Your Thought Leadership Strategy Is Broken. Let’s Fix That.

Your podcast is getting listens.

Your white paper is pulling in downloads.

Your LinkedIn posts? A good amount of likes, comments, and shares.

On the surface, your thought leadership looks like it’s attracting attention.

But the CFO is asking, “How does this turn into revenue?” and all you’ve got are engagement metrics that sound good but mean nothing to the pipeline.

And leadership?

They’re back and forth.

One meeting, they’re all-in on building trust and creating demand.

The next, the CFO’s talking about cutting costs, the CEO wants tighter efficiency, and suddenly every marketing dollar is under a microscope.

Because thought leadership is so hard to tie directly to revenue, you’re stuck justifying every expense—again and again.?

This is the paradox: You need thought leadership to build credibility and educate prospective buyers to create customers over the long-term.

But right now, your sales team needs leads—qualified, ready-to-buy leads—because revenue won’t wait for long-term plays to pan out.

And you’re doing all of this while stretching every dollar like it’s your last.

The result?

You’re stuck on the MQL hamster wheel, running in circles trying to balance the impossible: building long-term demand, generating short-term leads, and proving every penny is worth it.

Here’s the good news: You can achieve both outcomes with the right content strategy.

Let’s break it down.

Why Most Thought Leadership Misses the Mark

Marketers often mimic what big players in the industry are doing—publishing generic content that might be interesting but fails to attract prospects with real problems you can solve.?

Rand Fishkin calls this a critical misstep: copying "best practices" from major brands often results in strategies that miss the mark because their goals and audiences aren’t the same as yours.

The result?

• Content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience.
• Thought leadership that doesn’t align with the sales process.
• Audiences that stay passive, nodding along but taking no action.

But there’s an even bigger issue: most thought leadership content doesn’t challenge the status quo.?

As The Challenger Customer highlights, too much content reinforces what your audience already believes instead of pushing them to rethink their approach.

And content that doesn’t actively disrupt assumptions and demonstrate why sticking with the status quo is risky, it’s just more noise in an already crowded space.

The solution??

Research topics that directly address your audience’s biggest challenges.?

Test your ideas with organic content, engaging deeply with every comment, question, and interaction to validate what resonates.?

Once you identify what works, invest in production and promotion for those proven winners.?

Then, create direct-response funnels to hook prospects who agree it’s a problem worth solving, offering them an irresistible next step.

When done right, your thought leadership won’t just generate buzz—it will move your audience to act and drive revenue.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step

Step-by-Step Guide to Using Thought Leadership to Drive Engagement and Generate Revenue

Effective thought leadership is more than just publishing content—it’s about sparking engagement, testing messages, and converting those who agree with your message into action-takers.?

Let’s break this process into actionable steps, incorporating insights from Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers to create irresistible offers that close the gap between interest and sales.

Step 1: Build Awareness and Engagement with Audience-Focused Thought Leadership

Thought leadership plays a critical role in building awareness and trust.?

Start by creating content that:

• Grabs attention: Spark curiosity with unique insights, industry trends, or bold claims that help your target market solve problems. Take a position and hammer on it. Provide insights they can’t get anywhere else.?
• Establishes credibility: Share valuable expertise that positions you as a trusted authority in your field. Conduct industry research and build reports. Share your expertise through “illuminator” and “contrarian” content. Challenge their status quo.?
• Fosters relationships: Use consistent content to nurture your audience and lay the foundation for future engagement. Continuously nurture those topics and move them down a funnel.

For example, consider the TrustRadius 2024 Buyer-Seller Disconnect Report.?

While the report doesn’t make a sales pitch about working with them, it successfully informs and engages its audience by addressing a critical industry issue–how B2B buyer behavior has changed so you can make the appropriate changes to your marketing.?

We continuously reference their report as we build messaging and develop websites for SaaS customers.?

This type of tangential content builds credibility and primes your audience to listen to your next message.

Step 2: Test Messages Through Organic Content

Instead of going all-in on high-budget campaigns right away, follow Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice in his book Day Trading Attention: test your messages first.?

Create organic content on platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and your blog.?

Focus on:

• Engaging your audience: extend content that has proven to spark engagement and speaks to their struggles. (Problem agreement)
• Tracking what resonates: Pay close attention to likes, comments, and shares to identify which topics strike a chord.
• Iterating based on feedback: Use audience interactions as real-time data to refine your messaging.

The goal here is to identify the problems your audience is most eager to solve.?

Engage with every comment and question to deepen your understanding of their pain points.

Step 3: Transition to Solution-Awareness Content

Once you’ve validated your messages, create content that moves your audience from curiosity to urgency.

This involves following the formula from The Challenger Customer to drive change:

• Get agreement on the problem: Clearly articulate a problem your audience is facing in a way that makes them think, “Yes, that’s exactly it.”
• Highlight deficiencies in the status quo: Show them why their current approach isn’t working and the risks of staying the same.
• Provide a reframe: Offer a fresh perspective or solution that positions your offering as the way forward.

