces are a staple of any B2B campaign. Now there’s a
way for your content to influence more potential clients, and the power is at
your fingertips.

At digitalPR, we’re big fans of thought leadership campaigns and have successfully
employed this strategy to position our clients as key influencers in their respective
markets.

However, a thought leadership campaign doesn’t have to end once an opinion piece is
published in the media. The brand’s own media channels are a perfect vehicle for
expanding the reach of your message, while the topic is still hot and you have momentum.
The trick is finding a relevant audience.

Sadly, as much as we’d like our brand social media accounts to deliver the same reach as
top B2B media, we all know this isn’t the case. Posting your content to LinkedIn will get
some organic attention, but it will be limited.
This is where Thought Leader Ads come in.

Using paid ads to boost thought leadership campaigns.

Thought Leader Ads is a relatively new tool offered by LinkedIn. You might think that
combining PR opinion pieces and paid ads makes for an odd couple, but they’re a perfect
match.

Advertising fails when it’s seen as ‘spammy’ and irrelevant. As consumers, we’ve become
a cynical and highly discerning audience, but when ads provide genuine value and insight,
we respond. This is precisely what a well-crafted thought leadership piece aims to achieve.

Unlike typical ads that promote an image or video with text and a call to action, Thought
Leader ads resemble a regular LinkedIn post and come from your chosen spokesperson,
not a faceless brand.

Crucially, instead of the limited organic reach your company page might receive, we can
deliver this valuable content to a targeted and—crucially—relevant audience. Done
properly, Thought Leader Ads allow your content to influence thousands of potential
clients.

Getting maximum ROI from your content

The objective of Thought Leader Ads is to maximize engagement with your brand and your
brand spokesperson rather than push an immediate call to action. Thought Leader Ads
work in tandem with other forms of advertising, building trust and encouraging potential
clients to take positive action.

They’re also a perfect way of squeezing extra value out of previously published content
that may not have received the media attention you hoped for. If the content is good and
still relevant, Thought Leader Ads can give it a new lease of life, maximizing its ROI.
If you’d like to explore how Thought Leader Ads can maximize the reach of your opinion
pieces, build brand trust, and help you gain share-of-voice, we’d love to talk!