In this post we will explore how to make thought leadership content the centerpiece of your strategy and how to execute it successfully. Let’s start by getting clear about several key terms.

Thought Leadership Defined

Thought leadership is the process of developing specialized expertise and novel insights into a subject matter area and then sharing those perspectives with audiences for the purpose of educating and influencing them. Thought leaders shape the attitudes and behaviors of their followers.

Thought leadership can take many forms and have many purposes, such as social change or political influence. When focused on commercial objectives, it is often labeled as thought leadership marketing.

Thought Leadership Marketing Defined

Thought leadership marketing is the process of increasing the visibility of specialized expertise and accelerating market influence to accomplish marketing goals, such as building brand strength or generating new business. It is accomplished by creating insightful analysis and content and making that thought leadership visible to your target markets.

Thought Leadership Content Defined

Thought leadership content is how experts communicate their specialized knowledge and insights to their followers. It makes their intangible expertise visible and sharable and greatly increases their trust and marketplace leverage. Thought leadership content can be shared in a wide variety of formats (see Examples of Thought Leadership Content below).

Because of its educational nature, B2B thought leadership content is rarely overtly promotional in tone or substance. Over time, a stream of useful thought leadership content builds the expert’s visibility and influence.

Examples of Thought Leadership Content

Here are some examples of the most useful forms of B2B thought leadership content and the best uses of each type.

1. Books. Nothing says thought leadership like a business book on your area of expertise. If it is also a best seller, it can be a powerful tool for expanding your visibility as well as credibility. Books are a great way to capture your key ideas in a format that allows you to explore them in some detail.
2. Research reports. Original research is arguably the most trusted form of thought leadership content. It almost always provides new insights and is highly regarded in B2B organizations because it is objective. If it addresses an important issue facing the target audience, it is likely to be widely shared as well.
3. Guides and White Papers. Guides and white papers are generally longer pieces, often running from 10-25 pages in length. They are aimed at a specific segment of your target audience and take a comprehensive view of their subject matter. They are a great vehicle for explaining how you think about and solve for a specific issue.
4. Webinars and Speaking Engagements. Webinars and speaking engagements are great ways to expand your followers. They tend to be educational in nature, so they also do a good job of conveying your expertise. Many thought leaders report that speaking engagements are their single most effective approach to generating new business opportunities.
5. Educational Courses. Doing educational programs and courses is a good approach to conveying the full depth of your expertise. While some live formats may have limited enrollment, they often make up for it because of their depth of engagement. Digital courses, while less interactive, can offer greater reach and visibility. Also, partnering with a trade association or educational institution, can add extra credibility to your offering.
6. Blog posts and articles. Blog posts and articles tend to be shorter than guides or white papers and therefore easier to produce. They can be broad or narrow in their focus, so are very flexible. Their greatest strength in that they are typically open source and searchable, so they are easier to find and key to expanding the visibility of you thought leadership.
7. Podcasts. While a relatively new format for thought leadership, they are growing in popularity and impact. For experts that are naturally verbally oriented and love to talk about and explain their area of expertise, they can be a snap to produce. In addition to developing your own podcast series, you can also consider guest appearances on other experts’ podcasts. Interacting on podcasts is also a great way to develop your relationships with other thought leaders.
8. Opinion pieces. While often overlooked, opinion pieces are well suited to presenting thought leadership perspectives. Where better to express a contrarian view on a hot topic? Add some data from your original research and you have an excellent piece of thought leadership content.

Now that we have reviewed some examples of thought leadership content, lets examine some of the benefits and challenges of building your B2B content strategy around thought leadership.

Benefits of Thought Leadership Content

A thought leadership-based content strategy has a lot of benefits for the individual expert as well as for their firm. Here are some of the top benefits.

1. It positions you as an expert and innovator. By authoring thought leadership content, you are obviously positioned as an expert with new ideas. But the added benefit is that your firm also gains in status because of its association with the thought leader.
2. It helps increase visibility of you and your firm. Just as thought leadership content increases the visibility of the expert it also increases the visibility of your firm as well. Think improved reputation and increased visibility of that reputation. That is a recipe for a strong brand.
3. It attracts qualified new prospects. When properly promoted, thought leadership will attract new prospects who are looking for help in solving the challenges they face. Your insightful content shows them that you understand their challenges and that you have solutions to offer. As a matter of fact, we find that these inbound leads are typically the most qualified as they are approaching you because they understand how you can help them.
4. Business is easier to close. The same familiarity that helps attract new prospects also makes it easier to convert them into clients. You start out with credibility and often a great deal of trust. If you don’t “unsell them” you will very likely end up with a new client or customer.
5. You can charge higher fees. Our research studies of high-profile experts shows that their clients are willing to pay much higher hourly rates for more prominent experts [insert VE fee chart]. In other words, the more visible and prominent you become as a thought leader the more clients are willing to pay to work with you or your firm.

