I've seen the best minds of our generation destroyed financially because they chose the wrong market offerings for their thought leadership.*
What are market offerings for thought leadership?
In thought leadership, market offerings are the many ways people encounter your thought leadership. Articles, books, 1-1 coaching, keynotes, social media posts, book summaries, TEDx talks, conversations with friends, results in an internet search or AI query.
“Create stuff?” Yawn. Why do market offerings matter?
There’s a near infinite number of ways you can get your ideas into the world through market offerings. Your challenge is to choose the market offerings that will actually reach your target audience and get them to pay attention. Choose the wrong format, and you’ll spend a lot of time and money building things no one will ever see or use.
Are market offerings for thought leadership just products for sale?
No. You can think of market offerings as having two broad categories: free and paid. Free offerings are ones you give away (but still take time, money and effort to create). Paid offerings are ones which you keep behind a paywall.
What are some examples of market offerings?
I’ll use myself and my co-creators Peter Winick and Naren Aryal to share some examples:
Free Market Offerings:
This article (either as a LinkedIn or Substack post)
The Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast (co-hosted by Peter Winick and Bill Sherman)
A free set of online digital tools or quiz
A shortform video on your YouTube channel
Paid Offerings
A book (our book, The Thought Leadership Handbook)
A keynote
A consulting engagement
Executive coaching
An online learning program (e-learning, AI digital twin, etc.)
What socials are best for thought leadership?
That will evolve over time. Your audience will continue to shift how and where they get their information. The best thing to remember is that you need to follow them and go where your audience goes. Otherwise, you’re sharing your brilliance and collecting likes from people who look nothing like your target audience.
How do thought leaders lose money on market offerings?
Here are a few pitfalls we’ve seen over the last twenty years. We’ve seen each of these more than once. And it can happen with both free and paid offerings.
they create brilliant market offerings that have no clear buyer
they build market offerings before testing market demand
they pursue visual perfection (and pay top dollar for it)
they create free assets without a business strategy, hoping people will contact them
they create the offerings that interest them but not the market
they spend their own dollars rather than pre-sell market offerings and build based on committed revenue from actual buyers
they overestimate the number of potential buyers (especially in B2C) and misjudge their total addressable market (TAM)
they set the price for the market offering too high
They choose a modality that isn’t what people want anymore (Anyone remember Clubhouse during the 2020 pandemic?)
They spend massive amounts of time developing a new market offering and barely market it or promote it.
“If you build it, they will come” is a great tagline from the movie, Field of Dreams, but it’s a lousy thought leadership business strategy.
What do I do if I have a market offering that’s not selling?
Talk to members of the target buying community. See if this is something they’d be willing to pay money for (and check your pricing). If yes, then ask yourself how much time you have spent creating the market offering vs. marketing and promoting it. If you haven’t spent 3x as much effort on the marketing and promotion side, that’s a significant signal you need to put in more effort.
Wait. I can’t market and sell that many market offerings. I’m a solo thought leader.
Yes. You have limited time, energy, and bandwidth. That’s why choosing the right market offerings before your create them becomes critical. You also need to have a strategy on how you’ll get your offerings out into the world. If this sounds less exciting than ideating and creating new market offerings, you’re likely to develop a set of cool offerings that never get traction in the world.
Where can I learn more about building market offerings?
You’ll find more information (including stories and case studies) in Chapter 4 of The Thought Leadership Handbook by Bill Sherman, Peter Winick, and Naren Aryal. The book also contains tools to help you choose the right market offerings for your target audience.
Where Can I Learn More About Bill Sherman’s Four Elements of Thought Leadership?
This article is the third of four about the Four Elements of Thought Leadership here on Substack.
You can also find more articles for Bill Sherman’s Four Elements of Thought Leadership framework on its canonical page.
*Note: opening quote with apologies to Alan Ginsburg’s “Howl”