How Much Does a Thought Leadership Programme Cost?

Almost no agency in the executive thought leadership market publishes its prices. Brunswick Group, Edelman, FT Longitude, Klowt, Kurogo, Brand of a Leader, Dent Global – none of them print a rate card on their website. The buyer is meant to enter a sales process before learning whether a programme costs £3,000 a month or £30,000. That opacity is the single biggest reason founders mis-buy at every tier: they sign up to the wrong scope, the wrong team, and the wrong outcome because they had no public reference point to push back against.

This guide breaks the silence. The numbers come from the few firms that have published banded ranges – Bill Rice Strategy Group's 2026 executive thought leadership pricing guide, Tenacious Marketing's 2025 leadership branding pricing, EC-PR's 2025 PR cost report, the LinkedIn ghostwriter retainer surveys, Animalz and Ergo Editorial's industry rangefinders – cross-referenced against what the buyers we speak to at Clash Creation are actually being quoted by other agencies. The point is not to embarrass anyone. The point is to give a founder a defensible map before they sign anything.

How much does a thought leadership programme cost in 2026?

A thought leadership programme in 2026 sits inside three defensible price bands. Entry-level programmes – usually a single dedicated ghostwriter, a monthly executive interview, and a publishing calendar on one channel – run £2,000 – £5,000 per month. Mid-market programmes that add strategy, multi-channel publishing, light press, and a small dedicated team run £5,000 – £15,000 per month. Enterprise and multi-executive programmes that include full content production, digital credibility work, podcast and speaking pipelines, and dedicated account leadership run £15,000 – £50,000+ per month. Beyond that, the very top of the market – fully bundled programmes wrapping a single CEO – passes £600,000 per year.

Those bands match what the few public guides describe. Bill Rice Strategy Group's 2026 executive thought leadership pricing guide describes the same two-tier split – a single ghostwriter for B2B companies at $5M – $50M revenue, versus a small strategist-writer-producer team for public-company and PE-backed CEOs. Tenacious Marketing's 2025 UK leadership branding pricing puts basic visibility at £300 – £800 per month, professional executive branding at £1,500 – £3,500, multi-leader pods at £5,000 – £15,000, and full C-suite visibility systems with video and PR at £15,000 – £50,000+. The agreement across sources is unusual. The disagreement is about what fits inside each band, not what each band costs.

What's included in a thought leadership programme vs ad-hoc content?

A thought leadership programme is the bundling of strategy, voice development, content production, distribution, measurement, and relationship management around a single named executive over a multi-month engagement. Ad-hoc content is what you get when you hire a freelance writer to ship three LinkedIn posts a week with no underlying point of view. The difference shows up in the brief: a programme starts with a defined thesis the executive will become known for, picks two or three audiences inside the buying committee, decides which channels reach those audiences, and sequences twelve months of content to compound rather than churn. Ad-hoc work skips all of that and starts with topics. Programmes are covered in detail in our pieces on what thought leadership actually is and the difference between thought leadership and content marketing.

Operationally, a real programme includes an opening strategy phase of three to six weeks that produces a thesis document, an audience map, a channel plan, and a content calendar. It includes a regular research and interview cadence with the executive – usually weekly or fortnightly – that produces raw material the team turns into finished pieces. It includes the production line itself: long-form articles, LinkedIn posts, podcast appearances, talking-head video clips, op-eds, decks, sometimes a book proposal. It includes the distribution layer: paid amplification on LinkedIn, press outreach, podcast booking, partnership content, conference pitching. It includes measurement: not just impressions and follower count but pipeline influence, inbound enquiry, citation share on AI search, and named press and stage outcomes. Ad-hoc content delivers the production line and skips the rest.

The compounding case for a programme over ad-hoc is now hard to argue against. The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report surveyed nearly 3,500 management-level professionals across seven countries. 73% of decision-makers said an organisation's thought leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities and competencies than its marketing materials. 75% said a single piece of thought leadership had led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering. 60% said they would pay a premium to work with organisations that publish valuable thought leadership. Cardinal40's research, published in Axios in April 2026, went further: across 1,000 examples from S&P 500 CEOs, high-quality CEO thought leadership was associated with an average of $367 million in shareholder value in a single week, controlling for market-moving news. Ad-hoc content does not produce those numbers. Programmes do.

