Tighter budgets can be an opportunity to increase efficiency…and impact
During tough economic times, the marketing budget is often the first to be cut in organizations. As someone who has witnessed several recessions, I’ve noticed this trend continue, especially with current geopolitical unrest and declining business confidence. This poses a challenge for marketers, who are still expected to produce high-performing Thought Leadership, a critical component of B2B marketing strategy.
However, how can marketers achieve this with lower investment and fewer resources? To address this question and offer practical advice, I hosted a panel discussion with three leading experts in Thought Leadership design and delivery: Samad Masood from the Infosys Knowledge Institute, Angela Everitt from Springwise, and Mark Marone from Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning.
During our discussion, we covered tips and strategies for the four critical phases of a Thought Leadership campaign: Planning, Research Design, Content Creation, and Distribution.
Here’s a summary of our conversation.
Planning
Despite the challenges, there is still a strong appetite among C-level executives to use Thought Leadership content to inform strategic business decisions. This means that creating high-quality content can still enhance your brand reputation and drive new opportunities for your business. Therefore, there is a strong motivation for supporting a well-conceived Thought Leadership campaign.
1. Understand your audience and theme – be ruthless
It’s critical to be laser-focused on the audience you want to engage and to understand the theme that will educate and add value to them. If your company aims to cover multiple topics throughout the year, it’s better to adopt a “less is more” mindset and prioritize addressing a single topic thoughtfully and rigorously, rather than spreading yourself too thin.
2. Keep your stakeholder group small
Greater efficiency and higher quality can be achieved when fewer stakeholders are involved during the planning stage. Decisions can be made more quickly, which can help keep the project moving forward, discussions can be more focused and productive, and consensus and alignment with key objectives are easier.
3. Define success
When seeking sign-off on a project, it’s important to define the key metrics for success and gain clarity from stakeholders on their priorities from the outset. This means understanding which ROI metrics matter the most to stakeholders and incorporating them into your planning process. It’s crucial to avoid attempting to retrospectively apply success metrics once the campaign is completed, as this can lead to confusion and misalignment.
4. Demonstrate value
If you’re facing challenges in securing stakeholder agreement or additional budget, you can gather internal support by demonstrating the value of consumption and showing how TL can benefit colleagues across your business. For instance, highlight how credible TL content can help your sales team to engage clients and generate new business opportunities. Evaluate how your business compares to your competitors and the TL they produce. If your competitors are gaining an edge with great content, it’s crucial to consider the potential cost of doing nothing.
5. Embrace the power of GenAI
Creating Thought Leadership content does not have to be a high-cost endeavor, thanks to new tools that can save time and resources during the planning process. For instance, language learning models and generative AI can help you identify credible topics worth exploring further.
Research Design
Research is a critical component of most TL campaigns because it helps ensure that the content is relevant, engaging, and informative to the target audience, as well as timely in terms of current or future events.
1. Have a working hypothesis
Have a clear idea of the key messages you want to convey and the impact you want to have on your audience. This should be based on a sound working hypothesis that you want to test. This can help ensure that your content is focused and compelling, and that it delivers value to your target audience.
2. Think carefully about survey scope and complexity
Consider the size, scope, and structure of your survey. Do you need a global survey, or can you focus on key regions with minimal, or no, need for translations? Do you need to survey a wide range of job functions, and is a lengthy questionnaire necessary? Simplifying the survey or combining questions across multiple TL projects can reduce complexity. Avoid unnecessary questions, even with short surveys. When analyzing the data, think clearly in advance about the meaningful insights you want to elicit and how you want your audience to respond to avoid wasting time and resources in ‘analysis paralysis.’
3. Be open to unexpected data insights
Find a balance between being specific about the insights you’re trying to highlight and keeping an open mind on other issues that might be revealed that you hadn’t previously considered – these could potentially become a hot topic.
4. Seek feedback on the research from across your business
Involving people from marketing, PR, and other areas of your business to review the research can provide valuable feedback and insights into the issues that are most compelling to them. This can help spread ownership of the TL project and its benefits, potentially reducing internal friction and increasing buy-in for future campaigns.
