Authoritative and transparent content can instill trust in B2B audiences. Is integrating thought leadership with demand gen the best way to ensure this?
96% of executives assert that thought leadership helps them make insightful and informed business decisions, inspiring them to take action.
Previously, this type of content was generally flagged as a biased opinion rather than an informative insight.
But, with more and more business leaders consuming thought leadership content, organizations have taken further steps to integrate it into their content marketing strategies.
Over 75% of C-suite executives and decision-makers assert that thought leadership led them to learn more about a specific product or service, they were not even considering before.
Thought leadership content is original and valuable. It builds relevance and credibility between different executives, allowing them to collaborate and build recognition with each other.
This shows how important thought leadership is for demand generation. There are barely any requirements for references and citations, this content is evidence-based, making it reliable and authentic. It conveys what the thought leader stands for – who is the face of their brand. Similarly, thought leadership instills other thought leaders’ trust in your brand, establishing it as one of the most advantageous demand-gen strategies.
Demand generation strategy is driving your B2B conversion rates.
It is a marketing tactic that builds brand awareness for your business and generates interest to acquire a maximum number of high-quality leads. Demand gen helps you find, learn more about, and nurture leads by making them realize your services can solve their problem. This is how marketers generate interest and demand.
Most often, your business taps into a niche market and offers solutions to prospective clients. For this to work, the brand awareness strategy should be reliable and optimistic. If the awareness strategy is effective, it helps educate potential clients regarding your business, persuading them that your solutions and offers are genuine.
How can your clients trust you while increasing their reliability on your solutions? By crafting a compelling demand-generation strategy.
It should be authoritative. Your content should establish your industry expertise, i.e., highlight your authority in the chosen field or the subject matter.
This is where thought leadership steps in.
The thought leadership goal is to sound like an expert and establish yourself as one to prospective clients. It is a common but advantageous tactic used by content marketers to prove their credibility and themselves as leaders across the industry. Through thought leadership content that is educational and helpful, your brand shows that it’s an active participant across the chosen industrial domain.
In simpler terms, you have to illustrate that your brand is helpful, i.e., one that a customer turns towards for solutions or expertise in a distinct subject matter. Hence, educating and guiding the customers are the necessary functionalities of thought leadership. You generate new leads, initiate proof of your expertise, and boost engagement across socials through this content type.
Thought leadership content has helped drive demand and revenue – the two asks of the competitive and fast-paced marketing world.
It has assisted in bridging the gap between the expectations of the audiences and those creating the content. Something that traditional marketing tactics have failed to do.
When marketing teams allocate resources to implement their strategies, they should allocate time for mapping approaches that build trust and loyalty. When personal brands of thought leaders overlap with their professional experience, the value of the business also strengthens.
Here are the different ways in which integrating thought leadership with demand gen can prove effective for your brand –
Call-To-Actions (CTAs)
Call-to-actions guide prospects or users in taking the next step across the demand gen funnel, constituting awareness (TOFU), consideration (MOFU), and conversion (BOFU).
Your brand has already established itself as the thought leader. But through carefully placed call-to-actions (in blogs, podcasts, and emails), you urge the prospects towards the problem-solving step by implementing a smart demand gen strategy.
This could include asking them to sign up for weekly newsletters, downloading whitepapers & resources, and registering for webinars.
A strong CTA in a strategic and well-thought-out position convinces the leads to take action by telling them what to do next and guiding them through the decision-making process. When the prospects undergo a less exhaustive and complicated process (by hand holding them through the demand gen funnel), they are more likely to purchase, boosting the conversion rate. The trip through the funnel – from awareness to purchase – becomes hassle-free.
By providing their contact information, the clients have already moved to the next step of the tunnel, meanwhile, for marketers, acquiring leads becomes straightforward.
Lead Magnets
Marketing teams use lead magnets to create SQLs. They offer free resources or trial periods to collect the leads’ contact information.
This is how gated contents also work. Controlled access has become the new axiom of businesses. Remember that this type of content doesn’t contribute towards brand awareness or visibility because hidden content doesn’t drive traffic. It serves a different purpose.
The gated content should be valuable and informative, enabling users to provide their contact information in exchange. These should include topics that specifically resonate with the target audience and address their pain points.
When a prospect clicks on a CTA to avail of gated content, they are redirected to a landing page that has to be strong and provide value, like an eBook or a whitepaper. Meanwhile, the landing page includes a form before you access the content. This form should have clear instructions and be straightforward and user-friendly, allowing a simple user experience.
