January 4, 2023
True Thought Leadership Goes Far Beyond Content Marketing
Many business leaders think too small by compartmentalizing the term “Thought Leadership” as a marketing content play, to beef up the cadence and quality of the blog and social content. But, that’s not Thought Leadership; that’s better writing. True Thought Leadership is so much more than that and starts much higher in the value chain. It’s a central repository of knowledge for a company, and it has far-reaching use cases throughout the organization. Here’s a thorough list of non-traditional use cases for true Thought Leadership that make the investment pay off.
Sales Engineering or Sales Support:
Excellent Thought Leadership provides the context around why a company’s product differentiation is critical, proves the product suite works as promised, and offers accessible education about complex and confusing industry technological paradigm shifts. When intelligently staffed to support the sales org with events, 1:1 meetings, collateral, and more, this does wonders for building buyer confidence and establishing strategic relationships with clients and prospective clients.
Executive Retention:
One key aspect of Thought Leadership is establishing polished and visible star power from within the executive and VP ranks of a company. Attach your company’s name to theirs, provide them the supportive resources to look and speak like a star, and give them another reason to feel they are growing while in your company.
Product Roadmap Decisioning:
It’s always a challenge to prioritize product development options and to stay laser focused. Defining the company’s clearly defined unique vision for the future can act as a guidepost, to help improve focus and increase the ability to say no.
Partnership Development
Work together with a key partner on a groundbreaking original research or analytics project for joint PR or co-marketing, and you’ll deepen the connection and interdependence between the companies, while also increasing the marketing value of partnerships.
Improved Effectiveness of Your PR Agency
Investing in a PR agency relationship is like signing up for a gym membership. You only get out of it what you put into it. Unique groundbreaking analytics and research, and contrarian views of industry trends, are what trade publications and gatekeepers are looking for, and providing a steady stream of these makes your PR agency more successful. See some examples of Persuasion Art’s published work here.
Improved Paid Marketing ROAS:
Compelling and meaty content with a longer shelf life makes for more engaging paid marketing and will increase ROAS.
More Effective Lead Nurturing:
Branded reports and other content forms that consistently track industry changes in unique and compelling ways make for excellent excuses to engage with mid-funnel prospects and make them expect to hear from you.
While true Thought Leadership is capable of all of these things, simply improving the quality of your writing won’t get you there. You need to think bigger, and it comes back to defining a unique industry POV and generating compelling data from research & analytics. That’s the hard part, but Persuasion Art can help. Set up a 30-minute intro to learn more.