In this episode of “Not Another Marketing Podcast,” we delve into the nuances of thought leadership with Peter Murphy Lewis, former VP of Marketing at a healthcare company, host of the LTC Heroes podcast, and founder of Strategic Pete. Despite his modesty in rejecting the title of a thought leader, Peter shares his insights on what it truly means to be one, the importance of authenticity, and how to effectively educate and influence others within your industry.
Key Takeaways:
(01:43) – Thought leadership is often misunderstood and sometimes diluted by content that lacks depth. True thought leadership is about educating and offering unique perspectives that resonate and bring value to your audience.
(03:38) – People connect with people, not brands. Establishing thought leadership is about putting a face to a brand and building trust through authentic, consistent content.
(06:09) – There’s a significant difference between being a thought leader and being an influencer. Thought leadership is rooted in education and insight, while influencer marketing often revolves around pushing products.
(10:17) – Effective thought leadership can be achieved without decades of experience if one focuses on niche expertise, consistency, and authentic communication.
(13:40) – A strategic approach to becoming a thought leader can feel manufactured. Instead, focus on solving problems and adding value to your audience through genuine expertise and personal experiences.
(17:35) – Measuring the impact of thought leadership involves looking at trust and relationship-building metrics, such as shorter sales cycles, increased authentic engagements, and higher conversion rates from audiences who are familiar with your content.
(21:42) – Creativity in tracking the ROI of thought leadership is key. It’s not always about direct metrics like likes or shares but the deeper impact on trust, brand recognition, and long-term business relationships.
RAPID-FIRE Q&A
How do you define a thought leader?
A thought leader is someone who educates and provides unique insights that genuinely help others. It’s about being a trusted source of knowledge and inspiration in your field.
What’s the biggest misconception about thought leadership?
Many confuse thought leadership with content creation. Simply producing content doesn’t make someone a thought leader; it’s the depth, originality, and educational value that count.
How do you approach thought leadership in your role?
I focus on helping others—whether it’s my clients or my executive team—by fostering authentic communication and trust through consistent and valuable content.
How should one measure the success of thought leadership?
Success is reflected in the trust and relationships you build. Metrics like shortened sales cycles, genuine connections at events, and positive feedback from your audience are key indicators.
Is storytelling important in thought leadership?
Absolutely. Storytelling connects the dots between your experiences, insights, and the audience’s needs, making your message more impactful and relatable.
Where can our listeners find you?
You can connect with me on LinkedIn under Peter Murphy Lewis, or check out my podcast, LTC Heroes, where I discuss leadership in long-term care. More information can be found on my website at strategicpete.com.
Transcript
Jon Tromans [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Not Another Marketing Podcast where I’m talking to Peter Murphy Lewis, who says he’s not a thought leader, but I think he is really. Pete is the VP of marketing at a healthcare company as a keynote speaker, and through his own company he’s coached the business lives of over 200 CEOs with his fractional CMO services. So this week we’re talking about how to become a thought leader. Thanks for downloading. A lot of thought leadership is not very thoughtful, is it? I mean, just spend five minutes on LinkedIn. You know what I mean, don’t you? What does it take to become a thought leader? And should you bother? There’s lots of thoughts on this from Peter Murphy Lewis, who I think is a bit of a thought leader, to be fair. Peter’s his own TV show in Chile, is the host of a podcast called LTC Heroes, a keynote speaker, and is coached over 200 CEOs with his fractional CMO services. So he’s got lots of thoughts on thinking.
Jon Tromans [00:01:09]:
You can find Pete on his Strategic Pete website on LinkedIn. And don’t forget to give his podcast a quick listen. There’s a whole bunch of links in the show notes, so give those a quick tap. Can I quickly mention that not another marketing podcast is ad free? Love it. If you could give the pod a quick shout on social media and subscribe via your favorite podcast app, you can check out more episodes@jtid.co.uk podcast now, the first thing I asked Pete was to kind of explain what he thinks a thought leader is. As a lot of what we see doesn’t really look too thoughtful.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:01:43]:
I, I agree with you that there’s a lot of unthoughtful thinking, and I think that’s because thought leadership has become trendy. It’s, it’s, you know, they, they, they throw around words of brand awareness or they throw around words of lead generation or demand generation. I feel like it is a cousin in that marketing space that doesn’t have a perfectly well thought out definition that’s convincing. So if I were to define it kind of in marketing terms, I would probably say that it’s more around education of your audience from an individual point of view. So if a company is thinking about brand awareness, leadership should be thinking about personal awareness or thought leadership. So you’re creating and sharing valuable content that offers unique insights, perspectives, trying to solve problems and educating the audience.