It is easier to receive the user’s email addresses and contact information, helping segment the accounts for effective email marketing campaigns.
This marketing method eventually helps marketing-qualified leads convert to sales-qualified leads efficiently, boosting the lead nurturing process.
Nurture Campaigns
Content has become one of the most sought-after tools in this fast-paced digital marketing era. It has helped generate demand, nurture leads, and convert them efficiently.
Following this, your brand can offer expertise and valuable insights, boosting engagement and increasing conversion rates through high-quality thought leadership content. The goal is to turn the cold leads into hot ones who will eventually make a purchase.
Thought leadership content can help your brand build this credibility and make it the go-to resource across a niche market. When prospective clients face a marketing challenge, you should be their primary solution provider.
Miscellaneous Content Formats
One of the top goals of integrating a demand gen strategy with thought leadership is to drive engagement. And diversifying your content formats is one way to achieve this. It may range from blogs, landing pages, podcasts, infographics to eBooks, whitepapers, and interviews.
This includes valuable, insightful, informative, and relevant content that taps into a niche market, helping situate your brand as the authority. On a broader scale, it should address complex issues in a specific domain.
Take marketing as an example. The iterated content should establish a correlation between the marketing challenges and your branding solutions. Ensuring subtlety in this regard will emphasize the professionalism that industry experts often exude.
Market your brand instead of selling it!
Take podcasts for example. This form of content has a longer shelf-life. They are easily accessible to visitors and offer an expansive library of valuable content that educates. When you target a niche market, thought leadership through a podcast can offer a deeper insight into complex topics, turning it into memorable and shareable content in solutions.
Sharing snippets from a podcast episode works as an interesting demand-gen strategy. They instill interest and drive the traffic towards the podcast or the associated landing page.
Content such as podcast series makes the target audience receptive to offers, establishing authenticity through expert opinions. This discussion type provides a humanistic tone, making the listeners believe that the speakers speak from years of experience rather than following a script.
Quality thought leadership content is an effective way to attract high-quality leads.
So, thought leadership pieces should focus less on the organization itself and more on the audience meeting their preferences.
Omnichannel Promotions and Campaigns
Promoting through different marketing platforms boosts visibility and drives traffic. When the content is published on these platforms, including social media, new audiences might gravitate towards it, depending on how much it resonates with them.
This strategy is one of the crucial ways the marketing team can use to reach the prospects effectively. It assists in generating leads, allowing you to track the performance of each channel individually.
However, different channels lack consistent and cohesive brand experience. Here, you may pair the thought leadership pieces with the right channel, depending on its format, size, and length.
For example, when you post a small LinkedIn caption interlinking other content published by your brand, those interested might tap on ‘learn more’, taking them to the podcast or the landing page. This boosts your website traffic along with your brand awareness.
However, the bottom line is that regardless of the platform you post your content on, it should carry a consistent expert tone and voice. It should seem like an extension of a brand and not sound like an altogether different brand.
Uniformity remains the key to successful marketing campaigns.
Thought leadership can help market your knowledge to the audience, interest invested prospects, and establish brand value.
Demand gen is educational and informative, benefitting your brand for the long term. It offers you the bigger picture – instituting you as the thought leader and amplifying your brand reach to a bigger audience. Collaborating with other industry experts will allow your brand to create a network driving demand generation.
This unique collaboration between thought leadership and demand gen aims to magnify your impact, broaden your reach, and amplify your brand voice. Lead generation remains crucial, but we often forget the significance of demand generation.
Integrating demand gen with thought leadership has only propelled its importance further. Through compelling content, such as podcast appearances and guest blogs, thought leadership puts forth a unique perspective available on an established platform.
Today, thought leadership makes efficient use of digital marketing platforms to reach fresh audiences, build a loyal following, and drive demand gen while serving the main purpose, i.e., establishing authority.
In the fast-paced digital scape, marketers use thought leadership as a strategic tool to generate revenue, demand, and lead. Therefore, none can argue that thought leadership has elevated demand gen.
Thought leadership with a demand gen program has a transformative impact on your brand and your audience. By embracing this marketing strategy, you allow trust, innovation, and credibility to seep in.
Every content educates your readers but thought leadership content transforms your brand into an indispensable resource.
If, as a developing business, you wish to cultivate a loyal following, aligning thought leadership with demand-gen goals will help solidify trust in your expertise.