Thought Participation: Why Most Healthtech Thought Leadership Isn't Leadership

0:00Most health tech thought leadership isn't leadership, it's participation with a byline. And I'm not the one saying that. Health tech marketers are saying it about themselves. So today, let's talk about why and about what the people getting it right today are doing differently.

0:27Hello and welcome to the award-winning health tech marketing show. I'm Adam Turinas, CEO of Health Launchpad, one of the presenting sponsors. Thank you for being here and listening to our show today. If you're a regular listener, thank you for coming back. And if you're new, welcome. And we have a library of over 140 episodes packed with insights from B2B health tech marketers like you. So please follow or subscribe on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or whatever app you use so you never miss an episode of the show. A big thank you to our syndication partners, our great friends at Healthcare Now Radio, the 24-7 healthcare-only radio network and podcast syndication platform.

1:16They've been an incredible partner for us in getting this show out in front of the right people. And a special shout out as always to Roberta and Carol. We're so grateful to you for your support. Now, today's episode is a little different. It's just me, no guest, and that's because I want to report back on something. Every month, we bring together senior health tech marketing leaders in the Health Tech Marketing Network, which is a group of leaders who get together monthly for peer sessions. No slides, no pitching, just an honest conversation among people who do this job every day. And in September, we ran two sessions on thought leadership.

2:04So what it actually is today, who should carry it, where it lives, and whether you can ever tie it to pipeline. I wasn't able to be in the room for these. So a big thank you to my colleague, Matthew Piette, who facilitated both sessions. When I read through the transcripts, what struck me was how candid the people were. This wasn't the version of thought leadership you hear on conference panels. It was a real authentic conversation. These sessions run on a simple rule. What's said in the room stays in the room. So you won't hear any names from the network today, but I will be referring back to some of the folks who've been on podcasts that we've covered in this area.

2:52And you're going to hear what marketing leaders said in their own words. But I will refer back to some of the episodes that we did with Adriana Hosford from Artera, Paul Wicks from Proofsack Health, and John Lynn from Healthcare IT Today. Here's the headline. Our industry has diagnosed its thought leadership problem with remarkable accuracy. What it hasn't done yet is act on that diagnosis. So let's walk through where we really are in six parts. Let's start with the uncomfortable part. Back in episode 120 of this show, Adriana Hosford, who at the time was leading communications and marketing at Atera, gave us a framework I've been using and referring to ever since.

3:48She says there are three levels of thought leadership. Level one is the company ambassador, credible, knows the space, but ultimately just representing the company. Level two is the subject matter expert, someone who can translate industry trends into business impact. Genuinely valuable, but is it really thought leadership? Probably not. And level three is the real thing. It's a point of view that's provocative and ownable. And as Adriana put it, you're only a thought leader when the idea is actually ownable, when it's yours and no one else can claim it. And in the September sessions, Matthew asked the room a simple question.

4:39Where does your program sit? One, two, or three? Almost everyone said two. In the second session, a couple of people said zero, not one, zero. and nobody, not a single person claimed level three as where they're at on thought leadership. Now, here's what makes that interesting. Matthew opened the sessions with some survey data. There's a 2026 study of around a thousand thought leadership practitioners, and it found that 97 % believe their thought leadership delivers measurable business impact. Another source puts the average program's ROI at 156%. So think about that for a second. We all say thought leadership works, but then in private, we admit that we're not actually doing it.

5:35So both things can't be fully true. So either the level two stuff is doing more than we give it credit for, All those surveys are measuring optimism. My guess is it's a bit of both. Solid subject matter content does build credibility, but it doesn't build distinction. And in a crowded market, distinction is the whole game. One marketing leader in the room put it bluntly, nobody says anything distinct enough to rock the boat. There's no message that ties the thought leader to the organization. It just becomes about the market. That's the level two trap. You end up providing free education for your whole category and your competitors benefit from it as much as you do.

6:24When I first talked about this on the show, I called it thought participation. We're all in the conversation. We're all saying sensible things, but participating isn't leading. And the uncomfortable part of this is that participation feels productive. It fills the content calendar and it gets a few likes. It keeps the executive team happy. It just doesn't make anyone choose you. and if nobody could disagree with it, nobody will remember it. The second issue is that evidence is not a point of view. So if level two isn't enough, what gets you to three? This is where I think the network made its most useful distinction.

7:13One marketing leader works at a company with more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and abstracts. 300! That's a body of evidence most health tech companies would love to have. And she said, none of it counts as thought leadership. It validates workflows. It supports performance claims, but it doesn't advance an idea. Her question was, how do you step back and find the distinct, ownable idea your organization needs to develop? Another leader, someone with a background in primary research, gave the sharpest definition I've heard. Real thought leadership needs three things. Data that only you have, genuine expertise behind it, which doesn't have to be clinical, and a point that hasn't been made before.