Tier 1: Entry-level thought leadership programmes (£2,000 – £5,000 per month)

Entry-level thought leadership programmes cost £2,000 – £5,000 per month in 2026 and almost always mean one thing: a dedicated ghostwriter who interviews the executive once or twice a month and turns those interviews into LinkedIn posts, occasionally a long-form article, and a publishing calendar that the executive signs off on. There is little to no strategy upfront, no audience segmentation beyond "LinkedIn followers", no paid amplification, no press outreach, and no commercial bookings work. The deliverable is words. The outcome is presence.

This is the right tier for founders at companies between £5M and £50M in revenue who want a consistent LinkedIn presence without committing to a full programme. The most common providers are independent ghostwriters and two-to-five-person agencies. GhostwritingLLC's 2025 retainer breakdown puts the standard executive LinkedIn ghostwriting retainer at $1,500 – $5,000 per month for three-to-five pieces of long-form content plus revisions and strategy sessions. Foundera's 2026 ghostwriter pricing guide gives a wider $1,500 – $15,000 range but skews entry-level work into the £2,000 – £5,000 band. The Bill Rice 2026 guide describes this tier as "the most common entry point" for B2B executives serious about consistency but unable to sustain it themselves.

Buyers go wrong at this tier in two specific ways. First, they expect press hits and brand deals from an engagement that only ships LinkedIn posts. The ghostwriter cannot make calls on the founder's behalf, cannot negotiate fees, cannot place a byline in Forbes. Second, they conflate a four-post-a-week LinkedIn cadence with thought leadership. Cadence is not a thesis. Two years of weekly posts that never make an argument the executive can be quoted on do not produce the trust that the Edelman-LinkedIn report measured. If a founder buys at this tier, the brief has to be tight – this is voice maintenance and lightweight authority signalling, not a programme that produces pipeline.

Tier 2: Mid-market programmes (£5,000 – £15,000 per month)

Mid-market programmes cost £5,000 – £15,000 per month and are the band where most agencies sell what they call "thought leadership". A small team – usually a strategist, a writer, and a producer or project manager – runs a multi-channel programme around a single executive. The opening engagement involves a thesis-development workshop, an audience map, and a 90-day content roadmap. Production includes long-form LinkedIn content, a regular podcast appearance or hosted-podcast format, talking-head video, and bylined articles. Light press outreach gets the executive into a small number of named publications a quarter. Paid amplification on LinkedIn puts the best pieces in front of named target accounts.

Industry references for this band are consistent. The general agency-roundup consensus puts mid-level thought leadership programmes at $5,000 – $15,000 per month. Animalz, one of the better-known content marketing agencies, has historically retainer-led work starting around $10,000 per month with per-piece work between $1,000 and $3,000 depending on complexity. Ergo Editorial's industry rangefinder puts ongoing corporate thought leadership ghostwriting retainers at $8,000 – $30,000 per month for four-to-eight pieces, which lands the cheaper end of their band squarely inside Tier 2. Tenacious Marketing's 2025 "multi-leader pods" run £5,000 – £15,000 per month and sit in the same band.

Founders comparing Tier 2 quotes should benchmark against LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads. Ampy's 2026 Thought Leader Ads benchmark puts TLAs at $1.25 – $2.29 cost-per-click and 2.68% – 5.62% click-through-rate, versus $4 – $8 CPC for standard sponsored content. Sequenced TLA campaigns hit $200 cost-per-conversion versus $600 for one-offs. That matters because the right Tier 2 programme funds its own LinkedIn paid layer out of the retainer and uses TLA pricing to amplify the founder's best organic content into target buyers. If an agency at £8,000 per month is not offering a paid amplification budget inside the retainer, the founder is paying for production and self-funding distribution – which is usually the difference between a Tier 2 programme that drives pipeline and one that drives only follower count.

