Thought Leadership Services: What You Actually Get

Most pages about thought leadership services spend their whole length explaining why executive authority matters. You already know that part. What almost nobody bothers to write down is what the work actually looks like once the contract is signed: who you talk to, when, for how long, what lands in your inbox, what you are expected to do with it, and what you get shown at the end of the month.

I'm Sky Jordan, a consultant at Moriah, a LinkedIn marketing agency and a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner. I sit on these engagements with clients, which means the questions I field are almost never strategic. They're logistical. How much of my CEO's week does this eat? Who decides what goes out? What happens when I hate a draft? Where does a post go after it's published?

So this is the unglamorous version. No case for the discipline, no story about authority. Just the mechanics, in enough detail that you can picture next Tuesday.

What Is Delivered

Our thought leadership service is a managed monthly engagement. Strategy, writing, publishing and activation all happen in-house, with our own team. You're not buying a content calendar you then have to staff, and you're not buying training: we don't run courses or workshops, we do the work.

In a typical month you get:

• One to three LinkedIn posts per week, published from your executive's personal profile, written and scheduled by us.
• Around 200 targeted messages per week to the specific decision-makers your content was written for, sent and managed by us.
• LinkedIn Ads, run when paid amplification genuinely serves the objective rather than sitting there as a default line item.
• A recurring capture conversation with your executive. That is the only standing commitment on their calendar.
• A monthly read-out against the one business objective the engagement was set up to serve.

That's the whole shape of it. Three pillars, personal branding, targeted outreach and LinkedIn Ads, pointed at one objective. We run them together because that is the concept and because it's how LinkedIn performs: content with nothing activated around it produces nothing, and outreach from a profile with no visible point of view gets ignored. Personal branding is the pillar this page focuses on, but it's one of three, and we don't sell it on its own.

How Your Executive's Time Gets Used

Your executive's time goes into exactly two tasks, and neither of them is writing.

Supplying the raw material. That's the recurring conversation. We ask questions, they talk, we record it. No preparation, no notes drafted beforehand, no argument structured in advance. The job is to say what they think about something they already hold strong opinions on, and let us do the shaping.

Approving drafts. Reading a post and saying yes, or saying what's wrong with it. On a phone, between meetings, once the voice has settled.

Everything else sits with us: deciding what the week's posts are about, writing them, editing, scheduling, publishing, writing and sending the targeted outreach, handling the replies that need handling, building and managing the ads, and reporting. How long the capture conversation runs and how often is agreed in discovery, because a CEO who talks in finished paragraphs needs less of it than one who has to be drawn out. What doesn't change is the principle: if your executive is spending real hours on this, we've designed the engagement badly.

The Capture Cadence

Content is produced from recorded conversation, not from a brief you fill in. That matters operationally, because the alternative, mailing your executive a questionnaire, is how agencies end up writing posts that read like a press release.

The rhythm is straightforward. We hold the capture conversation, we transcribe it, and then we mine it for more than it looks like it contains. A single good answer usually carries several distinct posts, because an executive making an argument out loud will state a position, concede the counter-argument, pull an example from their own company, and land on a conclusion. That's several posts, not one.

We also keep a running bank. Not every idea from a conversation goes out that week. Strong material that isn't time-sensitive gets held and used when it fits, which is what keeps the publishing schedule stable during the weeks your executive is travelling or closing a quarter and nobody is available to talk to us.

Between conversations, we pull from what's already there: a point made in an earlier session, a position they've already taken publicly, a question a customer has now asked twice. The capture conversation is the engine. It isn't the only input.

How the Voice Survives Ghostwriting

The honest answer is that it survives because of a correction loop, not because a LinkedIn ghostwriter is clairvoyant.

Early drafts get checked against the recordings rather than against a style guide. We're listening for small specifics: whether they say "clients" or "customers", whether they hedge or state flatly, how long their sentences run, which words they'd never touch. The first few weeks involve more rejected drafts than later ones, and that's expected. Each correction becomes a rule rather than a one-off fix, so the same note doesn't come back twice.

