According to Wikipedia, a thought leader is an individual or firm recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded. If your company offers an innovative approach that is unique and important to your target audience AND you have the ability to articulate the amazing outcomes your innovative approach provides, then you are a thought leader. All you need is a structured approach for turning that thought leadership into an effective content marketing strategy that will nurture interested readers into future buyers.
The “WHY, HOW and WHAT” of Content Marketing
If you haven’t read Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why, I highly recommend it. It is the clearest and most compelling framework for establishing a value proposition I have found. If you want a brief introduction to the concept, check out this video of Simon explaining his Start With Why concept. It’s an 18-minute video, but you can get the essence of his concept by viewing 2:00-5:50. I bring this up because Sinek’s approach for articulating your value proposition is also a great way to formulate a content marketing strategy to establish thought leadership. Here’s the basic premise: Thought leaders don’t sell – they educate, inform and engage with prospective buyers. This is the essence of inbound marketing, a more powerful way to build awareness for your company and turn prospects into buyers.
A Content Marketing Framework
Just follow Sinek’s simple 3-question framework for building your own content marketing strategy and your inbound marketing assets (website, blog and social media sites), your outbound marketing programs (webinars, email campaigns and telemarketing) and your sales enablement resources (presentations, tools and training) will provide a cohesive and compelling sales and marketing framework for fueling your business.
WHY do readers care about your content?
Your content marketing strategy must address the end-goals of your audience so be sure to describe the amazing outcomes (business benefits and customer experiences) that can be realized by reading your content. In the IT services world, amazing outcomes are in the form of organizational efficiencies and cost savings resulting from a better way to deploy and manage technologies, products and services. Customer experiences are the end-user and buyer benefits realized when your approach is followed, versus the alternatives. However, there is a subtle, but critically important distinction to keep in mind. Don’t slip into sales mode and describe your company’s value proposition. This is about thought leadership. Don’t pontificate WHY your audience should do business with you. That’s just old-fashioned salesmanship. Thought leaders don’t need to sell. They educate, inform and engage their audience. Do this and you will establish trust and demonstrate leadership. If you are objective, authoritative and focused on the needs of the customer, buyers will find you, the sales process will have less friction and your sales team will experience a higher success rate.
HOW do you create amazing outcomes and experiences?
At the core of your content marketing strategy is HOW these amazing business outcomes and customer experiences are created. This dimension of your content must have real substance. This is your intellectual property, so to speak. How you create amazing outcomes is a result of your best practices and methodologies. It shows that you have thought about, developed, refined and ultimately perfected the best way to achieve the results your customers value the most. As a thought leader, your role is to share the wealth of those experiences with prospective buyers by educating, informing and engaging with them. The HOW dimension of your content marketing strategy must “pay off” the expectations set by the WHY dimension. You have successfully raised their curiosity by describing amazing outcomes, now you must satisfy that curiosity with an explanation of how those outcomes will be created. I am not saying give away the store. After all, your intellectual property is how you make money. But you must provide enough value to demonstrate your expertise and repay the reader for the time they invested to read your blog post or for the email address they provided to request your eBook.
WHAT are key products, services or technologies that enable amazing outcomes?
Hand-in-hand with HOW you create amazing outcomes is explaining WHAT tools you will use to make them happen. As a thought leader, you are not talking about products and services because you want to sell them (even though you are). You are describing the role they play in creating business outcomes and customer experiences. You are educating your audience about the importance of key product features to various deployment scenarios. You are demystifying the complex emerging technologies that are profoundly impacting their industry segments. You are explaining and justifying the strategy that went into building out your product portfolio. You are simply an educator because the need for selling products and services has been replaced by an enormous level of trust and credibility established by sharing your vision (WHY) and your expertise (HOW). You are believable because you believe in what you do. You are believable because you are a thought leader.
In a future blog post I will break down the Content Marketing Framework illustrated above into its component parts and describe the execution of your content marketing strategy using the elements of this framework.