If you’re a B2B executive, you understand how important it is to establish yourself and your business as desirable to work with: this is where a thought leadership strategy can become an important tool.
Developing a thought leadership strategy is the key component of building brand recognition and long term connections with your audience. Thought leadership is all about cementing yourself and your business as an expert in your field, all the while becoming a trusted source, since you are the one informing others and becoming a touch point for the discussion on specific topics relevant to your audience.
Dedicating the time and effort to develop and implement an effective strategy can be what puts you ahead of other businesses. It is all too common for executives to leave thought leadership to their marketing team instead of getting involved themselves, which leads to under-resourced and ineffective outreach when it comes to the final content.
This is why it is critical that you work together to properly dedicate time and resources to thought leadership because it can truly make the difference in the level of engagement your business receives from others.
An effective thought leadership strategy is what will set you apart from others, and this is why:
1. It Optimizes your Earning Potential
Having and maintaining a positive and acclaimed reputation is not only a direct result of thought leadership, but it is also a reason that working with your business becomes so appealing to others. When you are in high demand, you have the opportunity to optimize on how much you are earning for the provision of your services.
Being deemed an expert in your field means that people are likely more willing to pay for your service, even at a higher cost, because they believe that due to your expertise, you will provide them with the best result. When people are consistently being served thought leadership content from you it reinforces that your business is staying relevant, which allows you to maintain an expert status and keep your earning potential high.
2. It Builds Brand Awareness and Recognition
No matter who you are or what you do, in the current technological climate, it is inevitable that you are a content consumer, and because of this, choosing to produce and provide thought leadership content is a decision that will see massive long term impacts when it comes to the general recognition of your brand identity.
Creating content that is not exclusively marketing allows you to reach a wider audience because you are simply providing information instead of explicitly trying to sell your service. This way you can build up a brand identity that is not solely rooted in financial profit.
Statistically, reaching the most people possible will help you down the road, as only 5% of potential buyers are currently in the market for what your business is providing, meaning 95% of potential buyers can be converted into clients, simply because they have come to trust and recognise your brand through your thought leadership content.
3. It Strengthens Your Reputation and Legitimacy
As an executive, I am sure you understand how crucial establishing trust and authority in your business is to attract and acquire new clients, and a good thought leadership strategy can help you to do this. By providing information and guiding others with your content you are proving to your audience how knowledgeable you are in your field. When the consumer knows that they can trust your information, they start believing that they can trust you too, and this can make the difference in who they think of when they are looking for someone to work with in the future.
4. It Works Not Only as an Offensive Strategy, but a Defensive One Too
While a thought leadership strategy can be important for bringing in new clients, it is equally as fundamental in maintaining your current client base and staying afloat in an oversaturated market.
Knowing how you want to present yourself and your business within your thought leadership content is step one when it comes to creating a strategy. Every time you produce informative content, you are tied directly to it, so this content is a perfect place to reaffirm to past and current clients why it is that they should continue to work with you. Reminding your audience of your company’s purpose and values can stop them from being drawn in by the marketing competitors; after all, 70% of C-level executives said that they have occasionally reconsidered working with their current supplier because of another supplier’s thought leadership content.
5. It Outlasts Self-Promotion
Explicitly promoting yourself is a great way to garner immediate visibility for your business and B2B brand. On a sustainability front however, thought leadership is a long term opportunity to reach and connect with your audience, making you more memorable.
Planning out which specific media outlets you will use to spread thought leadership content is another essential component of a thought leadership strategy, and targeting your audience through the specific media platforms that they are most likely to go to for advice and information about your specific field means that they will continuously be exposed to your content. Your audience’s consistent exposure to your expert information means long term intrinsic promotion that goes beyond traditional marketing.
Podcasts can be a great medium for thought leadership content. They can also act as a valuable starting point for creating even more content across channels like blog articles, social media posts, video snippets, newsletters, and more. This means you’re not only spreading your ideas further, but also amplifying your brand, building a stronger sense of trust and authority around your business.
Partnering with a B2B podcast agency helps you launch your own show with the right strategy. This allows you to connect with ideal customers, build credibility with your audience, and turn each episode into a steady stream of repurposed content, all without putting extra strain on your team.
6. It Showcases You as a Future-Focused Problem Solver
Similarly, thought leadership content can help you to establish yourself as being both up to date with modern day advancements and trends, and a problem solver. These two qualities are extremely desirable to have as part of your B2B brand identity, so displaying and validating them by sharing your experience so that others can learn keeps you relevant. When people are talking about you and believe you to be a prominent, leading figure in your field of expertise, you are only further increasing your credibility as an executive.
7. It Encourages Personal Growth
Developing a thought leadership strategy will not only help you amass greater clientele, it will also grant you the opportunity to grow as a leader. In researching the forms of content your audience is most likely to engage with, whether that be videos, articles, white papers, social media or any of the many other types which your consumers find most appealing, you will have the opportunity to delve into different mediums. As an executive, this allows you to further broaden your understanding of your audience, and what makes something truly valuable to them.
Understanding your audience is the first step towards creating value-based thought leadership content. Once you are making content that people want to see, you are increasing your authority even more.
8. It Acts as an Example of the Quality of Your Work
While traditional marketing is critically important when it comes to promoting your business, 73% of business decision makers said that they believe thought leadership content to be a better indicator of the capabilities of a business. If you consider this statistic, it is clear to see that thought leadership content acts as an integral touchpoint between your business and others, and the quality of your work is used as a sample that others will analyse when considering how you might perform should they hire you in the future.
