Five Reasons Why Your Business Should Consider Producing Thought Leadership Content
In the course of delivering your product or service to clients, your business has developed a wealth of domain knowledge and expertise. But why share that wealth?
Skeptics may wonder if the returns on producing thought leadership content are too uncertain to justify the investment of time and effort. But with the assistance of thought leadership content services like ThoughtLede, the investment of time need not be overly burdensome. And that investment pays off in myriad ways. The construction of a library of impactful, evergreen content can deliver compounding returns, paying handsome dividends for years to come.
Here are five clear benefits of developing thought leadership content for your business to consider.
Educate customers and prospects
When a product or service - or even an industry, like crypto for example - is relatively new, the public requires education on the subject matter before it can consider early adoption. Companies that effectively provide that education differentiate themselves from the competition and create a lasting impression on prospective customers. If you can successfully teach an audience, you can earn its trust as well. When that audience is prepared to make its purchasing decisions, the choice will be obvious. The demonstration of deep domain knowledge is especially critical early in the adoption cycle when the search for credible information and answers is at its most active point.
Consider the crypto example: companies like Coinbase and Gemini have built formidable libraries of resource content on topics as novel as “What is Bitcoin” or “How to keep your crypto secure” to educate and onboard crypto newcomers. As prospective purchasers peruse the depths of this content, they become increasingly comfortable with the domain expertise of the author. Their very research of the topic suggests they have more purchasing intent than most, and should they make the ultimate decision to purchase crypto, they’ve developed enough comfort with Coinbase or Gemini to execute that purchase through them.
In an industry like crypto, where education is a significant barrier to entry, reducing that friction is a meaningful value-add.
Build credibility
When businesses share valuable insights with industry audiences, they begin to build a reputation as a credible expert in their field. While this reputation can be valuable in building the sales funnel and converting prospects into customers, the immediate impact need not be solely sales oriented. A reputation as a thought leader can attract requests from well regarded and widely read press organizations who may wish to feature your business or your personnel in articles on the industry. They may cite facts and figures from your company’s content or quote your executives. Of course, one quote or media citation does not convert directly into revenue. However, these features tend to have a compounding effect.
Readers of those publications begin to think of your company as an industry leader. Journalists from other publications see your work featured and seek your company’s input in their own pieces on the industry. Awareness of your company spreads exponentially over time, and these media citations beget more media citations. All of this reputational gain traces its roots to one piece of thoughtfully created content that provided value to its readers.
Generate leads
Thought leadership content can be a very effective way to gather leads that might become future customers. By leveraging unique insights from a company’s own customer base or by conducting primary or secondary research on the market in which it operates, a business can create reports that provide something of value to industry constituents. Those reports are composed in PDF format, and readers are prompted to provide contact information before they’re able to download the material. If they’re interested enough to read content on the industry, they’re likely to be actively engaged in it; that makes them high quality leads. For that reason, these PDFs are referred to as “lead magnets.”
For those businesses hoping to grow their email list or feed their sales personnel with new potential prospects, thought leadership content is a proven solution.
Demonstrate expertise
In some knowledge-based professions, the quality of an organization’s insights and ideas is the deciding factor in a customer’s choice to work with them. That being the case, consistently demonstrating a high caliber of expertise in a format easily digested by clients and prospects is of the utmost importance. These pursuits are particularly relevant in the investment world, where the quality of investment research and portfolio allocation ideas are significant selling points. Without content that credibly illustrates the firm’s investment outlook and strategy, clients are left to cross their fingers and hope for the best - as you can imagine, that’s not a winning recipe for client retention.
Similar themes ring true for agency based work; consider marketing agencies - prospective clients are eager to hear unique ideas that are creating differentiated and outsized results before entrusting their strategy to a third party. Thought leadership content highlights those ideas in a format that renders the firm’s expertise undeniable.
Illustrate value proposition
Without being overtly and gratuitously salesy, thought leadership content can elegantly illustrate the value proposition of a product or service. Thought leaders in an industry often create guides and content that share best practices and tips for solving a pain point. But here’s the thing: readers don’t like heavy-handed sales content. They like to learn how to solve their problems. And if it sounds too hard to solve those problems on their own, then they’re happy to have the problem solved for them. So rather than leaning hard into selling product, effective thought leadership content first shares more general information on the relevant steps that should be taken to solve a problem. Those steps may be burdensome to put into practice independently, so the author harmlessly plugs their offering, which automates and simplifies the execution of the process in a tidy package, delivering a no-brainer solution for consumers.
In that regard, thought leadership content can be a benevolent trojan horse.
Take Stripe as an example. The fintech behemoth offers services in payments, fraud prevention, billing, invoicing, revenue recognition, and various other tangential categories. Each of these topics is incredibly complex in nature. Stripe content dutifully explains the complicated rails of the payment processing world in simplified terms, but it also doesn’t shy away from reality: it’s a cumbersome world to understand and an even harder one to navigate independently. In many of their guides, the company illuminates a complex topic and then makes a quick plug for a Stripe service that offers a very simple, plug-and-play solution. For instance, in one section of a guide to accepting online payments, the company offers practical tips on increasing the efficacy of checkout pages. Those tips are immediately followed by a quick mention of “Stripe Checkout,” a drop-in checkout page that seamlessly puts all of those tips into action. The reader is then faced with a decision: do I try to put these best practices into place on my own, or do I just use Stripe’s ready-made tool?
I know how I’m answering.
An aside: case studies can sometimes be slightly more overt in their marketing intent, but when done well, they still provide valuable insight on navigating certain problems or achieving greater efficiency. They just more directly highlight a company’s specific services as the obvious mechanism used in the solution of those problems.
Are you ready to begin generating new leads, moving prospects down the sales funnel, driving new revenue, and demonstrating your expertise? Let’s get started on a suite of thought leadership content for your business. Reach out to the team at ThoughtLede today.