Thought leadership is the process of sharing your expertise, insights, and opinions on topics that matter to your ideal customer profile. It's not about selling your product or service. More than anything it’s about educating, inspiring, and influencing your potential customers. The ultimate goal is to establish your brand as a trusted expert in your space. Sharing high-quality practical content consistently with your audience is one of the best ways to build strong credibility and grow your brand value.
“61% of decision-makers say that an organization’s thought leadership can be moderately or a lot more effective at demonstrating the potential value of its products/services compared to traditional product-oriented marketing.”
Source: Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report – 2022
Positioning yourself as a thought leader offers many advantages, including:
“Its counter-intuitive for most marketers, innovators and CEOs. We think what we’re doing in marketing, is marketing a product with features and maybe, benefits. When in reality, category creators and designers market the POV, because once people subscribe to your way of looking at things, they are going to be interested in what you have to market.”
Source: 019 Power of a Point of View: Play Bigger Unplugged - Christopher Lochhead, 3x CMO, author of 13 books including Play Bigger, Niche Down, Snow Leopard
Let's cover the basics first. If you haven't completed this yet, put in the work to gain a clear understanding of your:
Additionally, as you grow invest time in building a robust reporting system to track and attribute revenue across channels, campaigns, and programs.
Tactics include launching a podcast, blog articles, partnership webinars, guest posts with target accounts, thought leaders, communities, and engaging industry media.
The key here is to choose the channels and formats that align with their preferences, behaviors, and expectations.
Great content is a way of paying forward. It makes prospects more likely to engage with your offering and eventually convert into paying customers once they are in-market for a solution.
A unique brand voice and promoting strong perspectives and opinions in the market, can go a long way to differentiate yourself in a highly competitive market.
Showcase your expertise and offer fresh insights. Share your distinct viewpoints, regularly post on LinkedIn and Twitter, answer questions, and host AMAs in important niche communities and witness your influence growth.
Every B2B company should have at least a someone ready to jump in on social to share their worldviews.
Identify these internal brand evangelists and team members eager at your company, and provide them with the necessary tools to get involved and excel.
There’s a saying that companies don’t create categories. To design a market category in your niche, and spark a movement, you need to build an audience.
The best content makes outbound more effective. Many SaaS businesses involve their sales teams in content creation and distribution. SDRs/BDRs share the content marketing produces with their prospects as a non-sales touchpoint to initiate or reengage in conversations as this has proven to lead to closing more deals more effectively.
“The key about thought leadership is you need to have leading thoughts. And the leading thoughts come from direct customer insights with the appropriate analysis and interpretation qualitatively, and by being in the details so much that you can develop leading thoughts.”
Source: Staying in the Details to Develop Leading Thoughts With Chris Walker of Refine Labs
As AI-generated content gains popularity, much of the content produced tends to be subpar or average. This makes it even more crucial to double down on value-driven, well-researched, and practical content tailored specifically to your brand's perceptions, narrative and opinions.
Although tools like GPT-4, Bing AI, and over thousand other AI solutions can 10x productivity, they fall short in fully understanding human judgment, strong opinions, tone of voice and the final touches necessary in creating incredible content.
It’s simple but not easy: your content must be useful, timely, and provide practical advice. Staying aligned with your distinctive brand's narrative, positioning, and messaging, increases the likelihood of building a stronger market voice and brand sentiment. This messaging coherence across content and marketing channels reinforces your brand identity, making it more recognizable and memorable.
1. Share case studies and success stories. Highlight your current customers, how they've implemented your product or service and other technologies with tips, demos, screenshots and add quotes from key personas in your content.
2. Involve partners. Partner with other software companies or agencies in your ecosystem to co-create content that highlights shared best practices and benefits. Partnerships can help you reach new audiences and build stronger relationships within your niche.
3. Analyze industry trends and benchmarks. Consistently stay informed and share trends, stats, benchmarks, and best practices. This not only demonstrates your commitment but also helps position your brand as a trusted advisor and the go-to source in your niche.
Including brand examples and best practices in today's AI-driven world is the key to activating the association bias in your audience. Showcasing what your current customers, prospects, and partners in the ecosystem are doing right is key component of any thought leadership system.
Expert driven content is the trump card and a must-have. By partnering with and inviting industry thought leaders to contribute to your content, you tap into their wealth of knowledge and experience, adding credibility and authenticity.
The importance of social currency never dies. AI tools, while incredibly powerful, have yet to fully replicate the human touch.
Genuine insights provided by top subject matter experts and content supported with their popular opinions is a superb asset in your marketing efforts. Do it while generative AI can't.
