September.

As B2B goes back to school for September, we’re focusing on Thought Leadership. From pumping out corporate landfill and leadership gone rogue, to the ‘broken record strategy’ in action and reconsidering the use of AI-generated content.

Plus, episode two of The Problem with B2B Marketing is live with Lucy Ferguson, Content Lead at DeepL and ex-Googler, talking about the problem with Thought Leadership.

Content.

How would you rate your thought leadership content? Are your experts sharing valuable, original insights and practical expertise or are you pumping out corporate landfill??

Be honest…

We only ask because few of the business and marketing leaders we know are truly happy with their output, and what it delivers.

The issues causing this are many and diverse. For instance, there’s a ton of legacy publications, reports and events pushed out year after year where the value is questionable but nobody wants to be the one that calls time on it.?

Or managing the mis-match between brand and comms strategy and what senior experts want to write and talk about…”leadership going rogue” as one CMO put it to us.?

And at the other end of the spectrum some marketing teams we know struggle to get their in-house experts to commit the time to share that expertise. We see this a lot because historically thought leadership creation was largely outsourced to agencies or commissioned from journalists. But with the current trend for inhousing over outsourcing, and the logic of enabling and sharing internal expertise (your product, or USP after all…) businesses can struggle with the cultural challenge of getting their people to change behaviour; to create content, share it, and work muscles they never had to before.

There’s two very good reasons that we’re focusing this month’s newsletter on Thought leadership. The first is that we’re seeing a lot of commentary about, and evidence, that explains a general trend in B2B away from performance and towards brand; a remix of the top of funnel: Bottom of funnel ration in favour of the former. Regular readers will of course be familiar with the work of Binet and Field that makes the evergreen case for investment in brand to make performance work harder, and this new research from Dentsu, via Marketing Week?suggests that the message has got through:

“In 2021, B2B marketers ranked ‘demand generation/driving and converting leads’ as the third most important factor in future strategy. But this has now dropped to seventh most important.

At the same time, ‘raising brand awareness/top of funnel performance’ has jumped from the sixth most important factor influencing future strategy in 2021, to the most crucial in 2024.”

But, crucially, the majority of businesses are not set up to succeed with their thought leadership:

“The research also suggests the need for brands to be seen as thought leaders is rapidly rising. Last year it ranked as the 20th most important decision driver for buyers, but it has rocketed to third this year.”

However, only 26% of B2B brands are rated highly by buyers for their thought leadership, with the study suggesting this is a “big opportunity” for brands that get it right to set themselves apart.?

And despite its perceived importance, buyers’ impression of B2B brands’ thought leadership skills are not improving. The same number (26%) rated B2B brands highly in this area last year, down from 31% in 2022.

So, there’s growing spend on thought leadership content, so there’s likely to be even more ‘stuff’ hitting inboxes and feeds, but the majority of businesses are not ‘getting it right.’ The result is a risk of EVEN MORE LANDFILL.?

What to do, in order to get seen, watched, read, remembered? Some ideas and references that we hope are helpful….

• Forrester builds on its ‘Era of less’ theme (justified by data that show that, adjusted for inflation, only 35% of organisations will see a real increase in B2B marketing budgets in the year ahead) by highlighting two areas that businesses with tight budgets should focus on.?
• Perhaps inevitably, the first is investing in “data, signals and insights” but it’s what this enables that is really interesting. Their second point is about using this to understand and then give customers what they need at every stage of the consideration and buying journey. This calls for more modular and agile use of “thought leadership” content assets and represents a marked change for many businesses where thought leadership has traditionally been more publishing centric and focused on what we want to tell you when we want to say it…
• Exitfive has a very clear and simple recommendation that’s perfect for the era of less. They call it the ‘broken record strategy’ and make a very strong case for the importance of deciding what you want to be known for, then repeating the hell out of those things; using and reusing core content assets over constantly looking for new hot takes and escaping the hassle (and cost) of constantly creating new content.?
• A (much) longer read comes from WPP agency SJR which last month published an 8 chapter eBook on what they call The New Thought Leadership. There are some useful ideas in there for sure (chapters 4 & 5 chime with the work we’ve shared previously on the virtue (and value ) of brands being less dull and more distinctive.) But we’ve got a (subjective) observation to share on the book; the recommendations here sound like incremental, marginal gains aimed at optimising ‘Thought Leadership,’ (and they don’t half drag it out…) and our feeling is that there’s an opportunity or need right now for B2B brands to do something different, not just ‘better.’?
• If budget and timing means you just need to tactically improve quality, relevance and performance we usually find that the best inspiration and ideas usually come from looking outside of your sector - we call them ‘Laterals.’ So, unless you are in the legal sector, we’d strongly recommend taking a look at Freshfields and AO Shearman and the way that they capltalise on the experts and expertise in the firm to promote their business and brand.?
• However, a more transformative idea, suggested by friend of VOLUME, Mat Morrison at Digital Whiskey, is to flip the ‘thought leadership’ model on its head entirely and approach things from a more commercial perspective: “Rather than asking, “how do we employ content to achieve our marketing goals”, instead ask, “what does our existing access to expertise, talent, audience, funding and other resources allow us to create as an asset?”?
• We also love this perspective from Amelia Sordell that fits perfectly with one of our mantras; whatever thought leadership you do, do more with it!?
• And there’s this from Meagan Loyst, founder of Gen Z VCs, writing in The Times (paywalled) last week on why brands, including Deloitte DACH, are hiring in-house influencers. This may be a fad, and the model won’t be for every brand but the principle behind, and the evidence driving it is something that literally every business we know can learn from, and do better at; organising the power of your people to increase the impact of your content: “A recent study from the start-up Refine Labs found that sharing information through a personal LinkedIn profile led to nearly three times as many impressions and five times as much engagement as doing so through a company’s LinkedIn profile.”

