Thought Leadership for Demand Generation - Step by Step (Part 2)
A playbook for ambitious business leaders aiming to skyrocket their brand's influence and lead generation. Discover proven strategies, tips, and actionable steps to attract and engage your audience.
👋 Hey, Ayush here! Welcome to this week’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Startup GTM Newsletter.
I have been building startups for the last 7 years and working with founders on GTM, growth, people-first strategies, communities and anything else about building a startup.
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In the last two issues, we laid the groundwork on why thought leadership is crucial in the B2B marketing sphere. Let’s do a quick recap…
In very first issue “Thought Leadership - Strategy and Tactics”, we wrote about
The Importance of Thought Leadership: Why it's a game-changer in B2B marketing.
Inspiring Examples: How top companies are acing their thought leadership initiatives.
Evaluating Success: Tips to measure and refine your thought leadership efforts.
Strategic Planning: Crafting your B2B thought leadership blueprint.
Then in the last issue “Thought Leadership for Demand Generation - Step by Step (Part 1)”, we have uncovered:
Launching Your Initiative: The step-by-step process to get you started.
Campaign Mastery: Creating impactful thought leadership campaigns.
Funnel Magic: Building thought leadership funnels for effective lead generation.
Now that we've come this far, let’s cover the final steps for launching and running your thought leadership initiative:
Step 1: Who's Leading the Charge?
Step 2 Which medium to choose?
Step 3. How will you build trust?
Step 4. Which distribution channels to use?
Step 5. How will you measure success? What’s your north star metric from the initiative?
Step 6. Create periodically
Step 7. Monitor, Review
Step 1: Who's Leading the Charge?
This always takes most of the time and it’s one of the crucial questions to address at day zero: Who's going to lead the charge?
Identifying our thought leadership theme is the first order of business. This theme is what I want people to recognize us for. Even if our theme isn’t crystal clear, it’s essential to decide who will spearhead this initiative and who will handle the operations behind the scenes.
Frontend Leadership: This could be you or another person who already has a network or knows how to build a network. Our job? To network, engage, and draw people into our thought leadership sphere.
Backend Operations: This involves managing the thought leadership initiative's inner workings, leading the content, design, production, and business teams to craft and execute our content pillars and topics.
Team Structure: To set up a team that delivers results –
a face for the initiative (Frontend Thought Leader),
a head for the initiative (Initiative head - can be same as Frontend Thought Leader),
a review team,
an advisory panel,
and a backend team (content, design, production, partnerships etc)
Have you thought about who would best represent your initiative? Who has the passion, the knowledge, and the charisma to engage your audience and carry your brand's message forward?
Let's answer this first as we build a foundation for our thought leadership to stand out and truly resonate.
Step 2: Which medium to choose?
As we decide who is gonna lead our thought leadership initiative and who will support it, the next critical thing I need to decide is: Which medium will best carry our message?
Video Series:
Interviews with domain experts, learning snippets, expert insights, and practical hacks.
Example
Interviews - Imagine a series like "Inside the Minds of Industry Innovators," where we sit down with Founders and CTOs to discuss the future of technology and leadership.
Learning Snippets: Short, impactful clips similar to TED-Ed videos, offering quick insights into AI technology or sustainable business practices.
Practical Hacks: A playlist similar to GrowthHackers' case studies, revealing strategies of companies like Razorpay, Flipkart or Stripe used to overcome challenges.
Podcasts:
Diving deep with leaders on specific themes or sharing success stories that inspire and educate
Example
Theme-Based Interviews: A podcast series like "How I Built This," where we talk with founders and leaders about building a business around a central theme, such as operational efficiency or technical innovation.
Success Stories: A podcast series like “Masters of Bootstrapping” similar to the most popular "Masters of Scale", where successful leaders like Andrew Chen, Mithun Sacheti, Nikhil Kamath etc. share their journey and lessons learned.
Newsletters:
Offer critical analyses of companies, tools, or strategies, curate invaluable resources, or uncover hidden techniques within our domain for our audience.
Example
Analyst Perspective: A deep dive analysis similar to the Stratechery newsletter, examining the strategic moves of Tesla in the electric vehicle market.
Curated Resources: Think of a curated newsletter like Marketing Examples, where they compile the best examples, techniques, and tools for digital marketing enthusiasts.
Educational Insights: A segment teaching lesser-known facts about cloud computing, GTM Strategies, modelled after Axios' newsletter formats. StartupGTM Newsletter is focused on uncovering GTM strategies.
Which of these formats will resonate most deeply with your audience? Video, podcast newsletter, or an in-depth analysis report?
Step 3: How will you build trust?
Building trust is fundamental to any demand generation initiative. How do we forge this with our audience, particularly those yet unfamiliar with our brand? Here's my strategy, distilled into actionable insights:
Leveraging Collaboration: Partnering with established
→ thought leaders,
→ newsletters, and
→ podcasts
can serve as a powerful endorsement, introducing us to a wider, yet targeted, audience network.
