Two Birds, One Stone

Last year, Gartner published a short release proclaiming that thought leadership was no longer the exclusive domain of large consulting firms and that is was a growing marketing field. In this release, they define thought leadership as:

… the giving — for free or at a nominal charge — of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.

In a response to this release Chris Koch argued that this definition is too narrow and would result in a “brochure on steroids” interpretation. Rather, that we should discard traditional “thought leadership marketing” and instead pursue “idea marketing” placing higher value on the conversation. In the world of social media, this makes the most sense. Being part of the conversation and responding to real needs are what make you a thought leader. And as Andrew points out below, you’re not a thought leader unless other people consider you to be. Andrew Spoeth is the Senior Manager of Marketing Programs at Marketo. Andrew blogs regularly at the Modern B2B Marketing Blog at blog.marketo.com and at www.MarketingFinger.com. He was gracious enough to answer a few questions from me on the topic of thought leadership: Briefly, what is your definition of Thought Leadership? Thought leadership means:

• Being seen as a knowledge leader in a given area
• Someone who is turned to for advice and is recognized in industry
• Being regularly cited and quoted by others

Do you have some examples of outstanding Thought Leadership? I typically attribute thought leadership to individuals. Since I work in tech and marketing, names I follow include Seth Godin, Avinash Kaushik, and Guy Kawasaki. Where is Thought Leadership most effective? B2C, B2B, specific industry, personal brand? How would you measure its success? Thought leadership is particularly effective in B2B, where education can play a big role in defining a brand and building trust with an audience of prospective customers. Most of the time, we see corporate thought leadership being propelled by a personal brand. People look up to individuals. It isn’t easy to measure the effectiveness of thought leadership. It takes a long time to build up and is intangible. To start, you can try to count sales referrals from, e.g. speaking at a given conference. But in reality, the effect of brand and trust is difficult to measure. Something you may want to consider is having a blog to produce thought leadership content and then measure traffic, opportunities and sales from individuals that have interacted with the blog. What are some tactics to consider when developing a Thought Leadership strategy? Depth vs Breadth? Depth over breadth. Become *the* expert in one specific field. Don’t push your products or services. Share insights freely and be generous with your ideas. Know the pains and challenges of your audience, be able to verbalize them. Speak passionately about your subject. Be accessible. Do you have any advice for pitfalls to avoid? Don’t call yourself a thought leader. Or a guru for that matter. You can only be a thought leader if others see you as one. Finally, how can someone like yourself or Marketo help an organization with Thought Leadership Marketing? Marketo sells software which marketers use to measure and drastically improve the performance of their online marketing efforts, e.g. through email marketing, lead management and revenue cycle analytics. Thought leadership content is often found online, in blogs, in newsletters, in social media. With Marketo’s software, we are able to deliver and measure interaction with this content and help prospective buyers move forward from general interest in your subject matter, to becoming a new customer. I want to thank Andrew for taking the time to answer my questions. If you want to start developing your brand as a thought leader, this slide deck has some questions that can get you started.