What does thought leadership really look like?

An increasing number of businesses are looking to thought leadership to bring their brands front of mind. But what does thought leadership really look like and how do you do it?  Claire Weekes investigates

Thought leadership is a buzz term increasingly used within B2B marketing circles and with good reason. As the economic squeeze fuels fierce competition, companies are under an increasing amount of pressure to make their propositions stand out. More than being just another supplier to their trade, clever B2B companies are showing they have the inside track on the issues their customer base faces and ideas on how to solve them.

The scramble though for so many companies to establish themselves as thought leaders has inevitably led to some bad practice in the field. Many supposed ‘thought-leading’ brands simply offer little more than an opinion or two on a blog and then package it up as a market-driving idea.

The maturity of web 2.0 technology and social media has helped blur the line between what is thought leadership and what is merely opinion – nowadays it is easy for any brand to add their two-cents worth to the melting pot of online conversations. So what is it then that separates true thought leaders from the other voices out there?

“Real thought leadership is about coming up with different points-of-view, and supporting them with hard, objective data. That takes a lot of experience and resource”, says Chris Koch, editorial director at SAP Marketing Services.

Koch points out that service companies – e.g. consulting firms such as McKinsey and Deloitte – are well known for exercising excellent examples of thought leadership. Firms offering consultancy by their very nature need to look smart themselves, “or else they’ll simply lose business,” he says.

Koch suggests it’s generally product companies that need to think hard about how they can achieve thought leadership, especially since products are increasingly being sold as part of solutions – “complex combinations of products and services designed to meet a particular business need,” as he puts it.

“[One] trend is that products are increasingly moving into the cloud and becoming more like services”, he says. “They need thought leadership to show business people – and not just IT people – why they should be the ones to choose for supporting an important business process.”

Staying one step ahead

Only each individual company can harness its own ground breaking idea. “It’s a case of identifying the critical business issues keeping your clients awake at night. Or better still, the threats on the horizon they haven’t seen coming yet. Then proving and quantifying the threat via research”, suggests Daryl Newman, senior account director at PR consultancy Man Bites Dog. The rewards to be reaped from carrying out such a campaign thoroughly are pretty obvious. “[They] can achieve not only high impact media coverage, but drive direct business leads for complex and technical advisory services,” he adds.

One brand that can vouch for this is global management consulting firm Hay Group. In 2008, around six months before the media spotlight turned on faltering government revenues, it produced a substantial report entitled The Big Squeeze: Productivity in the Public Sector. The report helped
position Hay Group as one of the first to examine the impact of the recession on government funding, and the public sector’s ability to deliver more against a rising demand for services.

A two-tier, multi-sector research programme secured national media coverage and set the news agenda in the relevant trade press, helping Hay Group to unify its complex sales proposition around these issues.

“The ‘Big Squeeze’ not only promoted our public sector expertise via targeted, high impact coverage, it also helped us to hone our approach to selling our consultancy model – leading directly to significant business wins,” says Kate Deeley, public sector marketing manager at Hay Group.

In another example, finance and IT services company SunGard has produced a thought leadership ‘hub’, centred around current topics facing the finance industry. It must be doing something right because the FT lists the hub as an influential blog it regularly reads.

The hub (in the form of a website) is a multi-faceted wealth of information – including resources, advice, blogs and interactive diagrams – all geared towards providing tangible solutions to problems that financiers might face in a broad range of areas – from alternative investments, to capital markets and wealth management. “We visualised our customers’ business environments and used that to create an interactive repository and content library,” explains Paul Wilson, chief marketing officer at financial software provider SunGard.

Supporting stats

Successful companies are often the ones  ahead of their competition in coming up with a good idea that will capture the attention of their audience. Bear in mind, says Koch, that buyers are seeking “epiphanies”.

He adds, “They are looking for something that will articulate a need that they didn’t even know they had, or something that helps them to put an ill-defined need into sharper perspective so that they can begin to move forward with it,” he says.

True thought leadership, then, could perhaps be defined in its simplest term as guiding the blind into the light.

 

Thinking about thought leadership?
Before you embark on a thought leadership campaign, consider the following top tips by Ashley Carr, MD at Neo PR

1. Find your thought leader
You must have access to a person who has opinions the industry wants to hear. Thought leadership needs to be ‘talking to the market, about the market’. It needs to be informative, educational, and market changing. Brands shouldn’t confuse trend analysis or market statistics with thought leadership; they are fundamentally different things.

2. Build a library of material
A brand can’t embark on a campaign of thought leadership, without treating it as they would any other marketing campaign. If you’ve only loaded one bullet into the barrel when you’ve got to fire six, your campaign will fail. You’ve got to be building ideas and fleshing them out for a campaign in advance so that you don’t run dry of material half-way through.

3. Slice ‘n’ dice
You need the ability to rework your thought leadership material so that it appeals to as many different audiences as possible. One piece of thought leadership can produce many things:
A complete opinion article; ‘sound bites’ that can be distilled and used to comment on relevant topics in the industry; and plenty of material for blogs and social media platforms.

4. Be proactive
Proactively look for where your thought leadership pieces could be placed; industry publications, your brand’s own marketing material, blogs and social media – the options are many if you know where to look.

5. Follow up and circle back
Once you have offered out your thought leadership, continue to monitor the media for coverage. If the medium likes your material enough to use it, chances are they’ll be interested to see more. Establish good relations with social and media contacts; they want creditable, educational and informative material for their audiences and that’s what your thought leadership will be providing. Then, when you are happy with your coverage, it’s time to circle back to
the start.


 

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