Three types of customer journey
Lead generation is a classic thought leadership objective. You’re asking your audience to share their contact details, in return for the knowledge that your thought leadership offers.
Traditionally, this has taken the form of a landing page and whitepaper, often leaving the audience with a sub-standard, uninspiring experience.
But times have changed. Your audience and customers expect more from the content they consume. They want to be engaged and inspired.
Now, the best thought leadership campaigns use a multi-format, multi-channel approach to engaging with customers. Video teasers, data tools and social media campaigns to attract a wide audience, and engaging often interactive deep-dives in reward for personal and contact details.
But what if your objective is less around scale, and more about direct, quality conversations with high-level customers. We find that these are often C-suite influencers to the deals your company needs to win.
This is an entirely different type of challenge. The likelihood of these types of people - whether it be CFOs, CEOs, COOs - getting into conversations with you based on a direct download is not likely. The typical avenue for this type of engagement is events.
We’ve found events, backed by proprietary thought leadership and insights to provide the backbone of discussion, is an attractive lure for those customers with plenty of power.
Strengthening long-term relationships is often overlooked in thought leadership. But in B2B relationships, content can form a strong pillar for your account-based marketing strategy to lean on.
Giving your client-facing teams the content they need, and the information they need to use it, to nurture their customer relationships, is vital for thought leadership to be more widely accepted and respected in the business.
We recommend building your thought leadership campaign in an ‘always-on’ model, and provide snippets of content throughout the year, keeping customers engaged over the long term.
Always-on uses a scheduled calendar of content that is released quarterly, monthly or even weekly. The goal is to build a regular flow of stories and insight that allow your brand to stay visible, while providing strong hooks to build and engage your core audiences over time.
An always-on model allows you to release content more regularly, which keeps your brand front of mind with your audience. Mental availability is paramount in B2B marketing because it is especially difficult to know when a customer is going to be making a purchase. Keeping your brand on your audience’s radar is half the battle won.