8:01That connects to a conversation from episode 132 with Paul Wicks, who's the founder and CEO of Proofstack Health. Paul made a compelling case that published evidence is one of the most powerful marketing assets that a health tech company can have, especially now that AI chatbots weigh peer-reviewed proof so heavily. His phrase was, use every part of the buffalo. A published paper isn't the end of the process. It's the beginning. And I agree with Paul completely on that. And the network added one step on top of that. Evidence is the raw material. It's not the finished product. Evidence gets you in the room.

8:45a point of view gets you remembered the best examples from the sessions paired the two one was a ceo in the longevity space who took on a serious physical challenge and tracked his own biological data the whole way through he turned the company's science into a live public proof point and it took on a life of its own online the team kept getting mileage out of it because as one person said, not every CEO can do that. The other was the CEO and a former research scientist who published a deliberately contrarian take on a popular nutrition trend. And this was based on his own research. His argument was that the conventional wisdom is misunderstood.

9:35That was his company's first real swing at thought leadership. And it worked because it combined credibility with an actual opinion. What I found interesting is how the marketing leader at that company thinks about the science itself. They've just had their first scientific abstract accepted and she sees that as a separate parallel track. The publication speaks to the medical community. The thought leadership has to take that credibility and turn it into a point of view that buyers and the broader market actually care about. Same foundation, two different jobs. Now, you might be thinking, well, that's great, but we're in healthcare.

10:16We just can't go out and be provocative. We have regulatory review, claims review, legal. The network talked about this a lot. But one leader reframed it in a way I really love. She said that what counts as extreme in our industry is a lot lower than in other industries. It's just a lower bar of controversy. Think about what that means. If the bar is lower, you don't need to be outrageous to stand out. You need to be a little braver than everyone else, and you need to back it up. In healthcare, the bar for bold is low. That's not a constraint. That's an opening. Another leader described coaching her executives in exactly this direction.

11:03She tells them that she'd rather have a strong opinion from them because when it comes to middle of the road, it reads as general education instead of leadership. And someone else remembered a colleague at a big healthcare company who rubbed almost everyone the wrong way, but packed the room every time he spoke. Because the alternative, being safely unremarkable draws nobody. Safe content is the most expensive content you'll ever publish because nobody reads it. The third area that we dove into is who carries the message. And this raises a question, who should be saying these things? The default in most companies is the CEO or maybe the chief medical officer.

11:49The network pushed back hard on that. One leader described a director level expert, not an executive, who built her own following simply because she has specialized knowledge and cared enough to share it, even outside work hours. Another said, the right thought leader is simply a strategic thinker. It could be a doctor with a unique point of view. It could be an operator. It just has to be someone willing to think differently and voice that. Thought leadership doesn't come with a title, it comes with a take. The group also talked about key opinion leaders, the clinicians and experts outside your company who speak on your behalf.

12:31Matthew made a great point here. A key opinion leader who has genuinely absorbed your mission is a third party endorsement and thought leadership at the same time, and is often more credible than your CEO saying the same thing. As Matthew put it, it's not what you think your brand is, it's what they think it is. There was a cautionary tale too. One leader described a past celebrity endorsement that got a lot of attention and she regrets it. No matter how clinically exciting the product was, the story became about the celebrity. Her company has since moved towards user-generated content, which fits a healthcare brand far better than a strong influencer.

13:15That lines up with something Adriana said in episode 120. Healthcare decision makers don't want to hear from the company why the product is great. They want to hear it from someone who does their job and maybe in another part of the country. One more point. Health tech deals are sold to buying committees, clinical, financial, operational, and IT. One leader builds thought leadership for three personas in parallel, another layers it into a single piece so the clinician finds what they need on page one and the cfo perks up on page four and one leader admitted that a previous company relying on a single medical voice to reach hr benefits finance and the ceo was a big mistake and looking back she said they short they thought they should have segmented this most teams don't have the resource to do this fully but even a little intention here goes a long way hey a quick pause here i need to take my breath but i also want to talk about what we can do at health launch ad because this is exactly the kind of thing that we help companies with so when companies come to us for help with thought leadership they usually think the problem is volume they need more blog posts more bylines more linkedin content usually it isn't the problem is that they haven't found the thing only they can say.

14:36So our brand strategy and thought leadership work starts there. We help you find your ownable point of view, the one that passes the swap logo test. We figure out who should carry it, whether that's your CEO, a subject matter, a KOL or a customer. And then we build the program around it so it shows up consistently in the places your buyers actually trust. We don't help you write more. we help you find the one thing only you can say and then say it everywhere it counts. If this sounds useful, there's a link in the show notes to schedule a call with me. I'd love to have a chat with you about it.

