Thought Leadership Can: Sell

TL;DR

• Thought leadership can sell, by nudging the right decision makers, maintaining customer loyalty, and generating premium pricing power. 
• But many B2B companies aren't clear on how to use it as a sales and marketing tool - and thus, how to measure its business value.  
• There are two parts to harvesting a strong ROI from thought leadership efforts: setting the right strategic goals and choosing tactics that align with those goals. 
  
• For best results, circulate and format thought leadership to meet buyers where they are. 

"I have a new respect for thought leadership," one early-stage founder told me a few months ago, "a sales qualified lead just emailed me with the link to our peer-reviewed pub, and asked for a call."

The surprise in their voice was undeniable - and I didn't quite know how to respond.

We had spent about 60 hours together on this campaign. We knew that the value of this peer reviewed pub would be to shift the perspective of the right buyers. We had:

• Conducted original research and developed a clear, credible narrative from that data + actionable insights that would drive reader understanding and know-how.
• Carefully researched journals at the outset, and had a thorough understanding of the readership we expected to reach through that journal.
• Marketed the publication with a full suite of complimentary content that we distributed through the most likely channels to keep this publication in front of the right readers.

We did the thing, and we did it right. 

And yet, this founder was still surprised when the strategy started working. And that's because despite understanding the business value of thought leadership in theory, they hadn't expected it to bear out SQLs in practice.

They are not alone in harboring this doubt: sales people and marketers alike don't always understand how thought leadership can complement sales activity. And we really, really should.

This founder, for example, turned that SQL into a single sale that alone resulted in a 150% ROI on that one peer-reviewed pub. And because that publication remains timely and impactful within their industry, that number will continue to compound as more readers turn into customers.

A wider perspective bears out this founder's experience: the Edelmann/LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Report has recently reported, for example, that 75% of decision makers turn to thought leadership to assess an organization's credibility - and in the process, these decision makers feel prompted to research a service, product, and even company they weren't previously considering too. Thought leadership also plays a critical role in maintaining customer loyalty, making it less difficult for similarly-positioned brands to lure your customers away. Perhaps more surprisingly, 60% of decision makers say that they are more willing to pay premium prices when companies regularly publish value-driving thought leadership. When you invest in thought leadership, you are also investing in your pricing power.  

Say it with me: thought leadership can sell. 

And yet, the report also notes that 30% of B2B companies don't understand how to use thought leadership as a sales or marketing tool, and 42% still measure its impact through clicks and conversions to the marketing website. Many founders, marketing leads, and executives are struggling to break into thought leadership in a way that justifies the expense. They, too, are ready for the pleasant surprise of a thought leadership-driven SQL. 

If your organization is struggling to invest in thought leadership, marketers can start by setting clear strategic expectations and developing metrics and tactics accordingly. In this article, I'll help you set those expectations and provide a few key metrics that help prove out the ROI of a thought leadership campaign. I'll cover:

1. 1. 1. How to set the right strategic expectations for B2B thought leadership campaigns;
      2. How to measure the ROI of B2B thought leadership campaigns, so that you can keep funding and creating exceptional thought leadership that sells your brand and business; and,
         
      3. How to avoid misusing thought leadership for B2B sales and marketing.

There is No ROI Without Strategy 

Let's start with a quick theoretical review of where thought leadership typically resides within the B2B buyer journey.

Most thought leadership campaigns share a common goal: to nudge decision makers towards considering a product or service that they may not have previously been considering. It is typically a subtle nudge. Thought leadership is most often top-of-funnel: its objective is to educate readers on a business challenge that they don't yet know that they are facing - and which your organization solves.

Done well, thought leadership challenges and educates your readers in equal measure, encouraging them to reconsider what they know to be true about their industry, and to believe in the problem you are bringing to light. Thought leadership should prompt the right decision-makers to start researching solutions to this business problem (of which yours is now likely a strong contender) - this is the buyer behavior you hope to incite. 

So one metric of success for thought leadership should be conversions to middle-of-funnel engagement with your brand. Do readers of your state of the field report then start engaging with your MOF content? Are they seeking out your validation study data, for example, or downloading product one-pagers? Are they learning more about your unique solution? You should be seeing contacts that you really want to talk to converting to MOF status after downloading or engaging with thought leadership content.

Here's another MOF metric to look out for: the Edelmann/LI report states that consistent thought leadership can lead to increased invitations to submit to RFPs.  

It's important to understand, however, that thought leadership can be effectively deployed across the marketing funnel, thanks to the varied and recursive structure of the B2B buying journey. Thought leadership can be useful throughout the buying journey because decision-makers and their teams need varied content, delivered at the right moment for their unique organization, to get to yes. Sometimes, a particularly convincing piece of thought leadership can propel buyers into bottom-of-funnel engagement: they may start asking for case studies, scheduling demos, or even signing up for free trials. I've also seen clients close deals with the help of high-quality thought leadership content too. That means that you can also measure the success of thought leadership through SQL and customer conversions. 

