If you’re in B2B marketing, you need to be thinking about a thought leadership strategy. In the world of marketing, it’s often divided into two hemispheres, B2C and B2B. These two types of marketing are so different and it’s essential that we understand their differences. In the world of B2C, the products and services tend to be a lot simpler. Maybe it’s meal delivery, or maybe you’re selling footwear or clothes or a physical products that people can actually get their hands on. The value propositions tend to be very simple. The products are often very visual as well. In the world of B2C marketing it’s a lot of showing, as opposed to telling. Showing people the product, enticing them with exciting advertisement to trigger some sort of emotional response and emotional purchasing decision.
In the world of B2B, we have the complete opposite. Value propositions tend to be much more abstract. They’re conceptual ideas. Let’s say your value proposition is to help companies with their supply chain, procurement, cybersecurity, or facilitating content decentralization. Those are complex ideas that you can’t just take a photo of and show in a piece of advertising, And so in B2B marketing, it’s all about establishing thought leadership, it’s about putting out content that can demonstrate your expertise and authority on the subject. Thought leadership is all about thoroughly understanding the problems that your customers are going through to such a level that your customers feel that you understand their problems even better than they do. And once you’ve demonstrated that level of understanding, you are then in a position where you’ve earned the respect to be able to propose your solution. Really, that is the key of thought leadership, it’s putting out content to demonstrate that you understand their problem, and therefore have earned the rights to be able to propose a solution to those problems.
There are many forms of thought leadership out there, everything from a blog post, to a podcast, or talking head videos. Just like this one, doesn’t matter how you deliver those ideas, but it’s essential that you do. Thought leadership strategies can take all sorts of shapes and forms, but if you’re in B2B marketing, you need to have a thought leadership strategy.
Creating a thought leadership strategy doesn’t need to be scary or daunting. Think about being a Content curator. If you took a course or you read a blog posts or read a white paper and learned a lot from it, try to summarize your learnings bring your audience the key takeaways. Be that person that reads the reports so that they don’t have to. I do a lot of that in my video content as well. You don’t have to wake up every day with these new genuine innovative ideas, just being a reliable source of knowledge is good enough. Be a curator, bring to them things that you’re learning. Learning about their problems and about their industry.
To all the B2B marketers out there: I want to know, do you currently have a thought leadership strategy? And how’s that working out for your brand so far? Let me know in the comments below.