Two rules we hold firm on. We don't write posts that claim an experience your executive didn't have, because the first person to correct them will be someone who was in the room. And we don't sand a strong opinion down into something inoffensive, because a post nobody can disagree with is a post nobody remembers.

If the voice isn't right, that's our problem to fix, not yours to work around.

The Approval Loop

Drafts reach you ahead of publication, batched rather than drip-fed one at a time, so the review is one sitting instead of a daily interruption. You approve, edit, or reject.

A rejection doesn't need an explanation. "Not me" is a usable note. We'd rather pull a post and write another than negotiate with you about one you don't want on your profile.

What happens when nobody responds is worth settling in advance, because an unanswered draft queue is what quietly kills these engagements. We agree the rule during onboarding, and there are really only two sensible versions: approved drafts publish on the agreed schedule and silence means hold, or silence past a set window means publish. Which one suits you depends on how much review your business genuinely needs. A cautious board or a compliance function points to the first. An executive who is simply busy and has stopped worrying about the drafts points to the second, because that's the one that keeps the cadence intact. Either is fine. Not deciding is not.

Where the Material Gets Used Again

A published post is the start of its usefulness, not the end. This is the part of the engagement most content services don't have, because distribution is a separate purchase from writing almost everywhere else.

Targeted outreach built on what you published. The targeted messages we send are informed by what your executive is publishing. A prospect who opens that profile finds a point of view instead of a résumé, which tends to be the difference between a message that gets a reply and one that gets ignored. For reference, cold email tends to get around 1% to 3% replies, while LinkedIn runs closer to 10% to 15%.

Paid amplification of what already worked. A post that performs organically becomes a candidate for LinkedIn Ads, because at that point we're putting budget behind a message the market has already responded to rather than guessing.

Conversations that come back from comments and replies. Engagement on a post is a list of people who raised their hand. It gets worked, not admired.

The personal profile, not the company page. Everything publishes from the executive's profile, because content from a personal profile performs roughly 5 to 10 times better than the same content from a company page. This is also the qualification point worth being blunt about: if your executive won't post from their own profile, this service cannot work for you, and we'd rather say so now.

What Gets Measured

We report against the one business objective the engagement was built for, whether that's qualified leads, partnerships, visibility to investors and institutions, entering a new market, or recruiting. Not against a dashboard of everything available.

What appears in the monthly read-out:

• Reach and engagement on published content, read as a measure of whether the point of view is landing with the right audience rather than a large one.
• Outreach volume, reply rate, and the quality of the conversations those replies turned into.
• Where ad spend went and what it returned, in the months ads were running.
• Movement on the objective itself, in your own commercial terms.
• What we're changing next month and why, which in practice often means shifting the balance between content and targeted outreach based on what the data shows.

We don't guarantee outcomes. The engagement is built to gather real data points and prove results on your own numbers, which is also why there's no minimum term.

What Next Tuesday Looks Like

Sign this week and the first month runs roughly like this.

1. A validation call before anything gets built. We confirm your buyers are genuinely active on LinkedIn, and we agree the one objective the engine will be judged against. If the audience isn't there, we say so and decline the engagement rather than sell you a retainer that cannot work.
2. The first capture conversation, recorded. Your executive talks, we record and transcribe, then come back with the territory they're going to own plus the opening bank of material pulled out of that single conversation.
3. First drafts and the voice correction loop. You see posts, you reject some, we turn your notes into rules. The approval rule gets set here too.
4. Publishing starts, targeted outreach starts alongside it. Content goes live on the agreed cadence and targeted messaging begins at the same time, rather than waiting for authority to build first.
5. First read-out, and the first adjustment. We show what happened against the objective and change the mix accordingly.