The takeaway: measuring the impact of thought leadership comes down to conversions throughout the buyer journey. If you are properly marketing and tracking thought leadership campaigns, you should be able to see primarily MOF conversions, and potentially, BOF and customer conversions too. 

One Metric to Skip

Unless you are a Gartner, McKinsey, or Deloitte, with substantial industry and domain authority, thought leadership published to the blog, marketing website, or other organic channels doesn't drive strong traffic out of the gate. 

That said, quality thought leadership, posted regularly throughout your organic channels, can grow your influence over time. If you want to measure the success of thought leadership in growing organic reach, you will need to invest in and execute a thought leadership strategy - and an aligned SEO strategy - for the long-haul. In this case, you will want to see measurable increases in organic traffic attributable to thought leadership content at least every quarter, as well as year-over-year. These gains will be small to start - but as your strategy plays out and your authority grows, traffic will grow too.  

Is it the best metric to focus on? In my opinion, no - the most profitable role for thought leadership is nudging buyer decision making. It should be curated and marketed with this objective in mind, from the very beginning.  

There is No ROI Without Tactics

Ok. So. Edelmann and LinkedIn report that 26% of marketers say that thought leadership gets "misused." What, exactly, is misuse? 

In my experience, thought leadership "misuse" comes down to two tactical errors: circulation and format. 

Circulation

How did we get a peer-reviewed pub to generate a SQL? By publishing in a journal that our ICPs turn to as an authority in their field. It was as simple as that. 

If you're not getting the thought leadership in front of the right people, you're not leading anyone, anywhere. That's one reason why I kick off every thought leadership campaign by understanding the publications and platforms where my clients' ICPs seek out information. Depending on our goal, we can seek to publish or market thought leadership in these venues. 

It's also tempting to reuse these often time- and labor-intensive thought leadership assets for multiple ICP audiences. But it doesn't always work, because different stakeholders don't perceive problems in the same way. To really move the needle on buyer behavior, thought leadership needs to respond meaningfully to the experiences of distinctive ICPs. A simple tweak of messaging does not usually suffice - if the campaign has been set up well, the proprietary insights you share and even the research you conducted to glean those insights have been designed to address a distinctive customer's questions and concerns from the outset. 

The lesson here is this: don't try to circulate content to audiences with whom it won't resonate. Your resources are best served when you take the time to market and develop thought leadership that uniquely leads each stakeholder.   

Format

Does your thought leadership reach buyers how they want to be reached? Does it deliver information how they want to consume it? If not - your thought leadership will fall on deaf ears.

It can be tempting to choose a format that is more easily trackable - say, a gated content download  over an earned-media placement - but if you have taken the time to understand where your audiences look for information, then you will also have a clear understanding of the format. If you know that your audience is devoted to a particular podcast, you'll want to pitch an interview to the hosts. If there is a trade publication that every buyer/decision-maker in your industry subscribes to, consider pitching an article to the publication or buying a paid ad that drives traffic back to thought leadership published on your owned channels. If you are well-connected with buyers on social and know they love a good webinar, deliver on that demand. How you package your thought leadership should be solely determined by what your audience wants to consume.

This is common sense, and most thought leaders intuitively get it. But there are many, many great pieces of thought leadership languishing in channels and formats that aren't meeting their audiences where they are, and how they want to be reached. It's a shame, for your ideas and your business. 

My diagnosis: when thought leadership gets misused, there is a lack of skill or investment in gaining a detailed understanding of buyer behavior. Starting here is essential for tactical success. Moreover, it doesn't have to be ridiculously time-consuming to do. That's a subject for another post, but here's an actionable insight on the matter: sales calls are the best source of up to date information on buyer behavior. Mine them for insights on where to pitch or publish your next thought leadership campaign. 

Thought leadership, like all genres, is fluidly defined - and that's one reason why it can be difficult for brands to leverage it for sales. So many thought leaders have lofty dreams of coining terms, building coalitions, forging revolutions, changing paradigms, moving markets - and thought leadership can do all of these things. Sometimes, these goals are not easily translatable into sales and marketing objectives. But achieving these lofty ambitions can depend upon leveraging thought leadership for sales, when appropriate. Capitalism, after all, is the force through which great ideas are assigned monetary value in our world - and your ideas gain momentum when real people buy into your business.  

- K

Edelmann/LinkedIn report that only 15% of thought leadership is considered excellent. Fledgling is here to fix that. Subscribe to On the Wing for more tips, tricks, and hot takes to help your thought leadership soar above the chatter.