Three thought leadership challenges and how to solve them

Even the best thought leadership campaigns can falter without originality, timeliness or clear measurement. Drawing on insights from FT Longitude’s Thought Leadership Clinic, we explore three common challenges that hold marketers back – and how to fix them.

You’re ready to launch your thought leadership campaign. After months of hard work, the data is checked, the media is briefed, and you’ve gone through so many versions that your project folder is bursting at the seams. This campaign is good to go. 

But is it? What if the storyline falls flat because your audience has heard it all before? What if your hot take on AI is already out of date? And how will you measure the ROI to prove you haven’t wasted significant budget?

This is the thought process of many thought leadership marketers when their campaigns launch. How do we know? At our recent breakfast briefing we ran our first Thought Leadership Clinic, where marketing leaders asked our editors about their toughest, most persistent challenges. And three themes stood out: measurement, originality and timeliness.

1. How do we measure the success of a thought leadership campaign?

Define success at the start

Imprecise and unclear goals will never be met. Instead, clearly lay out objectives and goals at the very beginning. This is an essential part of our strategy process at FT Longitude, where we use detailed discovery to clarify and establish our goals, which we later come back to as we design and activate the campaign.

Develop, or tap into, robust measurement frameworks

Measuring the success of thought leadership campaigns is a bit like trying to locate the end of the rainbow – it seems straightforward at first, but it gets very complex very quickly. Plus, individuals and small teams might not have the right resources to get it right. 

At FT Longitude, we do. Our Influence x Intelligence framework uses AI and automation to give us real-time insights into the success of our campaigns. We can track overall trends and multi-year performance to get clear insight into each campaign’s effectiveness.

2. How can we say something original?

Aim to be fresh, which doesn’t have to mean unique

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that in 2025 companies are still producing thought leadership about digital transformation. This topic might have been born in the early 2010s, but it’s still something that businesses need help with. 

There’s a temptation to try to be unique when it comes to marketing. But just saying something fresh about a well-established subject is sometimes the better approach. These topics are huge, and they span decades for a reason. So take the pressure off yourself to be unique, and focus instead on being fresh. 

What are your experts seeing in the market? Are customers coming to you with a specific problem? What challenges are you solving? Start here to develop hot takes on enduring topics. 

Put the spotlight on your experts 

Your business is full of experts on the topics you want to talk about. But many marketing professionals make the mistake of starting their campaign from the top down – drawing from the marketing messaging house, instead of from the experts on the front line. Flip this round and speak to your experts first, and you’ll find the fresh angles you’re looking for. A throwaway comment or authentic customer story could be the starting point of a stand-out idea.

3. How do we make sure we’re up to date?

Plan for the unexpected 

The Covid-19 pandemic taught marketers a lot about the need to be resilient and ready to adapt to change – and fast. Since then, we’ve seen quick-fire ‘pulse’ surveys, which are shorter questionnaires with less time collecting responses, grow in popularity. This kind of research can fuel standalone campaigns but it works best as a source of rapid insights that complement, or develop, existing larger studies. Incorporating these top-up surveys into your long-term campaign will help you to future-proof your subject.

Develop a ‘newsroom’ mindset

Newsrooms stay ahead because they’re immersed in their stories every day. Marketers can borrow this approach: treat your specialist area as a live beat, not a one-and-done campaign theme or big-bang launch. A major story in your field could break at any time, so make sure you have the agility to respond to it like a newsroom would.

Having agile, up-to-the-minute thought leadership content – short articles, blogs, videos, social media posts – that you can push out at the right time will make your brand a go-to voice on the topic, instead of a latecomer. So break free from the product-launch agenda and your marketing calendar, and ensure you are able to react quickly.

Fix your thought leadership

There’s a good reason why these thought leadership challenges are so long-standing: they are difficult. But in a fast-changing world, which AI is accelerating, thought leadership standards are rising. Effective campaigns today must be fresh, they have to be timely, and they’re pointless if they can’t be measured.