The lesson for thought leadership strategy

Thought leadership involves stakeholders from across the business, including marketing, communications, sales and the leadership team. One of the biggest challenges can be securing agreement among those groups, which may have different views about what the campaign ought to achieve.

The best thought leadership campaigns create consensus. They set common overall goals while recognising that individual requirements will be slightly different.

These are not necessarily contradictory. Think of an army: the overall objective should be clear to everyone, but within the army there are very different roles and goals.

The lesson for thought leadership strategy

Broadly speaking, B2B content campaigns can do two things. They can support sales activation, helping companies to capture demand that already exists, or they can help to build the brand and thereby create entirely new demand. The best campaigns will do both.

Often, though, companies tend to prioritise capturing existing demand instead of creating it from scratch – the equivalent of staying in your corner of the forest. Why? It is the age-old problem of short-termism and measuring what is easy to measure rather than what matters.

Demand-capture or lead-generation campaigns achieve tangible results in the short term, which is why they get so much attention. But they focus on a small segment of your audience – those who are poised to be buyers and are ready to talk to you. By homing in on imminent buyers, these campaigns ignore the 90% of your audience who are not yet at that stage.

Instead, companies need to seek that balance between capturing demand and creating it. To appeal to the 90%, you need to go to other parts of the forest: build associations between your brand and your chosen topics; foster emotional connections with your audience; and position yourself as an authority.

The lesson for thought leadership strategy

It takes time to build relationships with your audience, whether you are a rock star or a producer of thought leadership. There is always pressure to deliver short-term returns, but it is unrealistic to expect quick wins from your campaigns. Instead, you need long-term investment and a consistent approach.

Chopping and changing from one hot topic to the next might make you look like you are up to date with current thinking, but it is rarely what your audience wants. The best thought leadership campaigns build momentum over time and measure their success in years – not months.

The lesson for thought leadership strategy

This quote highlights the difference between distinctiveness and differentiation – a longstanding marketing debate. Professor Byron Sharp and others at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have highlighted how these two concepts are very different – and that distinctiveness is more important than differentiation when it comes to brand strategy.

We argue something similar in thought leadership. Many companies approach campaigns by looking at what their competitors are doing and then trying to do something different. But audiences do not care what your competitors are doing – they only care that you have something relevant to say to them.

So build memorable, lasting associations between your brand and your chosen messages (distinctiveness), instead of focusing on making sure your message is different from your competition’s (differentiation).

The lesson for thought leadership strategy

We often see a similar overemphasis on the buyer in thought leadership, and an obsession with the buyer journey or marketing funnel. This is an important element of any campaign, but focusing only on the buyer means you ignore everyone else in your potential audience. This includes those who can influence a purchasing decision, such as senior management, as well as the end consumer, investors, and other important stakeholders.

Thought leadership is never just about the buyer. If you focus solely on them, you could be neglecting a large number of people whose opinions really matter.

The lesson for thought leadership strategy

Some companies have large budgets for thought leadership, whereas others, like Moneyball’s Oakland Athletics, have limited resources. Companies with smaller budgets find it difficult to compete and achieve cut-through when faced with better-resourced rivals.

Yet it is possible, even on tight budgets. The key is to be highly targeted in the approach. Think relevance rather than reach, and rather than trying to appeal to a diverse business audience, consider exactly who you want to influence.

Focusing on the right metrics is also essential. Companies with smaller budgets must be forensic about defining what drives effectiveness and knowing what builds influence and creates impact.

They should worry less about narrow engagement metrics, such as downloads, bounce rates and open rates. Although these KPIs give partial information, they say nothing about the wider impact of content on how the brand and expertise are perceived. So their value is limited.

What matters is whether your content has impact on your brand or commercial fortunes. As Brad Pitt’s Moneyball character Billy Beane would say, it is about runs on the board.