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Best Practices for Thought Leadership Marketing

Thought Leadership Marketing is a term that has come into its own in the past few years. Yet few firms get it right. Below are 14 best practices that I've found work for me over the past 15 years of being in this Internet marketing business.

1. To Predict the Future, Look at the Past

Mark Twain once said history doesn't repeat itself; it rhymes. As special as we humans think we are, we do have a tendency to repeat ourselves en masse, with changes that reflect the nuance of the age in which we live.

By looking backwards, we can often get an idea of how we will evolve. In the early part of the 20th century, Thomas Edison worked on an electric car. Here we are examining the same concept, only with more sophisticated batteries. Maybe it will work this time, or maybe it will finally work in the next cycle.

If you're going to predict the future in your industry, have a good handle on how the industry grew up, along with the lineage of its technology and the rate of adoption of the practitioners within that industry.

I remember how obvious it was that ad agencies would have to go digital in order to make the production process faster and cheaper, so page files could be transmitted quickly from agency to publisher. But, many agencies resisted in the early days because it would upset the apple cart. In the end, whole departments and vendors went away.

2. Connect the Dots Between What You Do and What You're Predicting or Analyzing

There are lots of bad attempts at thought leadership writing. I can always tell these wannabe's, because they rarely, if ever, speak from experience. I call these "Best of What I've Read Lately" columns.

People who tell you how to do something or what to watch out for without giving examples out of their own business experience won't have the ring of authenticity to them.

3. Invest in Research

Each year, I write a couple of "look-ahead" pieces for Web Digest For Marketers. Some are based on observations and cycles I've seen reoccurring over the last 15 years in Internet marketing, while others are roundups of what's happening in Internet marketing that are not only new, but have potential for the near-term future.

I spent thousands of dollars to cover the waterfront of the latest, cutting-edge and intriguing online marketing campaigns. It was original research that was available nowhere else.

A recent example of this type of writing project is "The Top 12 Trends for the Next 3 Years for Internet Marketing." It is my most popular speaker topic now.

4. Multifaceted Messaging

Your groundbreaking POV (Point Of View) needs to be chunked down into parts that can, in turn, be quoted and commented on in multiple types of editorial venues. You may write a book, but the intro to each chapter might be repurposed in a blog environment. Pithy statements might work well in the Twitter channel, while your elevator speech might be your overarching message in 30 seconds.

5. Give It Time

Sure, sometimes there's an overnight hit. But it's more likely that it take will a while for you your thought leadership message(s) to propagate. For example, I notice pieces I wrote months or even years ago will pop up in the blogosphere.

6. The New PR

Identify the leading bloggers in your very well-defined niche. Contact them only when you have something real to say. I get very bored with PR people offering articles from their clients in the hope that I will run them.

One PR person offered me such an article presumably written by her client, and I asked if she herself had ever read my newsletter. She said she didn't have time to read all the newsletters. I'm still not sure what gave her the idea I had time to read all her press releases and client articles. In short, establish decent relationships with your valued media outlets.

7. You Have Permission to Use a Ghostwriter

If you are not comfortable writing your own ideas down and organizing them for public consumption, that's fine. It's important to have a content-rich message that is of tangible interest to your target audience.

A good ghostwriter will interview you, get the entire idea out of you and then formulate it in a voice that is yours. Good ghostwriters are expensive. Mediocre ones are less expensive, but you get what you pay for.

8. Be a Name-Dropper

This is a practice that is frowned upon in polite society, but it's very important to do it in your thought leadership marketing.

Assuming you are dropping the names of your clients in some of your research, you absolutely must get their approval to do so. Sometimes professional services firms will negotiate for the right to use their client's name later on.

That client may even enjoy a discount on services rendered or a value-added service for agreeing to such terms. Usually, that client reserves the right to approve whatever mention is used in later speeches, papers, etc..

9. Test New Technologies

Identify a technology that your industry is asking questions about. Then, invest in the deployment of that technology and report on your results.

