"Be a Thought Leader" points to the person. Strategic Thought Leadership is more about the leadership: It’s a Content Marketing Strategy organized to influence marketplace thinking in favor of your offering. Learn how to move the mind of the market.

1. The MARKETER’S Intro
to STRATEGIC
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

2. There is POWER in Thought Leadership Marketing.
Fully harnessing it comes from separating the Leadership from the Leader.

3. WHAT IS
THOUGHT
LEADERSHIP?
Be a Thought Leader
points to the person.
Strategic Thought
Leadership is more
about the leadership:
It’s a Content Marketing
Strategy organized to
actually influence
marketplace thinking in
favor of your offering.
Read along to learn
how…

4. What
makes it
worth
doing?
A message that simply stands out is not
enough. A storefront splashed with the graffiti of
last night’s vandalism stands out but isn’t
attracting new customers.
Well-designed Strategic Thought Leadership,
though, leads your market to embrace your
way as the way. It brings growth and profits.

5. Avoid a trap. Nearly every company is pumping
out web content. Most is fluff.
Joe Pullizi of the Content Marketing
Institute says “(repetition is the)
one thing … killing content
marketing and everyone is ignoring
it".
91% of B2B companies use content marketing. - CMI Report
60% of marketers create at least one piece of content a day. - eMarketer
So what other option is there? .
Mostly parroted…

6. Strategic Thought Leadership
Strategic Thought
Leadership Marketing
makes every content
piece count with a clear
purpose and powerful
tactics definable in a
backstory report.
It utilizes the structure of
language to positively
move marketplace
thinking to embrace your
unique model.
Intrigued? Stay with us, there are points we’ll cover that can transform your marketing.

7. SO ESCAPE THE SEA
OF PARROT CONTENT
As well as the undercurrent of
over-targeting.. recent studies
show targeted ads create a
distaste for a brand in
prospects. And may not even
produce results.
Strategic Thought Leadership
escapes the sea of sameness …Drowning in a Sea of Parrot Content. VanThaut 2019

8. IT’S NOT ABOUT CLICKS
ON AN AD (THAT
MIGHT BE A BOT)
… it's about the higher profits that come from relationships built on trust when you put
your prospects' needs, including their online learning needs, first. Especially since …
…and liberates from invasive targeted ads…

9. Customers
prefer learning
online to
targeted ads.
“70 percent of internet users want to learn
about products through content versus
traditional advertisements.” (MGD
Advertising)
We’ll return to this point with an illustrative example plus related online conversations revealing the customer point of view.

10. WHAT’s the key?
WHAT'S THE KEY TO RELEASING THE POWER OF SUCH
A SYSTEM OF ORGANIZED IDEAS?

11. Pivoting marketing technology to the end customer point of
view seems counter-intuitive to marketers used to the
customer data targeting paradigm. Yet it works.
The first key to Strategic Thought Leadership
Marketing is the point of view it is designed from:
The end user
Customer.

12. And we have found the prospect sets the value of web
content … with attention and engagement.
The Vanguard Group in the UK has demonstrated that the
customer sets the nominal value of a service.

13. So you can only fully flush out waste and maximize return on
investment in internet marketing by applying technology and
developing web content from the perspective of the customers.
So you can only fully flush out waste and maximize
return on investment in internet marketing by
developing content from the perspective of …
The end user
Customer.

14. Shift the
target in
order to hit
it.
• Instead of making prospects the target,
• Make what they want the target…
• Including what they want to learn about.

15. DESIGNING FROM
THE CUSTOMER
POINT OF VIEW
PREVENTS
POWERFUL
TECHNOLOGIES
FROM BEING
MANIPULATIVE
When coming from a position of empathy and positive intent, showing people new choices isn't manipulative, its empowering.

16. It’s about empowering your
audience
Questions to ask include –
• Who is our audience?
• How can we listen to them?
• How can we discover and serve their learning
needs?
• What other groups could join our audience,
given new learning that leads them to benefit
from our offering?
… how much can we elevate their
experience with new learning?

17. With a Thought
Leadership Model
you set a path
• Discover audience thinking.
• Define a new place to bring them where
only your offering exists.
• Develop, publish, and promote content
that guides them from A to B.

18. Customer-
centered
destinations
could be to
• Make more informed
buying decisions when
purchasing in your niche.
• Extract more value out of
what you sell.
• Learn to use your offering
in new & different ways.
• Elevate its purpose to
satisfy higher values.

19. Which can happen with
structure… all of which can
happen when you
work with the
structure of
strategic
thought
leadership.

20. Build a robust model with a
foundationBuilding a robust thought
leadership model is like building a
house where the foundation - the
structure - needs to be complete.
Just showing you are
knowledgeable is like the paint on
the house. It doesn’t go deep.

21. USE THE
right
building
blocks
SPECIFIC
BUILDING
BLOCKS ARE
NEEDED
To form a complete structure
of Strategic Thought Leadership
First, let’s sort them into 3 main
areas…
A stool needs 3 legs to be stable.