Creating a strategy to produce quality thought leadership content is so important here, because it could mean the difference between securing the client or being passed over in favour of another business. Putting the optimal amount of effort into ensuring the information and advice that you are providing to others is something that your audience finds helpful will display that your business will put in that level of effort professionally as well.
9. It Connects You With the Most Valuable Clients
As B2B Marketing continues to evolve with the changing times, cold calling has become entirely a thing of the past, with consumers having access to so many different business options with the click of a button. Since the market has become so crowded, thought leadership content is a great way to get your name out there in ways other than traditional advertisements. If people keep seeing your business popping up over and over when they search not only for the service you provide, but for information as well, they are more likely to come to you if they are looking for someone in the future.
The most valuable clients are those who understand the value of your service and have chosen you in the sea of so many other options. If people are coming to you, this shows there is something they believe sets you apart from your competitors, and this all starts with thought leadership strategy.
10. It Humanises Your Business
Hearing someone’s voice, whether it be through text in an article or the real thing in person or by video, is always going to feel more personal than chatting with AI or consulting google. This is because, at the end of the day, people want to make a human connection. This is the foundation of trust and, therefore, is the core principle of gaining clientele.
Thought leadership content is a simple way to move from being thought of by consumers as an impersonal logo on a screen to being thought of as real people looking to use the utmost effort to provide their service to others. Forming that extra, personal bond through supplementary content like advice videos, seminars or even articles humanises your business drastically and increases the likelihood that a business chooses to work with you.
11. It Boosts the Visibility of Your SEO Efforts
Search Engine Optimisation is a huge part of making sure that your business is reaching others, and by choosing to create thought leadership content, you are essentially increasing the amount of content on the internet that is associated with you. This means that you are not only building up trust and authority with actual clients, but you are also doing the same thing with various search engines.
Artificial Intelligence has quickly become the go-to source of information for many, and by continuing to produce content, you are also going to boost AEO as well, meaning AI is more likely to grab your information as a source for the answers it serves to prompts that are relevant to your expertise. This increases the visibility of your business, while also presenting you as a source that has so much credibility even AI chooses to serve it to its audience.
12. You Can Capitalise on Your Experience
The next crucial reason has to do with you. As an executive, you already possess a degree of credibility that is granted to you by your position. Your thought leadership strategy can then begin with using yourself as the jumping off point. All you need to do is make yourself into a spokesperson with whom others can connect, because you have already learned to adapt and grow within your field just by maintaining this position within your business; your audience will want to learn from you because of this.
This can start with simply humanising your LinkedIn profile and reaching out to your audience yourself rather than hiding behind your brand. Authentic opinions mixed with your experience in your field will make you even more of a trustworthy source, especially since your audience is other businesses, and other executives have an understanding of what it means to be in your professional position.
13. It Informs Major Purchasing Decisions from B2B Buyers
In many ways B2B buyers are no different from the common consumer; when making large purchases they will conduct research beforehand to ensure that they will be getting the best result possible.
Making sure that potential buyers know about you is something that, as I explained before, is a great advantage of thought leadership content, but another is the fact that through your content, buyers will be able to learn more about you than they could through a drop down list of your services, for example. Through this content there are also more avenues through which they can contact you directly before having to make a formal business inquiry. This level of engagement with your content can help buyers to feel more confident that they are making the right choice trusting your business.
14. It Showcases Your Knowledge
One of the most straightforward reasons that you should be producing thought leadership content is that you are able to promote yourself by showing off why you are in your industry in the first place. Being a thought leader comes from presenting your knowledge and expertise to others and giving your own unique opinions about topics that are relevant to your audience and are relevant to your business. Seizing every opportunity to stand out by presenting your fresh viewpoints is going to help your business to excel and grow in the future.
15. It Provides Opportunities for Open Communication
Building trust is a core advantage of having and implementing a thought leadership strategy, and one of the best ways to do this is through mediums that encourage real time discussions or feedback. Thought leadership through presentations, webinars and social media, to name a few mediums, all have in common the fact that others can respond to you in real time. Working off of the ideas of others and combating them with your own further works as a tool of humanisation and promotion because it allows you to reach others, reaffirm your expertise, and build connections.
16. It Has the Power to Transform Business Growth
The growth of B2B businesses is too often stunted by a lack of interest and exposure, because they can be so much harder to market in comparison to B2C businesses, where target audiences and demographics are much more diverse. A thought leadership strategy however, can work as a massive draw point of interest to your business, as having a thought leader grants you a level of intrigue and personality that other businesses may lack.
Bringing new and exciting ideas about your industry into the world positions you as being a unique voice in your field, and this will make others feel it is valuable to them to work with your business, instead of that of another executive who relies on recycled ideas.
17. It is Easier to Do than You Would Expect
One of the main things that deters executives from implementing a well planned thought leadership strategy is the belief that it will be so difficult to establish yourself as an expert that you might as well not even make an attempt to do so. In reality, all it takes to reach your audience is first conducting proper research into which mediums and platforms they utilize the most when searching for information about your field.
Conclusion
A thought leadership strategy is essential for every B2B executive because without one, you will not be developing that authority and recognition that you know is a necessary draw to attract other businesses to want to work with you.
If you are thinking about implementing a thought leadership strategy, you should consider all of these reasons why it would be a great asset to put one in place now - and let me know, how do you think a thought leadership strategy could help your business grow?
Written by Eva Geimer
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Jony Studios is a content marketing agency specializing in B2B podcasting and audiobook services. They have worked with many clients, from startups to larger organizations such as Penguin Random House, Amazon, University of Waterloo, Freakonomics Radio, and many others.