Spending the time and money on testing something that helps your industry run faster, cheaper, or smarter stages you as a leader who's willing to find answers sooner than others. Very often, consultants are hired precisely because they have experiences and knowledge with processes and technologies that no one else has.

In the Internet marketing space, Marketing Experiments Journal regularly runs marketing tests of many different sorts, and then reports on them to its subscribers. What's not to like?

10. The Importance of Bona Fides

Let's face it: very often, many products and services in this day and age are at parity. The difference becomes the people. How do these people at this company think and interact versus at another company?

The term "Thought Leadership" itself has gotten much more popular over the past four years. If you want to see for yourself, just do a search for the phrase "Thought Leadership"" using the Google Insights Tool . You'll notice that usage of this term has nearly doubled over the past few years.

One way to differentiate your thought leadership from others is to really spell out your background. This isn't a CV, but rather a rundown of your bona fides with action verbs attached to your previous and current endeavors. In short, show the difference you've made at various firms, on your own or for clients.

If you're not a household name in your industry, testimonials on your site about exactly how you've made a difference will help build your stature. You can say anything about yourself you want, but getting well-known people and/or well-known companies to say high-flown things about you is real proof in the pudding. It's what I look for.

11. Constant Reinvention

Time was when you could learn a set of skill sets like copywriting or art direction, and you'd be set for a few decades. Now, SEO experts, PPC gurus, email marketers, CRM practitioners and others have to stay actively engaged and be aware of the ever-quickening changes in their respective industries.

Whether you're in the Internet business or something else, the product cycle speeds and business practices are changing faster and faster.

Email marketers have to keep up with clean IP addresses and ISP relations, while SEO experts need to have a handle on social media, the impact of Universal Search results and mobile search. How will video affect PPC campaigns? There are plenty of opportunities to lead in Internet marketing.

12. Repurposing Your White Paper or Webinar

For as long as your white papers and Webinars are relevant, go out of your way to make them available through many channels.

You may have a library of such white papers on your site. You may want to feature a monthly Webinar on your home page in addition to promoting it through paid media, in order to not have your home page appear too stagnant.

Search engines like PDF files. Make sure they're tagged properly and have links back to appropriate pages on your website, as they're apt to be passed along if they're really good.

13. How Do You Know You Have a Winner?

If you come across a white paper topic, an overarching theme for a new POV or a direction you want to have people research for you, how do you know other people will want to know about it?

I've always asked myself what I would like to know. I figure I'm not so very different than my target audience in what I find interesting.

What mobile marketing campaigns are working in these early days of that medium? My staff came up with only a few that really had outstanding numbers. The early Subway text messaging offers were getting over 40% responses in many cases. I figured other people in Internet marketing would want to know about that, so I included it in my "The Top 12 Trends for the Next 3 Years for Internet Marketing." column.

14. Where Is the Money?

These days it's very easy to say outrageous things in a blog (for example). The practice is sometimes referred to as "link baiting." People love controversy. Heck, news operations and gossip magazines thrive on such fare. But, in a B2B setting, there is often value in presenting the counterpoint argument to what is otherwise considered common knowledge.

For yours truly, one such example is to ask where the money is in social media or Web 2.0. Do I enjoy engaging in the use of this many-to-many, participatory Web of more recent vintage? Yes, of course. But I do not necessarily think that paying hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for user-generated websites will ultimately pay off in media revenues for those firms purchasing them.

Blogs usually have a low CPM and are maybe best suited for establishing your thought leadership credentials and inbound leads, and perhaps as a channel to promote your events, sales, products or services. Sponsoring user-generated content sites can sometimes come across as interrupting an existing conversation between two peers with an ad. Very intrusive and not likely to be very effective.

This skeptical view of mine was very unpopular just a couple years ago. It's less unpopular now and more people are asking similar questions as we move forward in time

The point is, it sometimes pays off to be asking the unpopular questions before others do, which then adds to the perception that you stay focused on what matters. LC

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