22. Listen, Envision, Output
A simple way to understand the 3 modes of Strategic
Thought Leadership Marketing is the LEO model:
LEO

23. STRATEGIC THOUGHT
LEADERSHIP IS LIKE
MAKING A MOVIE
When considering the LEO model of
Listen | Envision | Output
…consider each of the 3 parts as a role in
making a movie …
To illustrate further…

24. LISTEN:
AUDIENCE
ATTUNEMENT
Take the role of the audience to better
listen to what they want, especially the
values and mental models behind it.
Thaut uses neurolinguistic analysis of authentic, public online conversations. We respect privacy – individuals aren’t identified or tracked.
Primary Sense: Hearing
Mode: Passive
Emotion: Compassion
Movie Role: Audience

25. ENVISION:
THOUGHT
LEADERSHIP
STUDIO
Like a screenplay writer, create adventures in
new thinking, showcasing your product, to
lead the audience to.Primary Sense: Visual
Mode: Creative
Emotion: Inspiration
Movie Role: Writer
Thaut draws from analysis of inspired leadership interviews.

26. OUTPUT:
MINDSHIFT
DIRECTOR
Like the director of a movie, bring the
scenes to life with content to impact
market thinking.Primary Sense: Kinesthetic
Mode: Active
Emotion: Confidence
Movie Role: Director
Thaut produces high-impact content using the structure of language patterns of influence.

27. THE THAUT
TRIAD
• Listen | Audience Attunement: Green
pyramid = 7 levels of market thinking.
• Envision | Thought Leadership Studio:
Yellow pyramid = The same 7 levels
shifted to a Thought Leadership Position
to lead the market to.
• Output | Mindshift Director: Red bridge
= the path from the old thinking to the
new, at the optimum 4th level of mental
models, the most leveraged level to
change. More on that further along…
To take another helpful perspective, these three
modes can take the form of two 7-level pyramids
connected by a bridge. In this form, it’s called …
Because the pyramids helpfully parse levels of thinking
related to customer demand AKA pull and prospect
learning pull, they are called “Pullamids”.
The 7-level Pullamid model is partly derived from the “Logical Levels” model of Robert Dilts , also known as the “Levels of Change” model.

28. THE 7 LEVELS OF
THE PULLAMIDS
Sorting thinking into 7
levels puts the power of
neuro-linguistics to work.
From top down:
•Core Purpose: Customers’ purest related purpose.
•Identity: Who they see themselves as using your product.
•Values: What’s important to them about it. Or what even
more important feelings could be associated with it.
•Mental Models: Their mental maps of how to buy and use
what you sell. How it works, what it’s for.
•Skillset: Their knowledge & skills about your product or
service and how to use it.
•Pull: How they express demand for it, including related
learning pull from prospects to learn about it.
•Pullfillment: Their experience of buying and using it.
The higher on the pullamid, the higher the level of influence. Higher levels change those beneath them. Lower levels do not change higher.

29. Let’s take
an
example….
You can enter the 3-part LEO system in either Listen or Envision. Here, we’ll first
Listen with the Audience Attunement stage of the Thaut Process to initiate a
Strategic Thought Leadership Marketing campaign for (drumroll) …. Strategic
Thought Leadership Marketing.
Yes, we are going meta.
For our example, we’ll build a Thought Leadership Model to lead more marketers to use Strategic Thought Leadership.

30. In our example, we want to lead market thinking to
embrace Strategic Thought Leadership Marketing.
Initial questions include, ”What large potential audience –
who doesn’t currently think our way - could be led to
embrace what we offer to their benefit?”
One obvious audience* is marketers who are currently
spending their and their clients’ resources on (likely
privacy invasive) targeted online advertising.
In addition to the marketers, those affected include the
companies they represent and the consumers they are
attempting to sell.
We want to persuade marketers while aligning the
interests of client companies and consumers as well.
Discovering a Target Audience
Sample campaign for
Strategic Thought
Leadership Marketing.
Audience Attunement
Stage
*Other ways of discovering potential audiences include keyword research, a tool of SEO, which pairs well with Strategic Thought Leadership.

31. “…publishers lost $22 billion to ad blocking software“…How can you quantify
publishing revenue you "lost" if you were forcibly denied the opportunity by a
person preferring to ignore ads altogether? You imply that somehow, the end
consumer would have purchased said product if only he could not CHOOSE to
ignore the ads? “
“..I find the company I want to buy from by researching and making an informed
decision on how I want to spend my money. No advertisers is ever going to do that
for me, so why not leave me in peace?”
“If I want to find a product or a service, I'll look it up on my own time, and do my
research to what would work best for me. I will not let an ad decide for me.”
“Don't forget to boycott the websites as well. This will force websites to choose
advertising companies who use non-intrusive ways to advertise.”
“..truthfully i will never buy any product from a company who is so thirsty for
buyers that they become obnoxiously intrusive…i say we should stop buying the
products they are advertising. that's what need to happen… “
Let’s Listen: here’s some example snippets from
online prospect conversations we discovered with
our listening tools.
Audience
Attunement:
Listening to the
consumers first.
Not the happiest campers, are they?