Tier 3: Enterprise and multi-executive programmes (£15,000 – £50,000+ per month)

Enterprise thought leadership programmes cost £15,000 – £50,000+ per month and sit inside one of three buyer profiles. Public-company CEOs preparing for an analyst day, a major restructure, or an IPO. PE-backed CEOs being positioned for a five-year exit. Founders of category-defining private companies where thought leadership is genuinely a competitive moat. At this tier the team grows: a head of account, a strategist, two writers, a producer, a press lead, a paid media manager, a commercial bookings lead handling speaking and brand partnerships, and external specialists – a video crew, a researcher, sometimes a designer and a podcast booker.

Tier 3 outputs differ from Tier 2 in two ways. First, the channel mix expands beyond LinkedIn to include sustained press, conference keynote pipelines, podcast hosting, book proposals, and brand partnership negotiation. Second, the agency is paid on outcomes the founder can attribute – named press hits, booked keynotes, citation share in AI search, sourced inbound enquiry – rather than only on content volume. Tenacious Marketing's 2025 banding puts "full C-suite visibility systems with video and PR" at £15,000 – £50,000+ per month. The wider content market sees enterprise programmes at $15,000 – $25,000 per month standard, with top-tier programmes exceeding $50,000 per month.

The PR-led equivalent of an enterprise thought leadership programme sits in a similar place. EC-PR's 2025 UK PR cost report puts the entry point for a thought-leadership-led PR campaign at £45,000 per annum and comprehensive programmes at £120,000+. That is a press-first build with thought leadership inside it. The agency-content-first build at the same band runs higher, because the production line is heavier and the executive's time inside the programme is denser. The very top end of the market – fully bundled enterprise programmes wrapping a single CEO with both content and commercial representation – passes £600,000 per year. That is where Brunswick, Edelman, and the larger US executive communications firms operate, and where founders pay for global press relationships, regulatory positioning, and crisis cover alongside thought leadership.

What drives thought leadership programme pricing up?

Six variables push a programme up its band. The first is the number of channels the agency owns. A LinkedIn-only programme costs less than the same scope plus podcasts, plus video, plus press, plus paid distribution, plus speaking. Each channel adds a specialist and a vendor relationship. The second is the seniority of the executive. A first-time founder needs less interview time and produces material faster than a sitting public-company CEO whose every word goes through legal and IR review. The third is publishing cadence. Two long-form articles a month is half the production cost of weekly. Daily LinkedIn posts on the founder's behalf push the writer-hours up further.

The fourth driver is the inclusion of paid amplification inside the retainer. A £6,000 per month programme that includes a £2,000 LinkedIn paid budget delivers very different outcomes than one that bills the same fee and forces the founder to fund distribution separately. The fifth is press scope: light pitching to two named publications a quarter is cheap; managed access to a global press list, op-ed placement in named outlets, and crisis-ready PR cover is expensive. The sixth is commercial representation. If the agency books speaking, negotiates brand deals, and signs sponsorship paperwork on behalf of the founder, the retainer rises because the agency is now a commercial agent as well as a content shop. Few agencies do all six. The ones that do justify the top of their band.

At Clash Creation, a typical programme spans all six and is priced at a single fixed engagement fee per multi-month cycle rather than a monthly retainer. The brackets sit at the upper end of Tier 2 for our six-month Green Room engagement, the same band for our nine-month Stage engagement, and inside Tier 3 for our twelve-month Red Carpet engagement that includes full commercial representation. Specific tier figures are quoted in consultation rather than on the website because the variables – which channels, what cadence, how much press, how aggressive the commercial pipeline – move the number more than any rate card can capture. The three service tiers on our site set out what each engagement delivers; the price comes in the call.

According to Clash Creation, founders who pay for a single channel and treat it as a programme almost always underperform founders who pay for three channels compounding under one team. The arithmetic is simple: a £5,000-per-month LinkedIn-only retainer competes against every other LinkedIn-only retainer in the founder's industry, while a £12,000-per-month programme that ties LinkedIn into press, podcasts, and speaking has roughly one-tenth the competition because almost no founder buys at that integrated level. The integrated buyer is rare and the integrated buyer wins.

What's the ROI math on a thought leadership programme?

