Build trust.

Thought leadership is your best growth opportunity.

What is thought leadership?

Data-backed thought leadership is additive, newsworthy, and educational. 

It teaches your audience something they didn’t know. It challenges the status quo. And it helps your audience achieve a goal or get better at something they care about.

Thought leadership is built on your unique expertise, but it’s not about you. It unveils opportunities for customers, but it’s not transactional.  

Why invest in thought leadership?

Generic content doesn’t cut it.

  • 61% of decision makers say thought leadership is more effective at demonstrating value vs sales-y, product-focused content. (LinkedIn/Edelman 2022)

  • Executives are 20% more likely to consider original research/data a key element of high-value content and 86% of buyers say engaging with content has accelerated their purchase decision. (Kickstand/Pavilion 2023)

It’s not enough to be self-promotional and call it “thought leadership.” Buyers are savvy.

You have to build trust with your target audience ahead of time to be in contention: 80-90% of buyers have list of vendors in mind before doing any research; 90% choose vendor from that list. (Bain/HBR 2023)

That’s why high quality thought leadership is such a powerful tool in go-to-market.

How it works.

Thought leadership changes mindsets and delivers good revenue.

Our approach.

We’ll partner with you to make the most of your limited opportunity to build trust with buyers. The framework is:

  1. What are we trying to change in the world? 

  2. Who is this for? 

  3. What is the nonobvious insight? 

  4. How is this unique? 

  5. Does the audience get more value from this than we do? 

1| Meaningful insights.

We start with deep market research or internal data analysis to surface unique, nonobvious insights that serve your target audience.

2| Core assets.

Insights are tested for value and packaged appropriately for the target audience. How does the insight change minds? What are future dimensions of the asset/s?

3| Launch plan.

We’ll build campaigns, earned media pitches, and a speakers bureau, including media training. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for your target audience to consumer your message and insights.

4| Downstream distribution.

Widespread consumption of valuable information that changes mindsets happens in the social/media channels where your audience lives, not on your blog.

Google increasingly rewards unique insights that demonstrate information gain over commoditized content (Search Engine Land 2023). It’s crucial to have a strong plan and relevant assets for the long tail, including search.

5| Effective KPIs.

The buyer journey changed forever, and so has perfect tracking. If you’re expecting leads and direct attribution from thought leadership you’ll be disappointed (SparkToro 2023).

Thought leadership builds a trust funnel, not a lead gen funnel. Focus on earned media metrics, sentiment analysis, brand trackers, and most importantly — direct customer feedback.