32. “Can you talk a bit more around the subject of different targets and KPIs for
******** vs. other channels such as ******* -- both in terms of calculating these
but also with respect to client buy-in? I find that some clients are quite firm on
their CPA goals and want to over-emphasize last-click conversions which makes it
difficult to properly show the full value of ******** advertising.
(In real-life conversation with salesperson for targeted marketing firm) “It’s really
creepy.”
“I totally agree that ads in general are widely disliked. Our goal is always to
encourage marketers to rely much more on inbound marketing methods that
attract potential customers through organic search, social media, and other
platforms that let people approach you on their own time based on their needs
and wants..”
“The websites should come up with better revenue streams than base everything
off an industry that is completely false. I work in advertising, and we ALL know
that nobody is going to watch the ads, we know that we are wasting the client's
money by creating ads for them. Ads are the product we make, and we are fully
aware that our product is snake oil... otherwise there wouldn't be so many tricks to
artificially boost numbers. The whole industry is a scam.”
Listening further, now to marketers, also sourced
from places online where people really speak their
minds ... again a few samples:
Audience
Attunement: Now
listening to the
marketers we aim to
first influence.
Note the disconnect some marketers have with the end-customer point of view. Note the apparent disenchantment of others.

33. NEURO-LINGUISTIC
ANALYSIS REVEALS
LEVERAGE FOR
POSITIVE INFLUENCE
Audience
Attunement:
Sorting marketplace
thinking into the 7
levels.
In this case, the thinking of marketers themselves.

34. A summary report like Thaut generates shows
the 7 levels of audience thinking. Certain levels
need alignment. Others should be led
somewhere new and different.
1. Core
Purpose
Make good things happen, lead to a better life through success.
2. Identity Success story, Rainmaker
3. Values Integrity/honesty, mutual respect, success, effectiveness, value,
creativity
4. Mental
Models
“Using privacy-invasive customer data to target them is necessary for
effective marketing”, “it’s the numbers that count.”
5. Skillset Statistical analysis, high-tech targeting methods, demographics, lacks
ability to pivot and see from customer point of view (numbers-only
focus detaches from empathy)
6. Pull (Wanting, not usually getting) Steady leads, Results for the money,
Stand out and get attention, Positive experience
7. Pullfillment Most marketing doesn’t meet expectations, Discomfort of pushback
against privacy invasion, fuzzy on real results because bots distort pay
per click numbers, frustration with new limiting laws,
Note the dysfunctional
Mental Models not
matching values and
thus causing poor
Pullfillment.
Keep in mind throughout the process that the middle level of Mental Models level offers the most potential for moving audience thinking.

35. We have found marketers who believe they must invade prospect
privacy to target them, as per the prevalent mental model:
“Using privacy-invasive customer data to target them is
necessary for effective marketing”
.. Driven in part by a second mental model
“…it’s the numbers that count.”
To satisfy the pull for
“leads, money, and a positive experience”
But the pullfillment is they often feel bad about the “creepy” side
and it doesn’t even work that well, so it’s frustrating. Looking at
the top of the Pullamid, values like
“Integrity/honesty, mutual respect”
Clearly aren’t being met by the prevalent mental models.
We’ve discovered a Thought Leadership Opportunity: a Market
Misalignment where the Mental Models fail to satisfy the Values.
Audience
Attunement:
Sorting the levels
for leverage to
influence thinking.

36. Audience
Attunement:
Competitive
Landscape Reports to
find market gaps.
Competitive Landscape Reports based on
discovered market values* reveal opportunities
as well.
The Audience Attunement Pullamid reveals opportunities to move thinking. Market Landscape Reports show market gaps to fill by doing so.
*like, in this example, privacy for consumers and creative
leadership for customers, client companies, and marketers.

37. Creativity is at the heart of our nature. It isn’t reserved for only
the inventors, musicians and artists.
Creativity isn’t specific to any activity, it’s more about the state of mind
brought to any situation – one of immersion in the present moment …
…a state of flow where you act consciously rather than from habit.
You can grant yourself freedom from limitations in the studio by suspending
doubt. As a mentor once said, “You can leave any personal limits by the door.
They’ll be there when you leave if you want to pick them back up.”
What if you could fully step back into a time when you were
totally inspired … or had a great idea that later worked well?
As you remember that time, what did you see? How do you feel different when
you imagine it bigger and brighter as you relive the experience?
What did you hear? As you hear that again, how do your feelings change when
you turn up the volume? And continue to increase the size and brightness?
What do you feel? Where is the feeling and how does it move? What happens
when you keep it moving that way, circulating it faster while thinking… “How
will things be different when the marketplace embraces my new ideas?” Spin it.
Thought Leadership
Studio: Generating
Creative Ideas for
Thought
Leadership.
Enter the Inspiring Atmosphere of
Thought Leadership Studio if you like:
Keep that spinning while you consider the questions on the next page.

38. Thanks for reading our free
intro!
Get the rest of the report
free and instantly (65 pages of
which you’ve read the first 38)
at
Thaut.io/Guide
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