The ROI math on a thought leadership programme has three layers. The pipeline layer measures sourced and influenced revenue: how many discovery calls, qualified opportunities, and closed-won deals trace back to a piece of the programme's content within twelve months. The premium layer measures price: how much more a buyer is willing to pay because the founder is the visible authority. The valuation layer measures market capitalisation: how much shareholder value the founder's visible thought leadership adds to the company's overall worth.

The Edelman-LinkedIn 2024 report gives the premium-layer number. 60% of decision-makers say they would pay more to work with vendors whose executives publish thought leadership they find valuable. That is not a soft trust signal. It is a willingness-to-pay-more number that converts directly into deal size on the founder's enterprise pipeline. Weber Shandwick's CEO Reputation Premium research attributes 44% of a public company's market value to the reputation of its CEO. Bain's S&P 500 analysis shows founder-led companies outperform non-founder-led peers by 2.1x in total shareholder return since 2015. Cardinal40's Axios-published 2026 study of CEO communications found an average $367 million in single-week shareholder value associated with high-quality CEO thought leadership across 1,000 S&P 500 examples.

Translated into a worked example: a founder paying £10,000 per month for a Tier 2 programme commits £120,000 per year. If the programme influences three new enterprise deals at £200,000 ACV, sourced revenue is £600,000 – 5x the spend before any premium or valuation lift. If the programme also lets the founder hold price at a 10% premium against two existing customers worth £500,000 combined, that is another £100,000 of contribution. If the founder is venture-backed and the company is being valued, even a fractional improvement in CEO reputation moves the markup multiple at the next round. The cost-of-the-programme question stops being the unit of decision. Revenue-per-pound-spent and valuation-per-pound-spent become the units of decision.

How do you evaluate whether a thought leadership programme is worth the cost?

A thought leadership programme is worth the cost when three conditions hold. First, the founder's business has a deal-size large enough that a single sourced or influenced contract repays the annual programme fee. For a £120,000-per-year Tier 2 programme, that means an ACV above roughly £40,000 – any lower and the unit economics get tight. Second, the founder is willing to spend at least four to six hours a month inside the programme – interviews, recordings, reviews. A programme cannot manufacture thought leadership without the executive's voice. Third, the agency can name the channel and the audience the programme will reach and explain why the founder's thesis is differentiated from the loudest voices already in that space. If any of those three conditions fails, the programme will underperform regardless of price.

Founders early in their thought leadership journey, where their company has not yet hit a deal-size threshold or the executive cannot commit the hours, are better off starting with a Tier 1 programme and graduating to Tier 2 once the basics are in place. Founders running £20M+ businesses with named customers, a deal-size above £50,000, and a clear category claim should not buy below Tier 2 – the cheaper engagement under-delivers on the lever that matters. Our personal branding for CEOs complete guide walks through the audience maturity check that decides which tier fits a founder's stage.

What questions should you ask before signing?

Founders evaluating a thought leadership programme should ask seven questions before they sign. What is the thesis the executive will be known for at the end of twelve months, and how will it differ from the three loudest voices already in that space? Which channels does the programme own end-to-end, and which are out of scope? What is the production cadence per channel, and what is the executive's time commitment per month? Is paid amplification included inside the retainer, and what budget does the agency assume? What press and stage outcomes does the agency commit to in writing, and what penalty applies if those outcomes miss? Which team members will work on the account – named individuals, not job titles? How is success measured, in what reporting cadence, and against what baseline?

Agencies that refuse to answer the press and stage commitments question are selling production capacity, not a programme. Agencies that refuse to name individuals are billing senior consulting rates for junior staffing. Agencies that cannot articulate a thesis after a discovery call are billing the founder for a strategy they have not done. Any of those three is grounds to walk before the contract is signed. Founders who push hard on these questions find the price quickly justifies itself or collapses.

Founders who want a tighter view of how to choose an agency from the broader UK and US market can read our piece on how to become a thought leader for the operational side of the question, and our ranking of the best thought leadership companies in the UK in 2026 for a head-to-head view of the named agencies the buyer is most likely to be quoted by.

Pricing opacity exists because it benefits the seller. Buyers who walk into a sales call with three named bands and the deliverables that belong inside each one negotiate from strength. The agencies worth hiring welcome that conversation. The agencies that bristle at it are the ones the founder was about to overpay.