Content Creation
During times of abundance, a Thought Leadership campaign would typically include a wide range of long and short-form content assets that are optimized for different platforms and designed with the user experience in mind. However, during times of scarcity, compromises must be made. To make the most of limited resources, it’s important to consider your audience and produce content based on their preferences and how they have consumed information in the past. Additionally, repurposing evergreen content that you have previously published can save time, money, and resources. In some cases, a simple update with refreshed data is all that’s needed to make the content relevant and valuable to your audience.
1. Create standalone pieces of content
Consider creating blogs or shorter articles which are less labor-intensive to produce than long-form reports. These types of content are popular among executives who have limited time and can be an effective way to share insights and information with your audience while conserving resources.
2. Consider podcasts and videos
Podcasts continue to be a powerful and cost-effective medium, as are long-form videos.
3. Serialize your long-form content
To make the most of your long-form content, it’s important to be strategic about how you publish it. Consider serializing it by releasing chapters separately or including by publishing standalone case studies that are also referenced within the main report. If you’re targeting decision-makers in specific industries, such as senior executives in healthcare or financial services, long-form content can still be critical to demonstrate your rigor and authority on the subject matter.
4. Think carefully about your publishing cadence
Choosing how and when to publish your content is a crucial balancing act. Short-form content can be published on a weekly or monthly basis to maintain relevance and visibility, but comprehensive Thought Leadership is often necessary to gain the trust and recognition of a sophisticated audience. The specific approach you take will depend on the circumstances and requirements of your firm. While it’s okay not to cover everything, it’s important not to spread yourself too thin and focus on providing the most value to your audience.
5. Handle Generative AI with care
While Chat GPT can be a useful tool during the content creation phase, it has its limitations. The tool is based on information that’s already available in the public domain, which means it can’t provide unique or original content. Additionally, in its current form, Chat GPT is unlikely to produce insights that are truly new or compelling enough to surprise your audience. Therefore, it’s important to use Chat GPT judiciously as an aid, but not to rely on it entirely or assume that it will be a silver bullet that transforms your content output.
Distribution
The final piece of the puzzle. Can you get your content in front of the people it’s meant to reach and influence?
1. Leverage free channels
Encourage senior leaders to discuss your content with clients, and promote it via company newsletters and presentations at client meetings or events. Engage internal subject matter experts or clients to write blogs that amplify key issues from your research, and publish them on third-party websites and your social media channels. Consider using LinkedIn polls as a new way to engage your audience with your research. Ensure that your content is properly contextualized and prominently displayed on your website, and carefully consider which elements (if any) should be gated.
2. Educate your sales team
Ensure your sales team is aware of and understands your content as they should ideally be the Thought Leaders when engaging clients. Create low-cost internal videos and webinars to help them understand and discuss your content, and provide guidance on how to effectively engage clients with your insights. Your sales team can also host webinars and invite clients and prospects to virtual roundtables for in-depth conversations on the topic. This can be an effective method to gain regional coverage and generate new business development opportunities.
3. Find a distribution partner
Partnering with a company in an adjacent industry that shares a similar client base can be a cost-effective way to promote your Thought Leadership. By sharing upfront research costs and co-marketing content via LinkedIn, other channels or events, you can reach a wider audience while reducing costs. However, it’s important to ensure that research questions and objectives are jointly understood and agreed upon before pursuing partnerships. Another option is to publish elements of your Thought Leadership in relevant trade publications, often for little or no cost. Contra deals with strategic partners can also be beneficial, allowing them to distribute your content to their audience for mutual benefit.
4. Don’t forget those industry events!
Identify industry or trade association events to discuss and raise awareness of your Thought Leadership. You don’t necessarily need to become a headline sponsor. Consider booking a small exhibition stand or participating in a panel discussion, which can often get you great coverage at minimal investment to a highly engaged audience.
While tough economic times can present challenges for marketing budgets, it’s still possible to produce high-performing Thought Leadership campaigns with fewer resources. By carefully planning, conducting focused research, producing content based on audience preferences, and leveraging free and low-cost distribution channels, marketers can continue to achieve their goals and drive new opportunities for their businesses.
Watch the on-demand webinar
Our webinar is available for you to watch and hear directly from our experts, or if you would like to discuss how we can help you create thought leadership with impact contact us.
