Thought leadership might mistakenly sound like a CEO who perhaps puts excessive thought into everything, as in a micromanaging approach. In fact, thought leadership is more to do with the customer in your B2B business and identifying what exactly they want. Once you know what they want, the concept expands beyond the leader of the company and into using the knowledge of all your employees. Then it expands further to providing those answers to your customers through marketing content.
It’s a marketing technique a lot more B2B companies are using as they realize customers want problems solved. In many marketing strategies, companies sometimes make it more about themselves than offering a solution to help their customers. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t provide a personal angle in order to nurture personal relationships with your B2B customers.
But how do you market toward them so it shows you’re a leader in your field? The true definition of thought leadership is proving your company is an innovator and has the answers to a problem other companies can’t solve.
Rounding Up Experts in Your Company for Marketing
When you want your company to be an innovator and provide expert answers to your B2B customers, it’s best to utilize experts in your company. You didn’t hire all your employees to just work by themselves. Hold meetings and come up with ideas for identifying new ideas that your B2B customers would want. Your marketing department can even find out what those customers want by doing extensive research analyzing big data.
Once you have those answers, you have to take it out to social media and as many outlets as you can to prove to your B2B customers you’re the leader in your field.
Providing Answers on Social Media
How do you go about providing those answers to your B2B customers on social media? To start with, you may want to create videos that you can embed on your website and on social media providing basic answers to your customers. Once you start getting inquiries from customers on wanting to know more, it’s essential to get back to them as soon as you can with expert answers.
This approach will show that you truly care about connecting and answering questions rather than letting emails or personal messages stack up. You also should prove in your video why you’re experts and why you should be taken seriously above anyone else. You can do that by proving education and proof of the work you’ve already done for other clients.
Making That Information Entertaining
All marketing, whether it be B2C or B2B, has to be done in an entertaining way so you also don’t bore your target audience. When creating a video of your above information, it could be overly technical and potentially dull without adding something fun. Comedy usually works, though it depends on your comedic timing and whether your business is suitable for that approach.
If nothing else, combining the earlier-mentioned personal angle with the information can be a golden way to grab attention. Most customers, even in the B2B community, appreciate a personal edge to create a good relationship with another business. When you can equate a personal story to the innovative information you’re providing, you can easily capture people’s emotions. And when you can do that, you have a stronger marketing pull than even comedy provides.
Much success,
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