How to Plan and Run B2B Thought Leadership Campaigns that Get Results

Thought leadership marketing can be incredibly effective at reaching B2B decisionmakers-- 49% of business buyers say thought leadership can influence their purchasing decisions, according to a 2020 Edelman/LinkedIn survey. Thought leadership may also seem easy to do, because when your organization is full of smart, talented people, you have plenty of potential thought leaders. However, only 17% of B2B buyers said the thought leadership content they see is of very good or excellent quality. Clearly, it’s harder than it looks to create effective thought leadership content.

How can you build a thought leadership campaign that gives your audience quality content, influences their buying decisions, and magnifies your brand’s authority and trust? What you need is a plan to develop your ideas, support your thought leaders, and reach and influence your audience. Here are the key steps.

Identify your thought-leadership audience

Before you decide what to say, decide who you want to speak to. Are you most interested in reaching potential customers, or does your thought leadership campaign have another goal, like impressing possible investors or job candidates? Pick one primary audience for each campaign. If you’d like to create thought leadership content for more than one audience segment, consider assigning a separate thought leader for each one, so they can build a relationship with that group.

Pick a niche that showcases your expertise

Select an area where you have knowledge and passion. Make sure it’s also a niche that your audience will care about. For example, if your audience is e-commerce store owners and your area of expertise is digital marketing, you can focus on trends, technologies and best practices that apply to online shopping.

Find the right outlets and study them

Your thought leadership content can (and should) appear on your blog, but for a wider audience and more credibility, you’ll want to place it in other outlets first. Depending on where your audience goes for news and your comfort level with writing, speaking and giving presentations, your outlet search can include:

• Trade publications
• Mass media outlets (papers, magazines, television and radio shows)
• Industry podcasts and video blogs
• Conferences and events
• Social media livestreams
• Journalist resources like HARO, which can lead to your quotes appearing in news articles

When you identify the right outlets for your program, study them. Request their content calendars and event schedules. You can use that information to help develop article and pitch ideas.

Start an idea file

Create a file or shared folder where your thought leaders and their teams can add ideas for articles, presentations, podcast topics and other forms of content. Consider seasonal topics that impact your industry, common questions or issues your customers share, emerging technologies in your field, and in-depth explanations of best practices.

The goal is to have lots of ideas ready to work with, so your campaign doesn’t start strong and then fade out. Thought leadership is a marathon, not a sprint.

Set up your production calendar

Decide how many articles, podcast episodes or videos you want to produce and when you want to have them ready to pitch. Keep the content calendars of your target outlets in mind. For example, if you know that an outlet you want to pitch will have an issue on automation in August, make sure your article on automation trends in your industry is ready to submit ahead of their deadline.

It’s a good idea to start with one or two deliverables each month, to give your team time to get comfortable putting together the content and finding outlets for it. As you gain experience and demand for your insights grows, you can turn out more thought leadership pieces each month.

Plan to promote every placement

When your thought leadership article, podcast or event is live, share it on your blog and your social channels. For example, here at Moss Networks, we publish a Clients in the News post each month featuring our clients’ thought leadership appearances.

Listen for feedback, monitor metrics, refine and repeat

Track the responses to your thought leadership. Do readers click through to your website from the link in your author bio? Does your social livestream attract new followers? Do customers tell you they found you through your podcast or media appearances? As you learn what works best for you and your audience, you can focus more on those outlets and improve your overall results.

Build your thought leadership team

Thought leadership showcases the insights of your executives and SMEs, but it’s not a solo effort. To help your thought leaders present their ideas well, at the right time, to the right audience, they’ll need a team. This can include a publicist who can identify outlets, a ghostwriter or editor who can take an executive’s first draft to a polished product, and even SEO analysts who can identify keywords to include for more search visibility—and then track the results.

Thought leadership campaigns are a big commitment but with solid planning, they can deliver a strong return on investment in terms of online news coverage, share of voice, site traffic growth and lead conversion.

Do you need a team to get your thought leadership campaign up and running? Or maybe you need to reassess your current strategy? Contact Moss Networks today! We'll help you create polished articles that influence buyers and boost your brand's authority and trust.