A promotional strategy for thought leadership isn’t straightforward; there are many ways to get your content in front of the right people. The key is to build a foundation, layer in expert moves, and ask the right questions from the get-go.
As you’ve developed your firm’s thought leadership program you’ve likely overcome common challenges: honing your firm’s unique POV, narrowing down who your ideal clients are, and finding the right topics to cover. Great job! But that doesn’t mean you’re done. You still have to crack the code on your publishing strategy — AKA getting your content in front of the right people.
We won’t sugarcoat it: With so many potential tactics and channels at your fingertips, it can be overwhelming to come up with a plan that won’t eat up your budget.
So where should you focus your thought leadership promotional efforts? There are certain foundational elements every firm should prioritize, and a few additional nice-to-haves once you master the basics. Additionally, nailing down the specifics of crafting that holistic strategy depends on a few key questions. Here’s what you should know.
THE FOUNDATIONAL ELEMENTS: SEO, MULTICHANNEL PROMOTION, AND SALES ALIGNMENT
Just like wearing sunscreen at the beach, there are promotional elements and practices you should apply to every piece of content you produce. If you don’t, you’ll only suffer an avoidable sting. These include baking basic SEO practices into your content, diversifying the channels you share the content through, and ensuring everyone in your firm is on board.
1. SET THE STAGE WITH SOLID SEO
Investing in SEO is non-negotiable and it doesn’t take much to get started. At a minimum, you need to conduct keyword research to pinpoint high-value terms, optimize your content and metadata for those target keywords, and build a backlink profile that builds your credibility. Most CMS platforms today include built-in SEO tools that help you identify where to improve your SEO effort. In our original research on thought leadership promotional tactics, 30% of consulting firms reported if they had an additional $1 to spend on promoting thought leadership, they would invest it in SEO.
2. SHARE THROUGH MULTIPLE OWNED CHANNELS
Whether it’s through your firm’s LinkedIn page or shared through personal networks, there are many avenues your firm can and should be sharing new assets. Posting fresh content to your organic social channels should be a given. Just as important as posting to your firm’s website and social media channels is circulating the content internally so your business development team can use it in conversations with prospects. Your firm’s employees are the best brand ambassadors and can easily increase the organic reach of your thought leadership with a simple share or post.. Keep in mind: The focus should be to quickly get the message out and drive traffic back to the website. AI can be a great tool for helping you brainstorm a quick draft for your social media posts.
3. GET SALES ON THE SAME PAGE
Thought leadership is aimed at educating and nurturing prospects toward becoming sales-ready leads. But if the content exists in a silo, that won’t happen. Collaborating closely with your business development team from the start, involving them in distributing assets and providing input on which topics to cover, goes a long way toward fostering a holistic thought leadership program with effective, relevant content.
THE NICE-TO-HAVES: PAID MEDIA AND NURTURE CAMPAIGNS
Think about the saying “walk before you run”.
When your content is optimized for search and you’ve gotten into a rhythm of sharing thought leadership content through your owned channels (you’re walking), it’s time to layer in additional methods to your promotion strategy (it’s time to run). These next steps ensure your content gets in front of the right people more effectively.
1. PRIORITIZE PAID MEDIA
Organic promotion through your owned channels will always be important. However, strategic paid media campaigns can amplify your message by reaching targeted audiences specifically searching for solutions to business issues your firm is primed to solve. Our data show that 27% of successful thought leadership programs (vs. 15% of laggards) would invest additional thought leadership promotion funds in paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. They recognize the value of putting dollars into a paid strategy to get a leg up on the competition when prospects are researching to appear at the top of search results or in the social media feeds of their target audience.
2. CRAFT LEAD NURTURING CAMPAIGNS
One percent of your audience is ready to buy while the other 99% isn’t ready yet. Marketing is all about what you do to nurture the 99% until they’re prepared to become a buyer (another one of my favorite marketing sayings). Of course, it’s important to stay top-of-mind by sharing your content through organic channels. But take the nurturing one step further with an automated email program. This allows you to supply a steady stream of relevant, and valuable, content to an ideal client’s inbox based on a topic they’ve already shown an interest in because they’ve signed up to download a high-value asset. Along with automated programs, don’t be afraid of the cold sales outreach route, either! When these efforts work together, your services will stay top of mind until just the right moment, when your prospects are ready to move forward.
ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS TO REV YOUR PROMOTIONAL ENGINE
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for promoting your firm’s thought leadership material. You can roll the dice, lean heavily on your organic channels with some research thrown in, and see wild success (and hey, let us know if you do). But even the most strategic tactics alone are not enough. To make your thought leadership promotional engine hum, you have to start by asking deeper questions first:
- Is this thought leadership equipping the sales team to push more deals over the finish line?
- Is our website properly set up for SEO to gain organic traffic and set up for CRO (conversion rate optimization) to convert visitors into leads?
- What’s our paid media budget and can we get in front of the right audience?
- Is a longer or more bite-sized content format better suited for this topic?
We’ve seen many scenarios where firms haven’t been prepared to handle the firehose spray of leads their marketing generates. It’s also not uncommon for firms to have neglected websites that lack the necessary forms for potential clients to get in touch. Whatever the case may be, your thought leadership program will not reach its full potential if it’s not built on the right foundation — which these questions can help build.
Whatever the case may be, know that you don’t have to navigate these questions on your own. We’re here to guide you through the process so you can make smarter decisions with your marketing strategy to ultimately get your game-changing content into the right hands.
ABOUT THIS RESEARCH
Our latest thought leadership research was conducted between 12/13/23 – 2/11/24. 233 professional services firms responded to a 25-question online survey.
The leaders in our study were self-identified by rating their firms’ prowess on a scale of 1-5 across eight dimensions of thought leadership effectiveness. They are those who self-identified a total score of 36 or better out of a total potential score of 40 on all 8 dimensions (the top quartile of firms by effectiveness). These firms annual revenue growth rate was 23.4%. All other firms in the sample grew at a mean rate of 17.7%, a 6% point differential.