Jon Tromans [00:02:39]:
Do you think it’s a little bit like being a philosopher? In a way?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:02:43]:
I feel like that’s a fair analogy But I would also say that the easiest way, if you were going to explain it to someone who’s not in marketing, think about the most important influences you’ve had in your life. So go back to high school, go back to college, think about your first job. That person, those people were thought leaders for you. Whether you know, you studied sociology or you studied biology or your first job, you are an HIV AIDS caseworker. Like me, I had someone who influenced the way that I approached the world, social work and, and, and the way that I wanted to grow as an entrepreneur. Those people were thought leaders. So now just take that to a systematic approach to converting someone as an individual, as a face of a brand. And, and it’s just a lot less expensive way to promote a brand by putting a person in front of it.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:03:36]:
Because people want to follow people, not brands.
Jon Tromans [00:03:38]:
Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. When I was doing the research, kind of like looking you up on that online and you done talks, you run your own business, you’ve done many different things. You’ve seen pictures of you on stage, I’ve seen pictures of you with a microphone. You got a podcast all the. Would you call yourself a thought leader?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:03:56]:
I don’t feel comfortable calling myself a thought leader. I would consider myself a connoisseur of the niche of thought leadership. It’s. I feel like I follow a lot of thought leaders. I’m interested in the way that they approach it. I try to help my clients as a consultant. I try to help my clients and thought leaderships in my corporate job that I do in healthcare. I try to create the executive team around me as thought leaders.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:04:25]:
But to answer your question, Frank, frankly no, I don’t consider myself a thought leader.
Jon Tromans [00:04:28]:
A lot of folks who I think of thought leaders, when you ask them, they say they’re not. Yeah. Do you think some of it’s a little bit of an ego trip?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:04:37]:
Yeah, I think it’s ego. I think it’s smarmy. I think it’s spammy. Like the people who self declare themselves. Obviously there’s a percentage of people who accurately declare themselves as thought leaders, but the majority of people that we are seeing push out crappy content on, on TikTok and Instagram and even on podcasts that no listens to other than they’re using for ads to push in front of their prospects that, you know that. That’s not thought leadership for me.
Jon Tromans [00:05:05]:
Yeah, I mean I just love, love it all on LinkedIn. I sometimes look at LinkedIn when I’m doom scrolling the thing and, and I’m old, so kind of like I realized that when I was in my twenties, I know nothing. I mean, still know nothing now. And you’re learning all the time. And when I’m 70, I’m going to be thinking to myself, God, you knew Nothing back then, 20, 30 years ago. But it’s kind of like you look, sometimes you think you’re like 25 years old. You can’t, you haven’t had time to think much yet. How can you be a thought leader? Do you think there’s a bit too much of that going on that folks kind of like want to.
Jon Tromans [00:05:37]:
If this is going to be my job?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:05:39]:
Yeah, I think that there’s an age variable to it. I think that has to do with both maturity and emotional intelligence. But I also think that there’s, there’s a lot of regurgitation of the same content out there, no matter what niche you’re in. And just because you regurgitate more often, often more consistently what everyone else thinks, that doesn’t make you a thought leader. That means that you create more content than anyone else. And creating content is not, is not the same as thought leadership.
Jon Tromans [00:06:10]:
Do you think that’s just being an influencer?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:06:13]:
Yeah, I’ve considered being a bad influencer. If you’re not actually educating people, you are trying to growth, hack the algorithms better than people who’d say the exact same thing as you.
Jon Tromans [00:06:28]:
Yeah, because the influencer thing is really interesting to me. I find it fascinating because I think, because influencer marketing has been going on forever. I think the first kind of influencer I found, I can’t remember the guy’s name. It was like a silent film actor back in the early 1900s in the States or early 1920s, something like that. And he did a deal with the cigarette company that every photograph he was in. Right. He would be smoking these cigarettes. Right.
Jon Tromans [00:06:59]:
And he would influence people to buy those cigarettes. But that isn’t being a thought leader. Right. That’s just influencer marketing is basically shilling stuff, isn’t it? Selling.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:07:09]:
Correct. That’s where probably the biggest difference right there is the verb educate. Are you educating people or are you pushing people towards something?