Their endorsement implies a level of trust and quality, encouraging their followers to give our content a chance.
However, there's a word of caution: If our content fails to deliver on its promised value, we risk losing that trust, possibly forever.
Step 4: Which distribution channels to use?
Distribution was, is and will always remain the king. If you can’t figure out the distribution part of any initiative, you are just wasting effort. Here's my take on deciding your distribution channels for your thought leadership initiative:
Primary Channels: LinkedIn and Twitter have become indispensable in the B2B landscape, with over 90% of business professionals active on these platforms.
Niche Communities: Beyond the broad networks, there are niche communities for virtually every domain, from marketing to supply chain. These can be goldmines for targeted engagement.
Choosing Your Battlefield: The key question you need to answer is, "Where does your audience spend their time?" Is it scrolling through LinkedIn, engaging in Twitter debates, digesting emails, or deep diving into specific community discussions?
I recommend a rather strategic approach:
Craft a Sequence: Develop a logical flow that guides your audience through your thought leadership content, building interest and engagement.
Deliver Value Where It Matters: Focus on platforms where your audience is already active. Whether it's LinkedIn, Twitter, or specialized communities, attract them with valuable insights.
Engage, Don't Broadcast: Interaction on the platform itself is vital. It's about starting conversations and showing you are one of them, not just pushing content.
Smooth Transitions: Create compelling reasons for your audience to move from social engagement to subscribing to your thought leadership materials.
Play by the Rules: Be mindful of platform guidelines to avoid trust penalties, like over-sharing links on LinkedIn.
Have you identified where your ideal audience meets for discussion? How will you tailor your distribution strategy to not only reach them but also convert them into loyal followers?
Step 5. How will you measure success? What’s your north star metric from the initiative?
What's the one metric that'll guide us through? What are the expectations of leadership from the initiative?
→ Is it brand value coming out of initiative value, captured through impressions and subscriber growth?
→ Leads, marked by clicks and landing page visits?
→ Or direct sales impact, seeing leads move through the funnel?
My Advice: Focus on “Impressions / Views and Subscriber Growth” primary metric initially. This clarity always prevents our team from chasing clicks at the cost of value. We have to aim for depth, not just breadth, in engagement.
Starting with initiative value, for instance, allows us to build a solid foundation of trust and recognition. From there, can we then shift gears to route them to brand value and convert that awareness into leads and sales?
But first, let's ask ourselves: What’s the single most important outcome we seek from our thought leadership? How does this align with our broader business goals?
Step 6: Create Periodically
Now, to make it work, it’s important to establish a rhythmic cadence of content creation. Here’s how I approach it:
Set a Schedule: Decide on a regular schedule for your content. It not only sets expectations for your audience but also keeps your team on track.
Stick to It: Adhering to this cadence religiously ensures consistency, which is key in building and maintaining audience trust and engagement.
Streamline the Process: Develop a clear process for advance planning, creating, reviewing, and updating content. This ensures quality and relevancy at every release.
Leadership Preview: Finalize and present content to internal leadership for a final approval before going public. It’s an extra layer of assurance.
Buffer Time: Schedule launches at least 24 hours in advance. This gives you a window to make any last-minute tweaks.
What’s your existing process on thought leadership cadence?
Step 7: Monitor, Review
This step is where we really fine-tune our strategy. Here’s my approach:
Track Key Metrics: Keep an eye on open rates, subscriber growth, and click rates. These indicators help pinpoint what resonates.
Experiment: Don’t hesitate from testing various content formats, topics, and value propositions. It’s about finding what clicks with our audience.
Performance Review: Which content pillars, topics and themes are hitting the mark? Conduct 30, 60, and 90-day cohort analyses to distill what’s working and what isn’t.
Use these insights as the base assumptions for the next growth phase of our thought leadership journey.
Next steps
Now, it's time to consider our next moves. With our thought leadership initiative gaining traction, how do we keep the momentum going and deepen engagement with our growing audience?
Host Events: Plan engaging events that foster real-time interactions.
Offer Exclusive Content: Provide valuable, exclusive content as an exclusive perk for our followers and subscribers.
Educational Opportunities: Consider launching an exclusive, free course tailored for leaders, executives, or teams.
Provide Free Tools: Equip our audience with free tools to apply the ideas we’ve discussed.
Build a Community: Build an exclusive community around our thought leadership initiative to spark ongoing conversations and connections.
Have you thought about the next steps to not just maintain but actively engage your audience?
What strategies will you employ to ensure your thought leadership becomes a vital part of their professional growth?
Want to brainstorm your go-to-market strategy?
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In case you want to connect and brainstorm your thought leadership initiative, write me on ayush@startupgtm.pro