When it comes to B2B marketing, creating thought leadership content is a crucial step that can’t be forgotten. C-suite executives and B2B decision makers are consuming more thought leadership content than ever before, with 54% and 52%, respectively, spending at least an hour reading through this type of content every week.
Thought leadership content helps to not only elevate your brand’s visibility, but positions you as an authority within your field. This authority makes you seem more trustworthy, allowing you to better sell your products and services to readers.
But creating this type of content can be difficult. Here, we’ll go through how we produce high-quality thought leadership content.
What is Thought Leadership?
Thought leadership simply means establishing your brand as an authority speaker within your niche or industry. This means that your brand is recognised as a leading figure in the field, with strong expertise and experience working in the industry. It also means that any content produced is considered to be of high value, and the brand name holds a lot of credibility.
However, thought leadership goes further than just sharing your opinions or giving information. It has a deeper focus on providing value and usefulness to your audience, such as offering up advice or predictions about future trends. You want to be seen as a trailblazer, and someone who fully understands the industry that you’re commenting on.
What is thought leadership in marketing?
In marketing, thought leadership has a focus on what you create, whether that’s video, blogs, social media posts, or even commenting and engaging with other content. You want to use your marketing activity and budget to build relationships and trust with your target audience — and even appear in front of new audiences.
Use your content to show off your expertise and authority within your niche. In B2B tech marketing, this means explaining how your product or service is beneficial to C-suite executives. Take customer pain points and real user journeys into account, and give advice on how you can help overcome these challenges.
You want to avoid producing generic content that speaks to a broad audience. Zero in on specific challenges. Create guides, video how-tos, infographics, or any other helpful content to position yourself as an expert in solving these problems.
Focusing on producing these types of helpful content bring a number of benefits:
- Build trust and credibility: By showing you know exactly what challenges face business owners and empathising with them, you can position yourself and your brand as a trusted advisor.
- Engage with decision makers: Your content should ideally be aimed at the people in charge. When they like, comment, or even share your content, you can network directly with them.
- Improve brand visibility: Unique and authoritative content ranks higher in search engine results pages, generating more traffic to your website and improving your brand visibility.
- Create lasting relationships: By posting advice consistently, you can build a network of dedicated followers who want to partner with you.
How to Create Thought Leadership Content
Now you understand why you should be creating thought leadership content, we can go into detail about how.
It requires a planned-out strategic approach. You want to take a look into what problems your customers are facing, and how you can help them rather than your competitors. This doesn’t necessarily mean constantly pitching your product, either. It’s about creating that trust. You want to prove that your brand is better and more trustworthy than your competitors.
Here are our tips to make your brand stand out in the market.
1. Engage with industry experts
Engaging and interacting with industry experts shows to audiences that you’re on the same level as these experts. If you’re just starting out in the field, it’s crucial to consistently engage with specialists, as it can build brand authority and recognition amongst the specific expert as well as their followers. However, if you already have a name for yourself, it’s critical that you continue to engage with experts, so they’re more like your peers.
Content that features insights from influential voices and experts elevates the credibility of the piece. These valuable perspectives are ones that your audience will trust and connect with, and can provide unique insights that you can’t get from simply crawling the web.
By engaging and creating a conversion, you’re able to unlock opinions, theories, and ideas that may not have been spoken about prior. And, if you can’t find this content anywhere else, it makes it even more valuable.
This is why we produce B2B podcasts with industry analysts that have been specifically chosen depending on the guest and podcast topic. By having an analyst specific to that topic, we can encourage useful content that our audience wants to listen to and engage with.
If you’re interested in learning how to appear as a guest on one of our podcasts, get in touch with our team.
2. Take part in roundtable discussions
Just like appearing on a podcast gets your voice heard, so does taking part in roundtables, panels, and other discussions. These are all excellent ways to participate in high-level conversations with other industry professionals — and shows that your company is an expert at solving challenges specific to the industry.
3. Leverage industry data and research
One of the best ways to position yourself as a thought leader is to provide your audience with exclusive insights backed by data. Original research, proprietary reports, and exclusive industry insights not only give your content credibility but also ensure that it provides new value.
If you don’t have the budget for a full-blown research project, you can do this for free (or, at a very low cost) by asking customers to fill in a survey and gathering data from responses. Or, if you notice any trends in the buying data you already hold, you can publish a report based on that.
When it comes to publishing the data, the world is your oyster. You can create videos and infographics, publish blogs and whitepapers, or even discuss your findings in conferences or on podcasts. Or, if you really wanted to, you can do all of the above to really get your voice heard.
Leveraging the unique data you have to hand means that no one else has this information and insight, giving you an edge over your competitors. It can also generate links back to your website and content if other publications pick up on the data you’ve published. This helps with brand authority and recognition, meaning that your thought leadership content is truly working.
4. Repurpose content into multiple formats
As mentioned above, you can publish your content in a number of different ways. And if you really want to reach as wide an audience as you can, we strongly recommend repurposing your content into various formats.
For example, you may have a whitepaper that has tons of unique insights and data. But what happens if people aren’t reading it? Then, you might want to appear on a podcast to discuss your specific findings with an industry leader. Once you’ve filmed and recorded your podcast, you could create video snippets to share across social media, with 30-second sound-bites for your social networks to listen to and engage with. This engagement then reaches out to your audience’s network, getting more listeners to engage with your social post, then podcast episode, and, ultimately, your whitepaper.
At EM360Tech, we’re passionate about repurposed content. We want to ensure that every piece of content we produce is seen by as many people as possible. This is why we have teams dedicated to creating podcasts, video, whitepapers, and social media posts, promoting all our content to our network of over 600,000 listeners.
5. Stay relevant
Thought leadership relies on innovation and relevancy. You need to constantly keep on top of the latest industry news and trends — while also using your knowledge and expertise to make predictions about what is to come.
Sharing your perspective and predictions about upcoming trends cements your position as a forward-thinking brand with authority. By sharing your predictions, you also show audiences that you have deep industry knowledge and you’re committed to the niche that you’re working in. It may well be the one thing that separates you from your competitors.
Become a Thought Leader with EM360Tech
So, now you know how to be a thought leader. The real challenge you’re facing now is going out and doing it. Luckily, we’re on hand to help.
Thought leadership content is where we really shine. By leveraging our platform, you can gain access to exclusive analyst insights, content syndication, and an audience of over 600,000 B2B professionals.
Whether you’re looking to publish original whitepapers, repurpose content into more engaging formats, or the opportunity to appear on established podcasts with industry leaders, EM3690Tech can help. Get in touch with our team today, and let us turn you into an industry leader.