In and out: The role of insourcing in meeting digital’s insatiable demand for thought leadership

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Thought leaders and content marketers can give thanks for digital: it’s made the profession more interesting, higher-profile and more dynamic.

But the explosion of digital channels has created an appetite for content – in ever-greater volumes and increasingly varied formats – that many organisations are struggling to satisfy.

As marketers plot how to feed the content demands of myriad channels – whether that’s the corporate website or LinkedIn – there may be some who think back wistfully to the days when a hard-copy mailout of a single report was the climax of a content programme, and ‘having clout’ was very different from having a Klout Score.

Some are responding to this need for frequency and volume by building their in-house content capability – from video production to infographic design – but this is not without its challenges, and can deliver mixed results.

The trouble with insourcing
While supporting assets such as infographics or videos are often done well in-house, firms still struggle to chile mobile phone numbers database convert their core intellectual capital into an effective thought leadership strategy.

There are two common problems that we see:

1. In large and complex organisations, thought leadership will often be decentralised. Countries and business units produce thought leadership that meets their immediate market priorities.


As a result, there are no common quality standards, no agreed definition of what constitutes thought-leading thinking, and a tendency to focus on a multitude of narrow topics at the expense of a focused, long-term analysis of major trends.
2. Even when in-house editorial support is provided, we often find organisations confessing that it takes too long for their internal experts to produce thought leadership.
Like the Hollywood screenplays that get lost ‘in development’ for years, internally produced thought leadership can circulate through endless iterations and reviewing feedback loops – sometimes even to the extent that the point of view is outdated by the time it’s finally ready to launch.