5 questions for branded opinion and thought-leadership pieces

By Michael Feeley, Editor, New Digital Age

In my previous blog, we looked at how to choose a topic for your own branded thought-leadership piece. We will now turn to actually writing the article.

However, before you start to write any branded opinion or thought-leadership piece, it’s important to first establish three things – 

Audience: Who are you talking to with this piece? Who is it that you want to engage?  

Relevance: Why is it useful for your organisation to share THIS information with THIS audience? 

Outcome: What, ideally, would you like your audience to do next having read the piece?

The answers you provide here will give you a foundation to build on while writing your piece: refer back to these to keep you focused and on track.

5 magic questions

The technique I’m about to share with you allows non-writers to create compelling thought-leadership articles simply by answering 5 questions. This time, your answers will provide you with the content of your article and help you to construct a solid argument, capable of engaging your target audience.

Question 1: What brought this topic to mind in the first place? 

What prompted you to choose this topic? For example, this could be a recent conversation you had, a piece of press coverage, survey or research findings, customer feedback, social media posts or wider trends in industry or society. 

Answering this question truthfully instantly provides a conversational intro to your chosen subject and lets the content originator quickly establish their own tone of voice and become a real person operating in the real world in the mind of the reader.

Question 2: What has recently changed, is about to change or needs to change around this topic? 

Without change, there can be no thought-leadership. How has the status quo been interrupted? How is traditional thinking around this topic being challenged at the moment?

At this stage, it is good to spend a couple of moments to summarise how things have been up until now before introducing the new factors that are driving change.

Questions 3: What does this change mean for your audience? i.e. what are the threats/opportunities?

Break down the ways in which these changes are most relevant to your chosen audience. Present the ways this will affect your audience and their prospects of success in their chosen field. An optimum of three points and a maximum of five points is recommended.

Question 4: How can your audience best address or prepare to address these changes? 

It’s important that any opinion or thought-leadership piece provides the reader with a few key ‘takeaways’ – free little nuggets of expertise to guide readers’ future information gathering and action around this subject. These also help to establish the content author as a trusted authority and subject-expert on this topic.

Where appropriate/possible, add illustrative examples from your own experience.

Question 5: How can YOU help readers address these changes?

Point towards sources of further information on this topic from your brand, such as research, whitepapers, forums, social media accounts. Great opportunity to add links to your site/social accounts to help boost SEO and enquiries. Provide details (possibly in a post-article CTA) to allow readers to contact you or your team directly.

Closing tips

Above all, when writing an opinion piece, remember to be authentically you. Use your own voice. Write it as you would say it. Don’t try to be overly fancy or clever in your language.

Also, use sub-headers to naturally break up the text into three or four roughly equally-sized sections. This encourages the reader to keep reading/scrolling without becoming exhausted/daunted.  

Finally, come up with a title that works from an SEO perspective, i.e. that lets readers (and search engines) instantly understand the nature of the content on offer. Online, that’s way more important than coming up with a print-style witty ‘play on words’ title.

If you need help in bringing your ideas to life, the team at the Bluestripe team is always here to support you!