Jon Tromans [00:07:18]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So how much experience and accomplishments do you think you actually need kind of in your field before you become a thought leader? Where do you kind of think, oh, I know enough now.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:07:32]:
Oh, John, I wasn’t prepared for that question. How much do you need? I would say minimal. I think that there’s a couple different variables that if you fine tune them and kind of work your muscles, whether it be your mouth when you speak or your eyes or the trust that you create, you can start to improve your thought leadership without having lots of years under your belt or lots of knowledge. And I think where this comes into is, you know, there’s one is niche down, two is be consistent. There’s a lot of people that try to become thought leaders for three months they post every single day on LinkedIn. Some, some cut up 20 second clip from a reel and they’re just regurgitating what other people say.
Jon Tromans [00:08:18]:
Yeah.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:08:19]:
Include some stats. Right. Like so educating people act upon something that makes sense and resonates and bey just the normal self help people want to take stats away because it helps back up their answer. So when you educate them, give them something that they can move on. But I think that where people. There’s probably two things that I think people could do the best if they don’t have the years under their belt. One is don’t be afraid to quote others give shout outs. I find that a lot of thought leaders like to act like that.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:08:51]:
They’re at the top of Mount Rushmore and no one else is. I think that that’s just crap. I think everyone knows that there’s lots of leaders at the top and you should space with them. And the second thing is some people would say you should zig when other people are zagging. I just, just have a different point of view. So if you, let’s say John, you know, you and I are both marketers instead of you and I just telling people about what to do with Facebook ads or what to do with SEO. It would be much more helpful if you and I took complex things that overwhelm non marketers and broke it down and said hey, this is what everyone’s going to say but you don’t need to listen to me. This is what you shouldn’t do.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:09:29]:
And that have a different point of view. And I think that that type of education is the fast way to grow ahead.
Jon Tromans [00:09:34]:
Yeah. So it’s almost coming at it from more of an academic point of view, I suppose, isn’t it really? You’ve mentioned sort of like teaching quite a few times.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:09:42]:
Yeah, that’s the way that I, I guess maybe I feel closer to that because I used to be an academic and I know that there’s still space in Today’s, you know, 21st century where we give a certain amount of trust and credibility and authority to academics. The way that if you’re not an academic is you just pull Over a little bit of science, a little bit of stats, you back it up with your opinion. You’re honest when it’s opinion, and you say it’s not science, you say it enough and you say it in an authentic way, people are going to start trusting you.
Jon Tromans [00:10:17]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Do you think being a good storyteller is important? Being able to, you know.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:10:22]:
Right on. I didn’t. That wasn’t in my mindset. But when I am helping clients, I often have them go to Donald, Donald Miller’s book and say, you know, we’re further enough along, you know, your niche, you know, what resonates. It resonates and it has to be true to you, who you are, you know, like it, it goes with your mind, it feels true with your heart. You’re not making things up. But then also being able to tell a story and connect the dots, you know, like a lot of times, if you get into the details and you get into the weeds and you can’t connect dots, you’re probably not going to be a thought leader. You’re going to be more of a researcher.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:10:57]:
And if you can’t connect, if you, if you’re too vague, well, then you’re not connecting any dots. You just sound kind of like. Like a person who’s trying to preach in the middle of a public park and doesn’t make sense to anybody? Yeah.
Jon Tromans [00:11:11]:
I always find the word storytelling, particularly when you come at it from a marketing point of view, is a difficult thing to define. How. How do you define? Because it is difficult to explain to somebody, like, I’ve got a product, I’ve got a thing, I’ve got a something. Right. I’m going to tell around it, and it’s just a boring product. And the word story is difficult, I think, sometimes for folks to comprehend what that means. How would you define it?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:11:37]:
So I would say I’m not going to be able to answer it directly. Everyone’s going to say, like, Peter didn’t answer a single question, John. So I apologize. People are going to think this guy, not only is he not an expert, but he doesn’t answer the questions.
Jon Tromans [00:11:49]:
Be a great politician.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:11:51]:
Yeah, I’m a little bit more gray. So here’s the way. Here’s the way that I would answer is. So I think you’ve probably seen from my background, I have a TV show. So I’m a host of a TV program, a cultural program in South America. And what I try to do when I interview people is I try to help them find three to five variables. In their life that help explain who they are. And I try to define those as quickly as possible myself.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:12:20]:
I try to find them as quickly as possible. Then I try through the day that I interview and work with them. I try to connect those and make sense of them, not only for the person I’m interviewing, but for the audience who will be watching it. So that’s how I would define storytelling is finding the moments in your life, the pivotal, transformational moments in your life that make sense. Connect those so they make sense for someone else and that they end up being a benefit for the person who’s listening or watching you. And that would be the same for a brand. So, like, if we need. If you and I needed to connect something together for a shoe company, well, let’s talk about when it was founded, by whom, let’s put it together.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:12:59]:
Who was their first client, how it helped that client. Let’s talk about how that emotional appeal benefits the person who puts them on afterwards, how that makes you feel and then how people identify you. It’s kind of putting those five things together and trying to say it in a simple fashion.