6. It attracts new employees. One of the often-overlooked benefits of thought leadership content is the role it can play in attracting new talent. The best people want to be in a firm where they can learn and grow. Thought leadership is a strong signal that your firm is a great place to consider.
7. It fosters career growth. Encouraging employees to create thought leadership content is a great way to foster career growth. The expert also benefits in that their personal brand is greatly enhanced and new options and opportunities come their way.

Now let’s look at the other side of the coin. What are the challenges of a thought leadership strategy?

The Challenges of Thought Leadership Content

Even with all the benefits, thought leadership is not a panacea for the B2B marketer. Here are the key challenges and some thoughts on how one might go about addressing them.

1. Creating thought leadership content is not easy. Creating a stream of insightful high-value content is clearly challenging. In fact, our recent study of professional services firms showed that creating valuable content was the number one marketing priority. In many organizations the subject matter experts are among the utilized members of the team. Well explore some ways around this dilemma when we cover creating your thought leadership content strategy below.
2. Thought leadership creates controversy. Almost by definition thought leadership is about change and new ways of doing things. As such it pushes against ingrained attitudes and the interests of established players in the marketplace. Throw in a pinch of contrarian attitude and it is easy to see why thought leadership can create controversy. Of course, content that just restates conventional wisdom is both very common and not really thought leadership.
3. You can’t be a thought leader without followers. As a thought leader you can have the most insightful content but if no one sees it or they cannot understand your insights you will not have followers. No followers, no impact. The best thought leaders also tend to be great communicators. They know their subject matter so well that they can explain complex concepts simply. This is a key skill set for thought leaders. Add to this the need for adequate promotion and the challenge of creating and holding the attention of your audience becomes clear.
4. New ideas become old. As your thinking gains traction, it will be adopted by more and more people. At some point it is no longer new and innovative thinking. It becomes conventional wisdom or “best practices”. Time for a new idea. For many thought leaders this is a turning point. Can you continue to produce new, insightful content? In the next section we will explore some strategies for producing better thought leadership content.
5. Competitors will copy your ideas. For many thought leaders this is the most vexing problem of all. It’s super frustrating to see your arch competitor copy your ideas and present them as their own. And, of course, if they have avoided outright plagiarism there may be little you can do about it. The cure for this is three-fold. First, make sure you capture your ideas and document them to obtain appropriate legal protection for your intellectual property. Second, promote your content widely (see below for promotion ideas) so the marketplace recognizes it as yours. And third, use it to your advantage. This is clear evidence of the quality of your ideas. Use it to bolster your differentiation.

How to Produce Better Thought Leadership Content

Producing a steady stream of high quality, insightful content is not easy. If it where we would not be adrift in a sea of mediocre, self-serving fluff that characterizes so much of what passes for thought leadership today.

Fortunately, there are steps that you can take to up your game. We will build upon some recommendations from our earlier article on thought leadership marketing and add some new ones.

1. Narrow your focus. The narrower the focus of your expertise the easier it is to master the subject matter in a way that facilitates greater insight. This also works when preparing a presentation or article. Going narrower and deeper into a subject allows for you to develop helpful perspectives in a way that a broader treatment can easily skim over.
2. Do original research. Original research is the most trusted form of thought leadership content. But it also has an important role to play in generating new insights. Imagine the power of have answers to some of the key questions facing your target clients. New research findings raise intriguing new questions even as they answer some of the existing ones. Let the data be your guide to thought leadership.
3. Take a contrarian perspective. Conventional thinking favors a consensus. This is the so called “best practices” thinking. But sometimes the greatest insight comes from taking a different, unexpected view. If most people espouse X, consider the case for Y. There is often great insight to be harvested by exploring the counterintuitive or overlooked.
4. Mash up your expertise. Try applying the methods or thought process from one discipline to another subject matter. Put together seemingly unrelated findings or methods of inquiry from different disciplines and see what new ideas emerge. Building bridges between seemingly unrelated fields is a top strategy for many well-known experts.
5. Network with other experts. One of the best ways to sharpen your thinking is to interact with other experts. They can challenge your thinking and give you new ideas and insights to consider. Partner with an expert from a related field to make your content more dynamic and interesting. You are sure to gain some new perspectives.
6. Answer the tough questions. What are the toughest questions you get from your clients? Concentrate on answering one of the toughest ones. What research could be done to get a definitive answer? Is there a better way to think about it? Perhaps a contrarian perspective will give you a new insight. High visibility experts often cite audience questions as the top source for generating useful thought leadership content.
7. Recycle. A great insight should not be shared in one piece of content and then ignored. Use your best ideas in multiple pieces of content. Different members of your target audiences prefer different content formats so sharing similar insights across multiple content formats makes a lot of sense and extends the reach of your thought leadership.

