What is thought leadership?
- Thought leadership means generating original
ideas or opinions on a topic that is of real interest to your target market and
relates to what you supply
- Like most marketing, success requires sustained
activity and real insight into your target customers and their needs
- Unlike most marketing, thought-leadership
requires frequent intellectual and analytical effort
- Thought leadership must appear to be objective;
the topic area and your ideas must position you as an expert with the solution
to your target’s need but without being pushy about your own services or
products
Why is it important?
- Most businesses are increasingly reliant upon
online marketing
o
The online marketplace is flooded with competing
messages and your targets are overloaded with information, most of which is
ignored
o
People look for efficient filters. One way to do this is to use the
recommendations of others. Your content
must therefore be unique and interesting, both to receive attention in the
first place and to make it worthy of repetition
o
Search engines, when they assign search
weightings, recognise and value content that is referred to by others
- Most businesses find it difficult to differentiate
themselves. Producing original and
relevant content helps to build a reputation for expertise which will lead to
sales opportunities
How do you do it?
- Start with the customer viewpoint. What problems does your product solve? What are the triggers or root causes of the
need? What stories do you have about
solving these problems? What did you
learn and can you generalise from this? What
tips or techniques can you share? How
are these problems affected by current events or trends? What new developments are there in the
marketplace?
- If practical, do some original research in the
area. If this isn’t possible, run a
survey on a relevant topic
- Develop reusable content. Start with a whitepaper, then blog about it,
post it on article sites. Use it in your
email newsletter and on social media.
Put whitepapers on your website, making sure that you capture contact
details for people who download them.
Run a seminar or webinar on the topic.
If possible get some PR from it
- If you are not sure how to produce a whitepaper
then look at some examples and adapt the layout and tone to your market – or
pay a copywriter to write one from your content
- Incorporate your thought leadership activities
into your marketing planner and follow it – don’t leave it until “things are
quiet”
- It’s marketing – plan it, be consistent and persistent,
stick to the plan and measure the results
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