Does your brand’s content establish it as a thought leader in your industry?
In today’s competitive market, establishing thought leadership is a powerful way to stand out. Thought leadership involves positioning your business as a trusted authority in your industry by offering valuable information and insights that resonate with your audience. When done right, it not only builds credibility but also drives leads, conversions, and customer retention.
In today’s competitive market, establishing thought leadership is a powerful way to stand out. Thought leadership involves positioning your business as a trusted authority in your industry by offering valuable information and insights that resonate with your audience. When done right, it not only builds credibility but also drives leads, conversions, and customer retention.
Find out how to position your company as a thought leader to drive business growth!
Understanding Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is about sharing your brand’s expertise, innovative ideas, and unique perspectives to influence and educate prospective buyers, leads, and existing customers. It’s about giving before asking. By providing help and advice before looking to make the sale, thought leadership can help to increase leads and improve conversion rates. Over time, it can also improve customer retention by portraying the company as a trustworthy partner instead of just a supplier of goods or services. When done well, thought leadership builds trust, enhances credibility, and fosters loyalty.
Building a Thought Leadership Strategy
Establishing a thought leadership strategy must be a deliberate effort – it doesn’t just magically happen! Follow these steps to create a thought leadership approach that moves the needle:
Once you have content that shows off your brand’s thought leadership, how do you use it? Quality thought leadership content can be used to:
Don’t track vanity metrics like email open rates and webpage visits. Measure the success of your thought leadership strategy by tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like:
Getting Started
When you need help creating a thought leadership strategy, please reach out to us. Every day we create the kind of content that fuels businesses just like yours! Let’s start a conversation about how we can help you drive growth!
Understanding Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is about sharing your brand’s expertise, innovative ideas, and unique perspectives to influence and educate prospective buyers, leads, and existing customers. It’s about giving before asking. By providing help and advice before looking to make the sale, thought leadership can help to increase leads and improve conversion rates. Over time, it can also improve customer retention by portraying the company as a trustworthy partner instead of just a supplier of goods or services. When done well, thought leadership builds trust, enhances credibility, and fosters loyalty.
Building a Thought Leadership Strategy
Establishing a thought leadership strategy must be a deliberate effort – it doesn’t just magically happen! Follow these steps to create a thought leadership approach that moves the needle:
- Identify your Core Audience – Know who you want to appeal to and use that as the foundation for everything you do. Create content specifically for that core audience and share it across the places where they spend their time online in whatever format they prefer (short articles, videos, images, white papers, etc.).
- Focus on a Niche Topic – Unlike major brands like Apple, which can cover all things tech, small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) will need to focus on a much smaller topic set. Focus on a specific niche where your brand can demonstrate deep expertise and get noticed. If the space is too saturated with voices already, look elsewhere.
- Create Helpful Content – Produce valuable content that seeks to inform and educate, not just sell. Focus on delivering original insights that arm your audience with the information and confidence they need to take whatever action you’re hoping to drive (sales, signups, donations, etc.).
- Prioritize Transparency – Be open and honest in a way that endears your business to its core audience. Use your content strategy to be so likeable that prospective buyers can’t help but buy from you and existing customers wouldn’t dream of being disloyal to you.
- Distribute Content Across Relevant Platforms – Use your audience’s online habits to determine where your content should be shared. Create content types that fit these platforms well and then leverage multiple channels to maximize visibility. Remember, the more mileage you can get out of individual pieces of content, the better the results are likely to be.
- Be Consistent – Just like traditional leadership, thought leadership can’t be built overnight, nor will it just stand the test of time unsupported. Be consistent with your efforts by regularly creating and updating content to provide ongoing value to your audience.
Once you have content that shows off your brand’s thought leadership, how do you use it? Quality thought leadership content can be used to:
- Optimize Visibility – By optimizing your content for search engines you can increase its visibility, bringing more traffic to your website and social media pages.
- Generate Qualified Leads – High-value gated content is a lead magnet. Offering something valuable in exchange for a prospective buyer’s email address is a common way to generate leads. However, if you require a few more fields before a visitor can access your content, you can make significant strides in qualifying those leads as well. (For example, you may want to ask for a few other variables like location, budget, company/team size, personal income/business revenue, current needs/pain points, purchase timeframe, etc. depending on what your ideal buyer persona looks like.)
- Collaborate & Form Partnerships – Use your content to find the kind of unique collaboration and partnership opportunities that can earn you additional exposure.
- Nurture Leads – Align content with your buying funnel to provide leads with the kind of content that they need in their buying journey right when they need it. Stagger what you provide based on online and offline triggers to keep it as timely as possible.
- Reduce Purchase Anxiety – Address objections and concerns proactively through your content to reduce purchase barriers. Prominently feature the kind of content that helps to reassure buyers like testimonials and case studies to allay worries and let your audience know that you will walk beside them through the purchase.
- Personalize Solutions – Segment your content based on needs, pain points, and budget to offer the kind of content that will resonate with specific categories of buyers.
- Form Strong Relationships – Create exclusive content for customers that demonstrates your company’s desire to keep serving them after the sale. Offer advice to new customers on how to get the most out of your products, announce new releases to your best customers before anyone else, and provide webinars on relevant topics to demonstrate your ongoing commitment to them.
- Build an Evangelist Community – Leverage user generated content (USG) by providing a place for customers to share their experiences, make requests, and ask questions. Use a community moderator to highlight any content you offer that can supplement the conversations that are occurring.
- Innovate and Evolve – Use the feedback you receive (both the good and the bad) to shape your company’s growth and its future offerings. Treat thought leadership content like a two-way street – providing value to your customers and creating value for your business in turn.
Don’t track vanity metrics like email open rates and webpage visits. Measure the success of your thought leadership strategy by tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like:
- Number of qualified leads
- Sales conversion rate
- Sales cycle length
- Customer retention rate
- Customer lifetime value
Getting Started
When you need help creating a thought leadership strategy, please reach out to us. Every day we create the kind of content that fuels businesses just like yours! Let’s start a conversation about how we can help you drive growth!
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