Most B2B technology and consulting companies are focused on solving complex problems for their clients. The more complex the problems, the more difficult it is for clients to firstly understand the challenges in front of them, and then to find solutions. If you're in the problem-solving business, you must prioritise thought leadership to clearly demonstrate your expertise through articles, guides, events, videos and so on.
While many firms invest in content, there's often a disconnect as the content created is focused elsewhere and rarely attempts to convince clients of their problem solving expertise. Typically, this is because content is owned by the marketing team, which has very limited support from the business to create unique and relevant insights.This article will explain why moving to an expert, rather than a marketing-led approach will transform your return on content - and help you become a known authority in your field.
Are you creating content or thought leadership?
Thought leadership is especially important for companies whose core business is to provide expertise to solve complex problems for clients. Thought leadership content is a highly effective way of consistently demonstrating your organisation’s expertise to your entire target audience, and to do so at scale.
The more complex the problems you solve, the more you need thought leadership to convince potential clients that you are best placed to help them. It needs to give them confidence that your expertise is superior to your competition and that you are worthy of their significant investment of time and money.
A big problem for most companies is that they unwittingly allow marketing to lead the creation of thought leadership. This is because they confuse run-of-the-mill content created to fuel lead generation activity, with thought leadership content - which are two very different things.
When marketing drives thought leadership, you have the tail wagging the dog. The content development process itself is wrongly used to develop thinking, rather than crafting unique perspectives before creating content. So, what happens is subject matter experts (SMEs) dip in and out of the process unprepared, providing under-developed ideas. It's no surprise that it takes multiple revisions of content before getting anywhere close to something fresh and insightful.
No company sets out to create bland, uninformed and uninspiring content that fails to demonstrate any credible expertise. Yet, when the process is led by marketing, this is often what materialises.
This is absolutely NOT the fault of marketing. Marketing is trying to accelerate the creation of content with good intentions - to engage with the target audience, nurture prospects and generate leads. But creating content in this way is not effective for thought leadership - nor is it in fact, for lead generation.
The impact of marketing-led thought leadership
With the prevalence of short-termism that exists in most organisations, marketing is constantly under pressure to provide a constant flow of leads. As a result, marketers want to churn out content at the fastest rate possible to fuel their lead generation campaigns.
Inevitably, more consideration is given and more effort is applied to how the content will be distributed, rather than the quality of the content itself. And seemingly, given the mass volume of competitive content you now have to cut through, distribution is increasingly where more of the marketing budget is now being spent.
It’s also a constant battle for marketing to create content consistently at scale. Marketers struggle to extract thought leadership from SMEs who are rarely able to prioritise its importance - and as a result, those SMEs become equally as frustrated with the content creation process. SMEs find it difficult in the limited time they have available to develop unique perspectives, which they feel are strong enough to educate and engage their audience.
The process of developing thought leadership is therefore convoluted, inefficient and very difficult to scale. Often early enthusiasm wanes and the content that is produced is mediocre. No criteria is applied to validate whether the content itself will present a company as a credible expert. Instead, with the overriding need to fuel lead generation, sub-par content is allowed to reach the public domain.
Why thought leadership content should be expert-led
The problems with a marketing-led approach leads many true, thought-leading companies to create dedicated thought leadership teams, which sit outside the marketing function. While these teams usually belong to large enterprises with significant resources, there’s no reason why smaller organisations can’t become thought leaders too. While a dedicated team may not be viable for you, a shift in mindset to view thought leadership as a business, not just a marketing function, would be a huge step forwards.
Top thought leadership-focused companies display five common traits that set them apart from everyone else in their fields, as follows:
- They go deep, not wide: Rather than cover every topic imaginable in their space and create lightweight perspectives on each, they hone in on a particular niche subject and seek to dominate it. This is typically an intersection of a space that really matters to the clients they serve and where they have significant expertise.
- They focus on solving customer problems: Instead of creating content around generic market trends, news, accreditations or what the sales team had for breakfast, thought leaders have an uncompromising focus on a small number of key client problems that they want to own. They put all their effort into finding new ways to solve those problems, while challenging conventional solutions.
- They create credible arguments first: Before even thinking about the format of the content, true thought leaders are devoted to shaping their arguments first - way ahead of committing ‘pen to paper’. This nearly always results in a unique point of view that demonstrates superior insight and expertise. And it avoids using the content process altogether to formulate perspectives, because such a convoluted approach is often the single biggest killer of quality content.
- They back-up their arguments with research and client experience: Today, research-based content is seen by audiences as a key preference. Yet even those that employ this approach do so randomly, and rarely focus it on a core client problem. However, you know you’ve hit the thought leadership ‘jackpot’ when you have: a) an expert opinion citing experiences from the field; b) a laser-focus on solving a core client problem and c) credible research.
- They commit to consistently high quality content at scale: Anyone believing that a single piece of content will generate ‘leads’, does not understand thought leadership. With this expectation, it's likely that any commitment to content creation won't last long. True thought leaders have built their brand authority over time by consistently publishing articles, videos, guides, white papers, research reports and so on. Undoubtedly, some of that content failed to resonate with their audience, but it didn’t stop them from continuing to create and distribute content. And, when it comes to content quality, it’s important to remember the bar is significantly higher for thought leadership.
The 7 signs you need to change your approach
If, after reading this, you’re concerned your content may be more marketing than expert-led, then maybe it’s time to reconsider your approach. This quick checklist will help you determine if this is the case:
- Your content is created randomly across many broad topics
- Your content is not consistently focused on solving core client problems
- Your content is created before shaping your expert argument or unique perspective
- Your content doesn’t truly reflect your expertise or what you actually sell
- Your content is rarely based on learnings or real client outcomes in the field
- Your content isn’t supported by credible research
- Your content is not distributed consistently to your audience
Aside from these obvious signs, the biggest reason for change will be this. If your products or services are solving problems with high complexity, then today you must rely on thought leadership to compete. Responsibility for the production of your content therefore needs to extend beyond marketing, to be business-wide and expert-led.
So if you’re looking for a place to start, change this mindset before doing anything else.
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