Who This Is For

• CEOs and C-level leaders of established B2B companies with a settled value proposition and a real perspective on their market, and no mechanism for getting it in front of the people who matter.
• CMOs and communication directors who need executive content produced reliably, without it hanging on whether a busy executive sat down to write.
• Executives who will post from their own profile. Not the company page. This is the one non-negotiable.
• Companies whose buyers are actually on LinkedIn. We check this before we take you on, across the roughly 12 industries we work in.
• Businesses that want the whole engine, personal branding plus targeted outreach plus ads, rather than a content supplier.

Not a fit: very early-stage companies, B2C, anyone looking for training instead of a done-for-you service, and anyone who wants content produced with nothing activated around it.

What It Costs

Our thought leadership services are sold as a single monthly retainer covering all three pillars, run in-house. In the United States that's $4,000 per month. In the United Kingdom, £3,000 per month. In France, €3,000 per month.

No minimum term, no lock-in, and you can cancel at any time. There's no per-post price and no per-tool pricing. Ad budget, in the months ads are running, is spent with LinkedIn and sits outside the retainer. Most of our clients stay well past the point where they could have walked, which is the only honest argument we have for the pricing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are thought leadership services? They're a managed service in which an agency produces and publishes an executive's point of view on a consistent schedule, and, in our case, activates it. At Moriah that means we handle strategy, writing, publishing from your executive's personal LinkedIn profile, targeted outreach to the people the content was written for, and LinkedIn Ads when they serve the objective.

How much time does this take from our executive each week? Two tasks only: a recurring capture conversation where they talk and we record, and approving batched drafts, which is a quick read once the voice has settled. They do no writing, editing, scheduling or publishing. The exact cadence of the capture conversation is set in discovery, based on how your executive works.

Who writes the posts? Our team does, in-house, from recorded conversations with your executive. We don't outsource the writing, and we don't generate posts off a brief without talking to the person whose name goes on them.

What happens if I do not like a draft? You reject it and we write another. No justification needed. Every correction gets logged as a rule so the same note doesn't come back, which is why rejections drop off sharply after the first few weeks.

Can I buy the content on its own? No. The service is personal branding, targeted outreach and LinkedIn Ads run together against one objective, because that's how LinkedIn produces business outcomes. Content with nothing activated around it reaches your existing connections and stops there. A page can focus on the content pillar, as this one does, but it's one of three and we run all three.

Do you post from my company page instead? No. Publishing happens on your executive's personal profile, because content from a personal profile performs roughly 5 to 10 times better than the same content from a company page. If posting from a personal profile is off the table, this service won't work for you.

How do you keep it sounding like me and not like an agency? Drafts are written from recordings of how you actually speak and checked back against them, not against a style guide. Your corrections in the first weeks become fixed rules. We also refuse to write claims about experiences you didn't have, and we won't soften a position you hold strongly.

What do you report, and how often? Monthly, against the single business objective the engagement was built for. Content reach and engagement, outreach volume and reply quality, ad spend and return in the months ads ran, movement on the objective in your terms, and what we're changing next.

Is this a course or training on writing for LinkedIn? No. We don't sell training, courses or workshops. This is done-for-you execution: we do the work rather than teach your team to do it.

Am I committed to a minimum term? No. There's no minimum term and no lock-in, and you can cancel at any time. The engagement runs long enough to gather real data and prove results, but staying is always your choice.

How long before this produces anything? Long enough to collect real data points rather than anecdotes. Outreach conversations typically start moving first, because they don't depend on an audience accumulating. Authority from content compounds more slowly. We don't guarantee outcomes, we show you what the engine actually produced.

Is Moriah an official LinkedIn partner? Yes. Moriah is a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner, and LinkedIn is the only channel we work in.

Get Started

If you've read this far you're not deciding whether thought leadership works. You're deciding whether you want to run it yourself or hand it over.

Book a call and we'll go through the specifics for your business: whether your buyers are genuinely active on LinkedIn, what the capture cadence would look like for your executive, and what the first month would actually involve. If it isn't a fit, we'll say so on the call.