Thought Leadership and its Influence on Marketing Strategies
Corporate Influencer
Posted 21 Jun 2022
Various companies continue to adopt new B2B marketing strategies that fit in line with their leaders ideas and opinions. Thought leadership can promote growth within the company and can be utilized to exchange and gain a deeper understanding on subjects or topics from leaders who have experience in those specific areas. It also gives them the opportunity to share their personal success stories.
Basically Thought leadership is a type of content marketing and personal branding which aspires to answer the most important questions from your businesses target audience. It is also important to answer these questions with complete openness and in a format that the audience will feel comfortable interacting with. In order to be seen as a thought leader it is important to be active in the communities in which the industry of the business operates. These are the building blocks needed in order to implement thought leadership.
With thought leaders communicating for the business is of upmost importance when the company wants to make a strong impact on the customers journey right away from the start. Brand affinity, which is enhanced by a leaders personal brand, is the outcome of strong conversations with the target audiences, which in return will allow for customers to feel more engaged with the business and build a stronger connection.
Content marketing can play a major role for your business. Why would this be the case you might ask? Well thought leadership is the direct result of using a well-planned and structured content strategy for an executive. Businesses need to understand that leaders are the face of the business and impersonates strength and responsibilty. If you can tap into their knowledge and experiences, it can start the process of shifting towards a social inclined business.
Now you might be curious, how do I incorporate thought leadership into a marketing strategy? The first aspect businesses need to understand and focus on when trying to introduce a marketing strategy is to understand and get to know their target audience. In order to understand your target audience, you need to know their specific personas. This means that you need to do some prior research on various social media channels, in order to answer the following questions. What excites your customers? What questions do they ask? What provokes them to buy something? Where will they interact with your thought leader?
This leads us to the next talking point, which is how businesses use social media to their advantage. Social media management is the perfect tool to keep your target audience and different communities in the loop. This tactic is ideal when introduced with regards to thought leadership. One reason for this is that customers will observe this approach as a natural way of showcasing what the business can offer.
Overall, your target audience should be exposed to high quality content, with the assistance of thought leadership.
Now that we have covered the benefits of thought leadership, it is important to observe the challenges that leaders can face. Leaders must be willing to take criticism and stand up to the challenges they might face when portraying their ideas. It can be easy for leaders to become over focused on showcasing ideas and trying to acquire talent in their specific field of expertise. The leaders could also introduce ideas that could be out of the ordinary, this can cause some people inside the business to not want to support them.
To add to the above, If the content that the business is creating on social media is not effective and does not appeal to the target audience, then it can push the business further away from its thought leadership objectives.
Thought Leadership can be beneficial, especially for companies to understand their target audience and to improve their customer experiences. It can be used to build awareness of the brand online via social media, by asking the appropriate questions. The challenge could be that it takes a strong leader and well-organized PR team to implement though leadership to overcome the challenges.
PR and Marketing Executive at HBI Helga Bailey GmbH
Brandon Borcherding has been supporting HBI in its international client work since the beginning of 2022. He is responsible for the Digital Executive Program and is specialized in English-language content creation.
