Trust plays a critical part in shaping your company’s brand perception. It also impacts buyer confidence in working with your company. One of the primary drivers of this trust is authentic thought leadership.

Thought leadership content surfaces your company’s earned secrets of unique perspectives, experiences, and resources you have.

You share those thoughts with your audience through content to position yourself as a leader in your industry. It helps you build credibility, earn trust, and gain customer loyalty.

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers are well-positioned today to build relationships with future customers through thought-leadership content.

The real value of thought leadership is often assumed, but it’s rarely measured.

According to research from Edelman and LinkedIn, most marketers significantly undervalue the power of thought leadership.

As a result of dismissing thought leadership, marketers see their demand and lead generation efforts suffer.

Edelman and LinkedIn interviewed 1,300 C-suite executives and business decision-makers.

The results underscore that marketers who produce thought leadership content consistently underestimate its impact on demand generation and on the buyer’s journey.

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Marketers don’t realize the power of thought leadership on demand generation

The Edelman and LinkedIn study shows that 26% of marketers believed that thought leadership helped them close business.

Furthermore, 58% of decision-makers said that thought leadership influenced them to work with that company.

As a result of underestimating the power of thought leadership, marketers have less impact on helping their companies win business from current customers and potential new customers.

The bottom line is that thought leadership helps your sales team participate in more requests for proposals (RFPs) and helps your company make the shortlist of final vendor candidates.

The Edelman and LinkedIn thought leadership study highlights some key points:

• 55% of decision-makers read thought leadership content to vet potential vendors
• 82% of decision-makers say thought leadership increased their trust in a company
• 90% of decision-makers believe companies need to create thought leadership content
• 79% of C-suite executives want thought leadership to show them new trends or issues

The study shows that successful thought leadership content helps build your brand, open new doors with potential customers, and close deals in your pipeline.

Strong thought leadership content conveys the quality of your work. It boosts your company’s reputation.

Thought leadership can help you amplify demand and lead a generation strategy.

Thought leadership is an integral part of your marketing strategy and improves alignment between marketing and sales. These five tips can help you create better thought leadership content.

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1. Create a Vision

According to the Edelman and LinkedIn study, decision-makers want you to have a vision for thought leadership.

So much so that 88% of decision-makers felt it was important for companies to lay out a future vision.

Decision-makers know in advance what they want from your content before they consume it.

To paint that vision, start with a vision statement. It’s a statement that looks to the future, envisioning how your company will look in 3, 5, and 10 years.

In a short paragraph, it communicates your goals for the future and unites your company around a common purpose.

The vision statement needs emotion and passion, not a boring list of corporate goals. It needs to spark them to take action.

Don’t confuse a mission statement with a vision statement.

A vision statement is based on the future (where is my company going?), while a mission statement is based on the present (what does my company do?).

To create a vision statement, involve others, display it proudly, keep it concise, and be specific.

A good example is Microsoft’s vision statement. It’s a short, sweet, and powerful statement that inspires a feeling of success.

2. Make it digestible, readable, and easy to find

It is essential to create content that is easy to digest, scan, and comprehend.

Think of your thought leadership as Google does. Google will rate your website high in its search results if your content is useful.

The search engine wants to help its searchers quickly find what they are looking for.

Google has one goal: searcher task accomplishment. It learns each time a user searches on Google.

Google wants to give each searcher answers to their question(s) as soon as possible. They reward websites that quickly help the needs of their searchers with excellent thought leadership content.

Your thought leadership content should be at an 8th-grade reading level.

According to the Edelman and LinkedIn thought leadership study, 72% of decision-makers say that brevity and ease of absorption make thought leadership very compelling.

Besides having thought leadership content that is digestible and readable, it should be easy to find.

According to the Edelman and LinkedIn study, 47% of decision-makers find it through their LinkedIn feeds and Google search.

Additionally, 32% of decision-makers find it through colleagues, conferences, or opt-in sources, while 18% find it through paid and earned social media and search channels.

3. Quality over quantity

Quality is more important than quantity for creating successful thought leadership content that drives results. Don’t create content for the sake of having more content. It can backfire on you.

Insightful and value-driven thought leadership content is critical to building an audience that trusts your company.

A good rule of thumb is to create fewer, higher-quality thought leadership pieces than to produce a lot of content that doesn’t provide much value.

According to the Edelman and LinkedIn study, marketers who produced thought leadership content said 25% of their content was “very good” or “excellent.”

Decision-makers in the study agreed. They cited that 18% of thought leadership content was at the level marketers thought it was.

4. Reframe the conversation

According to the Edelman and LinkedIn study, 55% of decision-makers use thought leadership content to vet potential partners and vendors.

This statistic shows that well-produced thought leadership content boosts your business’s reputation.

So, how do you do it right?

You reframe the conversation happening right now about a topic.

Change a decision-maker’s mind with your new point of view with reliable data.

This unique perspective should give them a scenario that resembles their situation. It should focus on the real source of their problem.

If decision-makers don’t understand how your thought leadership content makes their lives better, they won’t care.

They want content that helps them excel at their jobs, save their company money, improve work processes, and gain a competitive advantage.

A simple shift in that perspective can make your thought leadership more effective.

You want to get your decision-makers to say: “Wow, I never thought of it like that before.”

After extensive research across a wide range of industries, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a subsidiary of the global research firm Gartner, found that challenger salespeople are more successful.

Why?

They provide unique insights, help their customers avoid pitfalls, and challenge their thinking.

5. Educate internally

According to the Edelman and LinkedIn study, 26% of marketers thought such content was directly responsible for helping them close business.

In contrast, 58% of decision-makers said that thought leadership led them to award business to a company.

With most B2B sales cycles getting longer and larger, it’s essential for marketing to educate and empower salespeople to leverage their thought leadership content.

Marketing can enable sales to have better conversations with their customers and prospects.

The modern sales process today is about education, consultation, and effective communication.

Marketing plays a significant role in the sales process.

Thought leadership offers an excellent platform for your company to bring its collective ideas and insights to life.

Your thought leadership content should include additional elements, such as internal talking points, sales scripts, and checklists highlighting its importance.

It should also include multimedia tools, such as a video, to further explain the ideas presented in the thought leadership content.

After you create your thought leadership content, your work isn’t done because your sales team needs to be empowered to deliver the message.

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Bringing it all together

A poorly executed thought leadership plan could have an opposite effect, leading decision-makers to remove you from consideration, so it’s important that you do it correctly.

Thought leadership is most likely untapped at your company. It shouldn’t be because thought leadership can boost the size and scope of your sales deals.

Building trust with your customers and prospects is problematic because it takes time and effort. By utilizing thought leadership, you can enhance your overall marketing efforts.

To improve your thought leadership, create a vision that’s digestible, readable, and easy to find.

Also, make sure you concentrate on quality over quantity, reframe the conversation, and educate internally.

As a marketer myself, I’m asking you — my fellow marketers — not to undervalue the power of thought leadership content.

It significantly impacts your demand and lead-generation efforts, demonstrates marketing’s value, improves alignment between marketing and sales, and helps your company grow.

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