How to bring readers to your firm’s thought leadership content

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Traditional marketing came within the sort of constant interruptions for the consumer: Commercial ads between shows on TV or radio, billboards on a highway, newspaper ads then forth. This did little to align their interests or preferences with product or service promotions. The intent was wont to seek a consumer’s attention. But there was hardly any scope to customize this content. Of course, it also had the other effect when their attention or mindshare dwindled with such production of content.

Relevant and timely content that helped engage prospects and consumers was the necessity of the hour. Marketers realised that stories told in unique ways in which didn’t directly pitch products and services was a trusted thanks to attract and retain customers consistently. This became widely referred to as content marketing, and within the B2C context focused on creating content that’s purpose-driven—or even emotionally engaging to influence purchase behaviour.

In the B2B context, content marketing transcended into the realm of “thought leadership” to articulate the worth of unique points-of-view and research-backed insights to influence executive decision-making. consistent with Bill Sherman, COO and Thought Leadership Practice Lead, Thought Leadership Leverage, “Content marketing is primarily wont to fill today’s sales pipeline. Thought leadership can serve two very different roles: It can fill a sales pipeline today, and it also can be wont to build and sustain relationships when a sales conversation would be awkward or inappropriate”.

Edelman and LinkedIn launched a worldwide annual report on B2B Thought Leadership in 2017 to live the impact of thought leadership. They found that decision-makers wanted thought leadership to be “timely, relevant and substantive”. However, a majority of executives were disappointed by the standard of insights produced by companies. within the 2020 Thought Leadership Impact study, the standard of thought leadership content remains a cause for concern.

The ability to conceive and systematically evolve ideas and insights that have lasting value is at the guts of thought leadership. the thought is so original and powerful that it delivers value during a big variety of scenarios. Such ideas emerge when (a) we will specialise in the foremost fundamental problems without getting confused or distracted, (b) we stay calm and assured when the thought meets strong resistance, and (c) we patiently overcome the barriers and evolve the thought to form it strong and acceptable to several . Thought leaders have the unique ability to synchronise their thoughts, words and deeds—that precisely is that the source of their clarity and power.

True thought leadership isn’t almost predicting the longer term . it’s the power to ascertain the possible future scenarios even when this is chaotic. it’s not limited to a selected product or industry. it’s the power to practice systems thinking and appearance at the complex dynamics of interactions across industries. Thought leadership is made on a robust foundation of insights about customer, technology, market, economy, regulation, politics etc. and their influence on one another .

Thought leadership platforms

Building and sustaining momentum on insights-generation and consumption needs a strong foundation and governance structure across the organisation. it’s one thing to create good quality insights, it’s quite another to make sure it’s built for the users. Thought leadership content often lives across a number of siloed systems and platforms without streamlining distribution to customize by the customers’ interest. The challenge with current insights-platforms is that they don’t understand the users tolerably to personalise the experience for them.

Far too many companies can now create thought leadership on low-cost platforms without giving much thought into the standard of the platform. We discussed this with Douglas B. Laney, bestselling author of the book Infonomics: “In effect, thought leadership has become a more egalitarian endeavour. quite ideas approximately much a change in culture, it’s the democratisation of ideas offered by a breadth of low-to-zero cost ideation platforms like blogs, podcasts, social media and self-publishing. These platforms also offer a teeming ocean of ideas upon which to create . That is, thought leadership has become, not such a lot overtly collaborative, a virtuous (and, yes, sometimes vicious) self-perpetuating Bessler’s Wheel of imagination,” noted Laney.

Transition to a destination site model
Traditional thought leadership relies on a cumbersome process without timely intervention and actionable insights at every stage of the publishing cycle. For thought leadership to resonate with the changing interests of consumers, publishing on different digital platforms alone doesn’t cut it. Such a technique wouldn’t be ready to preserve the individuality of the thought amid all the noise, resulting in inferiority of insights.

Firms got to build a ‘destination-site’ model in order that a primary platform becomes a trusted source of curated insights by topical preference. A destination site model establishes the thought leadership platform as a brand that customers attend for fresh insights, rather than checking out the knowledge they have . Firms can do this by planning for fresh insights, co-creating content with influencers, collaborative review in an agile way, and automating distribution to the proper audience . When done consistently, this is able to influence decision-making around critical buyer issues to extend brand value significantly.

About the authors: Vishwas Anand and S Ramachandran are consultants within the thought leadership team at Infosys Knowledge Institute. Dr. Shankar Venugopal is vice chairman , and Dean, Mahindra Technical Academy, Mahindra & Mahindra.