15:13Okay, let's get back to the rest of the show. The fourth topic was AI flipped from author to audience. So let's talk more about AI because it came up constantly and in two very different ways. First, AI as an author. The network was close to unanimous. AI is a poor writer of thought leadership. One leader says he's strongly against using it for this kind of content at all because what you get back is the average, the most generic 50%. If you think about it, this is the level two problem produced at an industrial scale. Others use it more narrowly. One leader uses it to find credible sources and references she can check and attribute herself.

16:01Research, not opinion. And then there was a story that made me laugh and wince a little bit. One leader described an executive who fed an AI assistant a mountain of her own writing to build a bot that could write in her voice. Great idea. But then separately, she handed the marketing agency a 14-page AI-generated document that had none of that voice training behind it. The agency understandably panicked. The lesson isn't that AI is bad. It's that AI without a real point of view behind it just produces more pages, not more thinking. And one leader shared a tactic I'm going to steal. She calls it the AI cage match.

16:41If someone on a team drafts something with one AI model, she has them paste it into a different model, tell it the first one who wrote it, and ask for a critique. Apparently, the moment you tell one AI that another AI wrote something, it goes hard. It's a fast, cheap way to catch generic content before it goes out the door. But here's the bigger shift, and I think it's the one most teams haven't fully absorbed. AI isn't just a tool for making content, it's becoming the audience. Your buyers are asking chat, GPT, Claude and Perplexity who the leading companies are in your category. And those models decide who gets mentioned and how.

17:25And so AI is a terrible author, but a very important reader. What does the model read then? The network has strong views. LLMs weigh reputation and credibility a lot like search engines used to. Named authors and bylines matter a lot. consistency matters. One leader argued that if you coordinate your KOLs, so they all reinforce the same idea about your brand, you're feeding a consistent pattern to the models. And several people said the most citable signals are third-party ones, conference talks, PR placements, peer-reviewed abstracts, things like that. Your own website on its own carries less weight than it used to.

18:11Now, here's where it gets quite interesting because not everybody agrees. Back in episode 108, John Lynn from Healthcare IT Today made a different argument. He'd seen data suggesting that most AI citations actually came from brands, from their blog posts and from their white papers, not from the media outlets or Reddit. And he believes sponsored content done ride with a real editorial approach influences AI just as much as editorial does. So who's right? My take is they both are. And the common thread is credibility. The model doesn't care much who paid for the content. It cares whether the content comes from a credible source, says something specific, and gets echoed elsewhere.

18:58Branded content that's genuinely useful gets cited. branded content that's a sales pitch in disguise doesn't and third-party coverage amplifies whatever you've already said paul wicks gave a great practical tip in episode 132 open an incognito window and ask the ai tools who the top companies are in your space and what the evidence says about them then ask yourself whether that's the story you want your buyers to find And in that same episode, Mark Erwick, our chief strategy officer, said, go back to your content plan and ask what's actually unique here, because that's exactly what the models are looking for.

19:42Let's move on to the fifth topic, and that's the stage is the source. So where should your thought leadership live? There wasn't a consensus, but there was a clear lean. In both sessions, conferences and live events came out on top. Concentrated audience who choose to be there, the halo of being the person on stage. One team found a nice middle ground, a four-week series of 15-minute weekly webinars, which outperformed their one-off content. LinkedIn was the surprise. The survey data Matthew shared ranked LinkedIn highest for ROI, but the room was skeptical. One leader said, you're shouting to the void.

20:24You think you know who's looking, but you have no idea. Another felt the platform is losing its reputation as a place for serious B2B content. The most useful framing came from a leader who described thought leadership as one star in a constellation. On its own, it rarely converts. To make it work on LinkedIn, you need an established brand, established targeting, and a separate conversion point. As he said, he's never going to read something insightful and jump into the buying cycle because of it. And then one leader shared a memory. 20 years ago, she saw Clayton Christensen speak about innovation at a conference to a pack room.

21:02She still references that talk today, 20 years later. The stage is the source. Everything else is the echo. That doesn't make digital less important. It means digital works best as the long tail. Use LinkedIn and video to extend a live moment, not to create one from nothing. One leader said, short video clips work especially well because a real person on camera is much harder to dismiss as AI generated. LinkedIn is where thought leadership gets amplified, not where it gets born. I'd add one more channel to this conversation, and yes, I'm biased, podcasting. In episode 131, Ed and Mark Gaudet from Sense and Ed talked about their show, Risk Never Sleeps, and how it became a real source of pipeline.