Jon Tromans [00:13:15]:
Yeah. So if you were kind of like going out to become a thought leader, or you think to yourself, I quite fancy being a thought leader. I’m going to think for a living. I could do that. I could just sit here and just for a living, I can make a ton of money just thinking all day. I wouldn’t mind doing that, Pete, you know, sounds like a good gig. That does. Would you try and work out a strategy? Would you try and sit down and think to yourself how you’re going to become a thought leader?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:13:42]:
I wouldn’t go around doing it that way. That feels kind of manufactured. Fabricated. So what I would. If that person came to me and said, hey, I’m thinking about doing this, I would go through a set of questions. I would say, so let’s call this person Paul. So, Paul, you know, tell me, who are the 10 people in your life, personal or professional, who, if they could have an hour with you to sit down and have dinner and ask you lots of questions, who are they? And then I would write down how old that person is, what they do for a living, what they’re interested in personally, how do they like to solve problems? So I’d basically write out that person’s ideal customer profile. Then I would say.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:14:25]:
Then I would say, what are they going to interview you about? So let’s find the topic that those 10 people have in common, the common denominator there and Then we determine why. Have you solved that before? Do you think about different frameworks? That’s the way that I would walk them through to see if they have the space, capability and knowledge to be a thought leader.
Jon Tromans [00:14:46]:
Yeah, you’re right. It does seem a little bit fake. I suppose that you go, I’m going to sit down, I’m going to work out this strategy to become a thought leader. I think a lot of folks who I’ve spoken to, I would genuinely call thought leaders have probably just become one without even knowing it. Right. They’ve just, just through doing something for a long period of time, probably just.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:15:08]:
Being consistently helpful and valuable and educating a small niche of people around them. Those people fall in love with that person’s content and become that person’s ambassad or 1000 first true fans. And then that person grows because of the value that they’ve delivered in their social circle.
Jon Tromans [00:15:26]:
Yeah. Putting your marketing head on, how do you think we could kind of measure the impact of thought leadership? I mean, you might get a TED talk, you might get on the COVID of Forbes magazine and then get thrown in jail like six months later or something. Most of them seem to, don’t they? But do you know, how do you measure kind of success?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:15:49]:
Yeah, so I. Let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s take it down to a real clear example. So I work in healthcare enterprise software.
Jon Tromans [00:15:58]:
Yeah.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:15:58]:
The way that I would measure this would be, let’s say that, that we’re trying to use my podcast, which is in healthcare, and trying to use that platform to turn me into a thought leader. And what are the benefits for the company that I, that I’m employed by? The metrics that I would ask, if I were the CEO, would be people who have listened to Peter’s podcast or Peter’s interviews, Do they have a shorter sales cycle? Because they trust our brand and our team more than those who haven’t? The people who have listened to Peter on stage when he goes to conventions, do those people have an authentic interest in getting to know him as a human being beyond just a brand? So do they want to go up and ask him for advice? Do they want to follow him on LinkedIn? Do they want to connect? Do they want to have a beer with him? Do they want to talk about their kids? So there’s, there’s something that’s intangible about that human being that could be turned into two metrics. Right? Like there’s, you could do an mps. You could determine just after the, after the presentation, was it positive? And all of those other can be turned into more finite marketing metrics. So what percentage of your people are coming straight to your homepage? And when you ask them when they fill out the demo form, how did they hear about you? They might not be able to say how they heard about you, but if you asked them, you know, who do you know inside of the brand or who do you follow? Or why did you check? Why did you fill out the demo form? Hopefully that thought leader or something that, that thought leader will be in that open form text box.
