Thought Leadership Models
How to turn your expertise into thought leadership?
Company Vs Personal approach
As it turns out, LinkedIn has a great deal of data indicative of the conversion you can achieve from your personal pages when compared to company pages. Generating B2B leads from your personal profile is completely organic as well, not something you push as you would on other sites.
This particular model is already utilized by large companies like Deloitte. On the main company website there was an article which links to a personal LinkedIn article that someone shared on their personal platform, a decision that enforces that connection in both directions.
Similarly, people want to be experts, they want to understand and be able to subsequently present themselves as authority figures. And they do this by acquiring more knowledge. This means you can share information that educates, going back to the value journey, an example of which was done by the House of Spark.
Layered Thought Leadership Approach
Where lead generation is concerned, you need to apply a layered thought leadership approach. There are many layers to thought leadership. If you have a company or a team you should layer your story. You should find a way to link people who will have the biggest chance of success.
In your business you might have the executives, management, and operational team members. Use those layers to connect Executives with other Founders, Executives, or vice presidents. Connect managers with other directors or other managers. Connect operational-level team members with juniors, experts, and operational leads.In effect, you want circles of influence to match with their respective circles among your leads.
What story does each tell?
- Executives focus on the vision story, the strategy of the company, and the entrepreneur journey. They are realistic, and focus on things when they are good or bad. They focus on the long term.
- Management focuses on problem solving, strategy, and expertise.
- Operational team members focus on a deep dive, hands-on usage and expertise.
Thought leadership content model
Interestingly enough most of the time with traditional marketing, there’s an all-in-one approach for production of contents, distribution of content, and events. And yet the people who have the knowledge and creativity to make content are usually terrible at distributing it, just the same as those who are great at distribution are terrible at making content.
The solution is the revised thought leadership content model which delineates between production and distribution. Those who create the content should be differentiated from those who scale the audience. This can be achieved by adding new roles within your company like growth hackers or other technical marketing roles to fulfill both sides of this bubble.
Those companies which are most successful tend to utilize this model and divide production from distribution while those who are not as successful as they want typically have production and distribution combined into one bubble.
For example: If you have one company that spends an average of $8,000 to make a single marketing video in 1 format which they distribute one time, they will not be nearly as successful as the company that uses the thought leadership content model and creates 12 videos across three different formats including insider videos, expert videos, and guess videos for the same price.
In the latter case, the company is providing the inspirational contents concurrently with the educational content for those customers who are ready to buy the fire extinguisher because their house is on fire and for those whose houses are not on fire. This type of content can be delivered over the course of an entire year following the aforementioned 6 or 8 week distribution model, offering much more to customers and increasing the opportunity for lead capture and lead generation significantly.