Community.

Leading by example, here’s an application of the broken record strategy in action, resurfacing one of our posts from last year about, well, doing better with thought leadership… Well worth a read but especially to read about and listen to John Romeo, Head of the Oliver Wyman Forum talking about how they tapped into the wisdom of their community to plan and develop content that their audience actually wants.?

In the US the folks at The B2B Growth podcast dropped a really interesting episode Can Starbucks and Coke match Red Bull’s success with owned media? The reason for the punchy headline is the recent launch of Coke’s B2B content platform COCA-COLA LENS and Starbucks dipping their toe into the owned media space with a new studio.?

Red Bull went all in on owned media with the Red Bull Media house because they saw the value of building niche communities of passion and having a direct relationship with their customers and building advocacy - they started in extreme sports then invested in multiple niche passions across sport, fashion and music right up to Formula 1.?

The immediate upside of this investment in owned media and community were the savings in advertising investment on traditional media. The longer term benefit (outside of product sales) is the vast catalogue of content and IP that Red Bull has amassed -? which in the content hungry world of social is pure gold and in some cases a valuable evergreen cultural archive.

Coke are taking inspiration from this playbook not to sell soda to punters but to build a valuable insights platform and content resource for their B2B customers. They (we assume) see Lens as a significant investment that builds and strengthens relationships with their stakeholders and acts as a tool to both the sales and marketing teams to promote product innovation and ultimately drive sales.

We are big fans. Not just because one of our founders spent a few years developing owned content platforms for Red Bull but because it is a key pillar of the VOLUME thinking that business brands should invest in owed media to allow them to build audiences - and communities - so that when clients are ready to buy, or buy again, they think of you.

AI.

Forbes reports that Linkedin has started labelling content created by generative AI so that users can more clearly understand the posts they interact with. The piece goes on to say that “marketers may face new challenges in maintaining authority and trust on the platform, leaving brands to reconsider the use of AI-generated content and prioritise messaging crafted by humans, for humans.”

Interesting development, especially given that we are literally seeing new “AI-powered content strategy tools” being launched EVERY DAY. Like this which promises to create fully AI-Generated blogs to this - a data scientist and strategist all rolled into one…

However there’s a problem, at least in the short term, as eConsultancy reports ? of marketing leaders say their teams are not “skilled or confident enough” to use AI tools.

Perhaps then the solution is Agentic AI? Where Gen-AI is all about large-language models, prompts and templated workflows, Agentic AI is having an always-on expert partner that you train to plan, reason and execute on your behalf. Read more in our summary following a fascinating session last month at Paul Armstrong's The New Normal where Sanjeev Prabhakar Badri presented the theory and practical B2B use cases in the next wave of AI.??

Team VOLUME.

The Problem with Thought Leadership… May we recommend to you the second episode of our podcast The Problem with B2B Marketing where Lucy Ferguson, Content Lead at DeepL and ex-Googler. talks about the problem with Thought Leadership. Focusing on the common mistakes she has seen over the course of her career across media owner, agency and platform roles, we discuss how and why B2B brands are turning clients and potential customers off with content that's more 'inside-out' than outside in.?

Lucy shares insights on how to develop the content your customer needs and the huge ROI potential from taking distribution seriously, including a practical view on how AI can make this better (or worse) depending on the approach you choose. Listen to episode two here.

Roundup.

• Fast growing B2B creator Kallaway gets an exclusive with Zuckerberg where he discusses the future of content creators, Meta AI Studio, smart glasses and thoughts on our AI powered future
• Linkedin launches Gen Z focused podcast “Lets Talk Offline”
• More on the growth of B2B influencer content - why business brands are embracing creators
• Microsoft’s Q4 numbers confirm Linkedin’s fastest area of growth is video - 34% growth yr on yr - that will be the influencers and creators!
• WARC & The Linkedin Institute prove the value of Customer Promise - here are the stats and the report
• Industry Dice report - The state of B2B marketing and what 20 million leaders want. Watch on Demand
• And finally… when content goes micro podcasters go long. Bloomberg looks at the trend of the mega podcast. Seven hours with Elon anyone?