The No.1 B2B marketing tactic right now: thought leadership
You can’t doubt the power or impact of high-quality executive thought leadership content. It can spark conversations, open doors, and create opportunities that you’d otherwise miss by not doing it. In fact, developing your personal or business brand on LinkedIn, your company blog, or in other communities offers one of those rare win-win-win scenarios.
Three wins, no losses
The first ‘win’ is for the business, as we’ve written about before. If your people have high profiles in the markets you serve because of their knowledge and expertise, then, by association, your business will benefit – not least, because you were smart enough to hire them in the first place. But, you may well ask, why invest in developing thought leaders when they might very well leave or be poached by a competitor?
Well, there is always that risk, but on balance we think it’s far outweighed by the fact that in the whole history of business, success is rarely down to one person. A lone individual, for example, cannot bring in a multi-million pound contract on their own, but the company they work for can.
The second ‘win’, is for your personal brand. People often forget that LinkedIn is a social network at the end of the day, and works just like any other social network. It gives you an opportunity to share your thoughts, opinions and experiences, to shape the narrative and influence others in your professional sphere.
‘Liking’ and ‘sharing’ others’ content will, no doubt, improve your visibility, but to really make your mark, establish your authority, cement your credentials, and grow your network, you have to share your own opinions, perspectives, and ideas. Once you start establishing yourself as a thought leader in a specific area, people inside and outside your organisation will start contacting you for all sorts of things like your views, new business opportunities, speaker slots, career opportunities and so on.
The third and final ’win’ is for your audience because they get to benefit from your knowledge and experience of your particular area of expertise. Who of us hasn’t learnt something useful, helpful, interesting or valuable, while casually scrolling through LinkedIn? A platform that’s seen a remarkable rise in use during the pandemic, and which has really upped its game (and engagement) with new rich-media formats. For anyone keen to find work, recruits, or customers, or to grow their professional network, it has to be LinkedIn.
Monstrously good returns
So if you invest in thought leadership, what returns can you expect? Well, it could be monstrously good. For example, we've been working with a Senior Exec of a £400 million innovation company who had a specific, but very narrow audience he wanted to reach. As well as raising his personal profile across his own business and across the industry, the £12,000 his company spent with us led directly to a £2 million opportunity, which has now led to a further £20 million opportunity.
And the fortnightly content we continue to create for him is all done through a one-hour briefing session each month, with very little prep on his part. Framed like that, investing in executive thought leadership content as part of your wider marketing activity is a no-brainer.
Form our own perspective, we’ve published content specifically aimed at the Board of a client our agency was keen to work with. When we won the account, they mentioned a deciding factor was the in-depth understanding we showed about their business in the article we created. All it took was a bit of thinking, a bit of research, and a short conversation with our Content Director to knock it into shape.
But revenue aside, good thought leadership content is also about less measurable things like visibility, authority and credibility. Things we know influence how people buy and who they want to work with, but are just very hard to measure in any meaningfully quantitative way.
Last word
So if you ask us what we think is the best B2B marketing tactic right now, it has to be executive thought leadership content. It’s quick to pull together, it’s high impact, it’s supremely cost-effective, and the ROI can be off the charts.