This type of content disrupts complacency and primes your audience to take action

Step 4: Craft Irresistible Offers

Now it’s time to guide those who agree the problem is worth solving to an irresistible offer with clear calls-to-action and seamless conversion paths.?

This is where the content must explicitly ask for action, like signing up, booking a call, or starting a free trial.

This is where you take everything you’ve learned about your audience’s struggle to make progress and craft offers they can’t refuse.?

Drawing from Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers, here’s how to create offers that drive action:

• Make the value clear: Clearly show how your solution solves their problem better than any alternative. Focus on outcomes your audience deeply cares about—time saved, costs reduced, or results amplified.
• Eliminate risk: Remove barriers to entry with no-risk options like free trials, money-back guarantees, or proof-of-concept engagements. The less risky the decision feels, the more likely your audience will act.
• Create urgency: Add a compelling reason to act now, such as limited-time pricing, exclusive bonuses, or spots that are filling up fast. Urgency helps overcome procrastination.

Examples of Irresistible B2B Offers

1. Free Demand Generation Audit: Offer to evaluate a prospect’s current demand generation process and provide a detailed report showing inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and specific recommendations.
2. Proof-of-Concept Pilot: For SaaS products, provide a 30-day free pilot that includes onboarding and customer success support to show immediate value. Frame it as “Try it risk-free—only pay if you see X% improvement in your results.”
3. Exclusive Strategy Session: Offer a one-on-one, 60-minute session with your experts to develop a roadmap tailored to solving a specific pain point (e.g., improving lead conversion rates). Add urgency by stating that only 10 sessions are available this month.
4. Implementation Support Package: Bundle your service or product with free implementation or onboarding support for a limited time. For example, “Sign up by [date] and get $1,000 in onboarding services free.”
5. ROI Calculators and Self-Assessments: Interactive tools like ROI calculators and self-assessments can effectively qualify buyers and gauge intent, especially when designed to be engaging and memorable.

Why This Works

These offers combine clarity, risk elimination, and urgency to create a compelling reason for your audience to act now.?

They’re designed not only to attract attention but also to nudge prospects over the line by making the value so clear and the risk so minimal that saying “no” becomes harder than saying “yes.”

By tailoring your offers to the specific problems your audience cares about most, you’ll create a direct path from engagement to conversion—and ultimately, revenue.

Balancing the Long Game with Immediate Wins

The TrustRadius 2024 Brand in Crisis report makes it clear—brands that consistently build trust are the ones winning today.

But thought leadership often feels like a gamble—difficult to attribute, hard to defend in the boardroom, and nearly impossible to tie directly to pipeline metrics.

But here’s the truth: Thought leadership doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition.?

With the right approach, it can achieve both—creating customers over the long term while capturing those that move into an immediate buying window. .

When you align these forces, you’re not just creating content; you’re building a growth engine. Picture this:

• Amplifiers organically spreading your message beyond your immediate audience.
• Content that doesn’t just inspire but also drives measurable action.
• Marketing and sales working in sync, armed with insights that create urgency and close deals.

The best thought leadership starts with your customer’s struggle.?

Offer unique insights, bold research, or even controversial takes to spark conversations and build trust—this is your long game. It’s how you establish credibility, expand visibility, and make your brand indispensable.

And once you’ve brought them into your world, convert those who resonate with the problem by providing irresistible offers that turn agreement into action and action into revenue.

By combining the big-picture impact of thought leadership with precise strategies for capturing attention and driving conversions, you’re not just justifying every dollar spent—you’re creating a system that fuels sustainable growth.

Not Getting Enough Demos?

If you’re not getting enough qualified demos for your sales team to make quota, it could be your messaging.

Vague, hard-to-understand messaging that fails to inspire action is the silent killer of your demo pipeline.

Prospects aren’t booking demos because your messaging isn’t compelling them to take that first step.

That’s where our Marketing and Messaging Review comes in.

We’ll help you uncover exactly why your messaging isn’t driving demos—and, more importantly, how to fix it.

Our comprehensive review dives deep into how your current content is performing, whether it’s your website, content, or ads.

We pinpoint gaps, vague language, and missed opportunities that may be causing potential prospects to scroll right past you or bounce off your site.

With actionable insights and clear recommendations, we’ll show you how to craft messaging that speaks directly to your target audience’s pain points, sparks curiosity, and gets them thinking, “This is exactly what we need!”

Here’s what you’ll gain from our Marketing and Messaging Review:

• Clarity and Focus: Messaging that’s simple, impactful, and easy to understand—so prospects immediately see your value.
• Increased Engagement: Strategies to make your content resonate with your ideal customers, driving them to take the next step.
• More Demos: Messaging that compels action, filling your pipeline with high-quality prospects who want to see what you have to offer.

Here’s the truth: Your demo problem starts with your messaging.

If prospects don’t understand how you can solve their problems, they’ll never make it to the demo stage. Fix your messaging, and you’ll start seeing a ripple effect through your entire sales process.

Ready to stop leaving opportunities on the table?

Let’s make your messaging work as hard as you do.

Learn more about our Marketing and Messaging Review here.