Jon Tromans [00:17:35]:
Yeah, because it’s difficult, particularly offline, isn’t it, to track folks unless you, you sit there asking them questions. Because like you say, you could have done a gig at a, at a, I don’t know, an expo or something like that, and half a dozen people phone later, like three weeks, a month later. Do you think we should be doing regular market research and asking questions to find out where, where folks have come from?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:17:58]:
I think that yes. But I think that if you are a big brand and you’re thinking of thought leadership as a long term play, you need to know that there’s a lot of fuzzy metrics or return on investment or gray area that’s not going to make sense. Like John, like let’s say that you and I are going to leave mailchimp or HubSpot and we’re gonna move to something that does a little bit better anonymous tracking of people on our website and then lines up that data. When they do come a lead, we’re able to see what they did before they gave us their information. So you and I might not be able to think about the first person that we’re gonna go to, but we’re gonna reach out to someone who knows more about marketing metrics than ourselves and that person is a friend is probably going to give us information that did come from thought leadership. So you and I might track it as referral. But truly the, the ambassador of that thought leader came from someone who consumed their podcast or their YouTube or met them at a convention.
Jon Tromans [00:19:03]:
Yeah, I mean it’s one of the reasons I did this podcast is because I learned so much from so many folks doing this is done because my background is more in kind of like design, web design, digital design, you know, a lot of campaign automation and things like that. But I was talking to somebody about Google Analytics yesterday and it was like I learned so much because I hate Google Analytics, but. And they could be my little thought leader, I suppose.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:19:28]:
True. I mean like if when you and I turn off the recording for this. I’m like, hey, I also hot hate Google Analytics. I need someone to clean this up. You’re going to immediately tell me that person, that person, in all reality is a thought leader for you from now on.
Jon Tromans [00:19:42]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Peter. I could chat for ages on this because I got loads of opinion on thought leaders and not a lot of it’s. Particularly when you look on LinkedIn. It’s not very thoughtful, is it?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:19:51]:
No, no, I think, I think. I think the key to all of that noise on there is you need to think about who you’re actually watching. So you and I might scroll through, but then when you and I see something like, now that I know you and I’ve listened to your podcast, I’m not going to just scroll through, I’m going to click through and I might not like something because maybe I’m selfish with my likes. I might not mention anything and say, like, great interview, John, because maybe I’m introverted and I don’t want to be vulnerable out there, but the fact that I consumed you and now that you’ve been in my ears for probably two hours, you’re now a thought leader for me in the marketing podcast space.
Jon Tromans [00:20:29]:
Yeah, that’s really interesting you mentioned the likes and shares there because I think that’s really important because we do strive for likes and shares to be noticed. We have to have our post or our thing or our stuff liked. And, you know, back when I was working in radio and tv, a long, long time ago, you wouldn’t know. You know, in radio particularly, it’d be like three months before you knew whether somebody was actually listening or not when the survey came out.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:20:57]:
Going back to your question about, like, how could we measure this? You need to be creative. From a CEO point of view or whoever’s controlling finances, you need to be creative in the way that you’re going to try to determine if this is successful. So I’m going to give you another example. Yeah, we have. We have a person on our team who does a fair amount of industry, a fair amount of industry research. They’re connected. A first connection with me on LinkedIn when they reach out to my contacts and say something along the lines of, hey, I work with Peter doing X, Y and Z. Will you help me with this? The conversion rate of them filling out the survey is much higher than when someone doesn’t mention.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:21:39]:
So you do need to be creative when you’re working on metrics.
Jon Tromans [00:21:42]:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:21:44]:
Right.
Jon Tromans [00:21:44]:
Pete, where are you? Where can we find you where’s your podcast and all your thought, your lead, all your thinking?
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:21:53]:
Currently, physically, today I’m in Wichita, Kansas. I spent half the year in Santiago, Chile down in South America. Sounds nice where you can it is nice where you can find me online. Probably the easiest place is LinkedIn, so just search Peter Murphy Lewis. I don’t think that there are any other Peter Murphy Lewis is out there and that is where I put all the content. So the podcast is LTC Heroes, which means long term care or nursing home. I interview a lot of nursing home leaders and then I also work as a consultant helping SEOs improve their their revenue. You can find that on our website@strategicpeak.com Fantastic.
Jon Tromans [00:22:30]:
Pete, listen, thanks ever so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:22:34]:
Likewise John. If you ever make it over to the over the ocean, let’s meet up in person and talk about our true thought leaders.
Jon Tromans [00:22:41]:
Fantastic. I’ll do that. Absolutely. Thanks for your time.
Peter Murphy Lewis [00:22:44]:
Appreciate it.
Jon Tromans [00:22:47]:
Thanks to Pete for his time. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe for more on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast player. Just search for not another marketing podcast. Thanks for listening.
Closing
Thanks for tuning into this insightful conversation with Peter Murphy Lewis. If you found value in this episode, please check out our other podcasts. Your feedback is always appreciated!
