Ashley Faus is the Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian and author of Human-Centered Marketing. Besides helping build Atlassian’s thought leadership playbook, over the last year, she built her own executive presence on LinkedIn with now over 22,000 followers.

In this podcast, we cover her thought leadership framework.

We discuss:

1. Ashley’s approach to LinkedIn

2. The 4 pillars of thought leadership

3. SMEs vs. influencers vs. thought leaders

4. The “Internal Influencer” strategy

5. How to operationalize employee advocacy

6. Understanding trust intent vs buying intent

7. And much more

Connect with Ashley:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyfaus/

Human-Centered Marketing book: https://a.co/d/bbd8nV2

Atlassian: https://atlassian.com/

Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33: https://www.project33.io/

Some key takeaways:

1. Ashley’s content idea generation prompts: Write about “One question I asked today” and “One question I answered today”. It anchors your content in real experiences rather than generic advice.

2. The 4 Pillars Framework: Thought leadership requires credibility (being the source), profile (audience size), prolificness (showing up often), and depth of ideas (saying new things)

3. SME vs. thought leader: Subject-matter experts solve gnarly internal problems but lack profile. Thought leaders are disruptive and forward-looking

4. A CEO’s job is often to show the market they are steady and predictable. Thought leadership is naturally disruptive, so it can actually be better to have non-C-suite experts as your primary visionaries.

5. Build up your internal influencers. Laura Erdem at Dreamdata is a good example. She built an audience of now 50k+ LinkedIn followers by talking about how she actually uses the product in her own deals.

6. Don’t fear employees leaving with their audience. Careers are long and the Valley is small. Investing in them creates lifelong partners, customers, and advocates.

7. The first thing to NOT do is buy an advocacy platform and force people to register. Focus on the small handful of people who are “willing and able” and pair them with a marketer to help slice and dice their ideas.

8. Revenue vs. thought leadership: Revenue belongs with “buy intent”. Thought leadership is about “trust intent” and “learn intent”. If you force it to drive short-term sales, you end up with a thinly veiled sales pitch that breaks trust.

9. What “human-centered” marketing means: Most marketers talk about “capturing” leads and “converting” an MQL. Human-centered marketing means solving a problem for an actual person behind the screen, even if it doesn’t fit perfectly into a dashboard. Which is a fundamental mindset shift for most marketers.

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