Where should you publish thought leadership content? Anywhere but the company blog.

One thing I love about thought leadership is that it typically succeeds or fails based on the quality of the ideas, not on how well it’s optimized for the channel. In one of my favorite articles on how to do thought leadership well, Katie Parrott says:

…in order for content to rise to the level of thought leadership, it has to be authentic. It has to be deeply rooted in your unique perspective or experience or expertise.

(If you haven’t read that piece, please stop now and read it.)

Unfortunately, though, we marketers have given readers many reasons to doubt that our content will deliver. I agree with Katie that thought leadership content itself must be authentic and I think to accomplish that, it deserves a home that ensures it can be. A blog, sub-domain, third-party publisher, etc. each come with its own incentives and norms. It’s very important to choose a destination that aligns with the type of content you plan to publish. 

In most cases, thought leadership content doesn’t belong on the company blog. It’s been years since the company blog stopped being the best place for every type of content. Most SaaS companies have divided up content into a resource center, an academy, as well as sub-folders for customer stories, webinars, etc. As a general rule, I think that any type of content that you plan to publish on a regular basis deserves its own space to keep the site tidy but also so you can create different types of experience for each content type.

I think this is especially true for thought leadership content. There are a few reasons for this. One is that it’s too easy for it to get lost among other stuff. Another is that most blogs don’t put enough emphasis on the byline (and we know that people prefer to follow people). And, of course, another is that traffic to websites is down across the board.

There is one obvious question that we need to address. Are most company blogs so saturated that you need a net new space to publish? Can the company blog be saved? It obviously depends, but I do think there are plenty of blogs out there that haven’t done 10 years of SEO content and therefore have maintained enough reader trust to do it. (Can you sense my cynicism here? I am generally very optimistic about content, but I do feel that SEO basically killed the idea of the blog.) That’s why this post is on the Superpath blog. We’ve never made a big investment in SEO and have kept the blog pretty focused on the type of first-person narrative writing that we mostly associate with thought leadership.

In some cases, companies choose to have a content brand that is a sort of subsidiary of the main brand as we’ve done with Miro’s Substack, Up for Renewal. All of this builds towards the most important reason for not using the company blog, which is that thought leadership content works best when it has some distance from marketing. Bbecause it’s all about ideas. And those ideas feel tainted if they are surrounded by CTAs and pop-up forms, not to mention optimized for algorithms. 

How to make the case

I recently wrote about getting buy-in to launch a skunkworks content project at Miro. It’s a Substack dedicated to first-person essays from our execs on their experience with AI transformation. This is content marketing, except with the freedom to avoid marketing sheen and optimization tactics. 

I think perhaps my favorite part of this project is that the content does not live on the company blog. Any why not? It’s a fair question and one that I fielded a few times while seeking buy-in. After all, organic traffic to the blog is down and it could use an infusion of new content. We already have a CMS and tracking in place and a big subscriber list. We have a web team who can help optimize the posts and a designer in the loop. 

If you’re going to pitch a content project that lives off-site or on a sub-domain, you need a good answer to this question. Here’s mine.

• People don’t trust company blogs anymore. We marketers have gone overboard with “ultimate guides,” pop-ups, forms, and CTAs.
• People prefer to follow people, not companies. Blogs have trended towards outlets for information from the company vs. the insights and opinions of the people who work there. Substack emphasizes the byline which is very important to make this work.
• The company blog has a brand problem. Years of SEO content, product launches, employee spotlights, and webinar recaps eroded its effectiveness.

Okay that’s the case against the blog, but you also have to make a case for the alternative you’re suggesting. This differs by platform of course. I wanted Substack because:

• Decision-makers want to learn from their peers and already know Substack as a destination where people write about their first-hand experience. 
• We need to be where our audience is. A quick look at the most popular Substacks shows that tech dominates, which indicates that, at least in broad strokes, our audience is here. 
• Essays are the norm on Substack. We must adhere to the Substacks norms to succeed and, in this case, those guidelines are perfectly in line with the style of content I wanted to create (no marketing sheen, no CTAs, just ideas, etc.).
• We don’t have to build anything. Substack’s CMS is simple and makes it easy to publish. Using it requires no developer resources. 

And lastly, you have to be able to explain the trade-offs. There are at least three in this case:

• Data: Substack has no API so we can’t send data into another tool to see if readers also visit the site or purchase. In my personal opinion this is wonderful, but I can of course understand why a marketing leader needs a good explanation for this before giving you the time and resources to do it.
• Distribution: One challenge with any third-party platform is that you are starting at zero. Creating a Substack with no subscribers means you have a content challenge and a distribution challenge. We partially mitigated this by migrating some existing subscribers that fit the exact demographic profile we’re trying to reach. This is not always possible, and when it isn’t, there’s a good argument to make for a sub-domain instead.
• ROI: In our recent podcast with Rand Fishkin about zero-click marketing, he explained that all marketing was zero-click before the internet. We got addicted to the click. It’s still there, but it’s far less important than it once was. Thought leadership content fuels social, events, AEO, and brand. It’s hard to make a dashboard showing pipeline contributions from Substack, but it absolutely can lift your brand if you know what to look for.

It’s important to run through the pros, the cons and the trade-offs so you (and your manager) can set the right expectations. As a writer, I love thought leadership because there’s more creative freedom than other types of content, but we all still have to make a strong business case to do it and publish somewhere besides the blog.

You’re probably already doing this on LinkedIn

Organic traffic is way down because of AI Overviews and LLM search, and most marketing teams know it’s time to try something new. For many, that something is exec posts on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn checks every box in this article: a personal byline, a third-party platform, no easy way to tie it to pipeline. If you’ve already made peace with those trade-offs, Substack is the same thing, just longer form.

So when you decide where your thought leadership lives, pick the place whose style and norms match the work. Maybe that’s the company blog. But if you’re willing to look beyond it, you’ll likely find a place where your best ideas have a much better shot at reaching people.