21:52I've seen the same thing here. Recently, a podcast listener became a customer, and in a single week, I had two calls with people who found us because of something on the show that resonated with them. A podcast sits right between the live moment and the long tail. It's a real conversation, but it's on demand. Ed and Mark also made a point that applies to thought leadership in any channel. The first six months are the hardest, and that's when most people quit. Thought leadership is the same. It's a consistency game. One brilliant piece doesn't make you a thought leader. Showing up with the same distinctive point of view again and again over time does.

22:32Okay, the last topic, the attribution ceiling is cracking. So the question every marketing leader eventually gets asked is, and as Matthew put it to the room, imagine your CFO asks you to justify your thought leadership spend against this course's pipeline. what would you say? Most people gave the same answer. It's brand, it's awareness, it sits at the very top of the funnel, and it should be judged that way. One leader with a research background said it's a long-term strategic investment in how you want to move the conversation rather than trying to attribute it to sales. And another pointed out that with sales cycles this long, tying a piece of written piece two years ago to a deal closing today just is incredible.

23:22And that's a fair position, but a couple of people push back and I think they're onto something. And let me add my own lens here because I think about everything through an ABM filter. The data we've seen for years says that most B2B buyers, well over 80%, already have a shortlist and often a favorite before they even start a formal buying process. And only a small fraction of your market is actually a market at any given time. So the job of thought leadership is to get into buyers' heads months, even years before they need you. That's brand, yes? But it's brand with a very commercial purpose, getting on the shortlist before the shortlist exists.

24:04One leader argued that most organizations right now aren't struggling to generate opportunities. They're struggling to close them. So why only measure thought leadership at the top of the funnel? Why don't you track who's engaging with it later in the buying cycle? Are the people in your active deals reading it? Are they sharing it? Another added that thought leadership shapes things we rarely measure, like how confident your sales team is and how sharp their message is in the room. So maybe stop asking whether your thought leadership drives pipeline. Start asking whether your pipeline has read it.

24:42And here's my favorite moment from both sessions. One marketing leader in the first session described thought leadership as all awareness and top of funnel. She came back a week later to the second session and she opened by challenging herself. She said she wanted to push back on her own assumption from the last time and not just accept that it's pure awareness and can't be tied to anything. And maybe that there is a way. That to me is exactly where our industry is. We've been telling ourselves the same story about thought leadership for years. And now, in real time, people are starting to question it.

25:18I'll leave this particular segment with something John Lynn said in episode 108. In a tough market with budget cuts and sales cycles slowing, now is the time to educate and be the trusted partner. Because the buyers you help now, even if they can't buy today, will remember it. And those memories last. So let me pull all this together with five key takeaways. Takeaway number one, run the swap the logo test and be honest about it. Before you publish, ask whether a competitor's name can replace yours without changing the meaning. Grade your program on Adriana's three levels. If you're level two, you're in good company, but you're not standing out.

26:04Takeaway two, evidence is not a point of view your data your publications and your outcomes are the raw material thought leadership is what you say because of them pair proof with conviction takeaway number three choose your voice for the take not the title the best thought leader in your company might be a director a clinician and a cast or a customer or a kol and if you sell to a buying committee, think about who's speaking to the CFO, not just the clinician. Takeaway number four, use AI to research and to critique, never to originate the point of view and build deliberately to be cited by it.

26:48Named authors, consistent messaging, third-party validation and content that actually says something. Takeaway number five, anchor in-person, echo in digital and don't give up on attribution too quickly. Start by tracking whether the people in your active deals are engaging with your thought leadership. And if you want to do one thing this week, try this. Pick your three most recent thought leadership pieces. Run the swap the logo test on each one. Then paste the strongest one into an AI tool. Tell it a competitor wrote it and ask it to tear it apart. You'll learn a lot about where you really sit very, very quickly.

27:32So here's the through line. The marketing leaders in our networks weren't defensive about any of this. They were clear eyed. They know most of what we produce is interchangeable and they know AI is raising the stakes. The industry has diagnosed itself accurately. The question for the rest of 2026 and 2027 is who's actually going to act on that diagnosis. If this episode got you thinking about where your own thought leadership really sits, I'd love to hear about it. And if you want to talk through your brand, your thought leadership, and your growth strategy more broadly, there's a link in the show notes to book a call with me.

28:09No pressure, nothing for sale. I'm just happy to have a chat and compare notes. And if you found this useful, please do share it with a colleague who's wrestling with thought leadership. And there's a lot of us out there. And if you enjoy the show, a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple really does help people find us. So I'd really appreciate it if you could do that. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Adam Chirinus, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Health Debt Marketing Show.