How to Promote Your Thought Leadership Content

To maximize the visibility of your thought leadership, you must promote your content. Think of it this way. Your content makes your thought leadership tangible. Promotion makes that content visible to your target audiences.

How do you effectively do that? We have identified ten promotional techniques that work especially well with thought leadership content.

1. Email. Email is the most direct way to communicate with individual members of your target audience that you already have a relationship with i.e., they have given you their email address. This makes it an ideal format to nurture prospects by sharing relevant thought leadership content.
2. Social Media. One of the most popular promotional strategies, sharing valuable content on social media can both widen your visibility as well as nurture specific relationships. Larger pieces of content can be broken into small sharable tidbits and promoted over time and across multiple social media platforms.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The first place many professionals look when they have a business challenge is a search engine. This makes SEO and ideal tool for increasing the visibility of your content. Another advantage is that the people who find your content will be those that are looking for that specific type of content. You will discover members of your target audience that you did not anticipate.
4. Paid Advertising. Paid advertising works in a similar way as SEO except that you need to specify your target audience demographics. If your advertising message is well crafted it will then attract the right members of the target audience. Paid advertising works well when you have a time linked event, such as a webinar, or need to rapidly accelerate visibility, such as with a new product launch.
5. Public Relations. Both traditional and digital PR have important roles to play in amplifying visibility. If the media outlet already has credibility with the target audience, you will benefit from the association just as the readers or listeners will benefit from your insightful thought leadership.
6. Networking. Networking with members of your target audience is a great way to build relationships. As it turns out, it’s also a great way to promote your content. Following up after a conversation with a piece of thought leadership content you have discussed is often a big win. It’s relevant, personal, and clearly shows your expertise.
7. Partner Marketing. Partner marketing is partnering with another professional or organization to promote thought leadership content. You will benefit by exposure to the partners audience just as they will benefit by exposure to yours. Partners typically offer different, but complimentary, services to the same target audience.
8. Online Reviews. For certain categories of B2B products, SaaS being a prime example, online reviews are great ways to increase visibility of the product. This process can also work well for thought leadership content. Books and podcasts would be two good examples.
9. Guest appearances. Being a guest on someone else’s thought leadership vehicle (such as a podcast or webinar) has a double benefit. First, you get to share your thought leadership directly with their audience. Second, you will often be able to promote a new piece of your content, such as a book or research report, as part of the appearance.
10. Speaking Engagements. When high visibility thought leaders were asked about how they get new clients speaking engagements topped the list of most effective strategies. It too has multiple benefits. You are sharing you thought leadership directly with the audience in a high-credibility context. The organization to which you are speaking has typically promoted your presentation and added their stamp of approval. Also, in the case of in-person events you often can interact directly with the audience before and after your address. Talk about a great networking opportunity.

Developing Your Thought Leadership Content Strategy

Now that we have covered the basics of thought leadership content, let’s look at how these threads come together in a thought leadership strategy. There are six key elements in a thought leadership strategy. This is true whether you are a single individual or whether you are planning for a business unit or an entire firm.

Let’s review each of the key components.

• Purpose or Goals. This section answers the question as to why we need a strategy in the first place. What are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to increase new business or position the firm differently? Obviously different goals will have different metrics to track success.
• Target Audiences. Who are we trying to influence? Decision makers in client organizations are a common target. But don’t forget the internal influencers who have a lot of power in modern B2B decision making. In many circumstances journalists, reviewers, industry analysists or other thought leaders may be important targets as well.
• Expert Positioning. How are you positioned as an expert? What are you an expert in? Who do you help? Why do they choose you? As an individual, your expert positioning will normally be expressed as your brief bio. On the firm level this is typically a formal positioning statement which is reflected in your “About” statements on your website and firm overviews.
• Your Issues. Here we identify which specific target client issues you will focus your thought leadership on. What big challenges will you write and speak about? It is important that the issues you identify are important to your target audience and that you have solutions or perspectives that can add value. In most cases you should limit your focus to a small number of issues (1-3 is common) so you can gain thought leader status more quickly.

• Your Perspective on the Issues. What is your perspective on the issues that you are focusing on? The essence of thought leadership content is that you are offering a new perspective. For example, at Hinge we focus on research driven marketing solutions, so our thought leadership always starts with an insightful piece of research at its core.
• Your Visibility Plan. The final component of your strategy involves planning around gaining visibility for your thought leadership content. It considers what format your content should take (e.g., webinars vs. podcasts), how often you will produce it, and how you will promote it. You should make sure that your decisions take into account audience preferences, or you will waste a lot of effort.

Should You Use Outside Help?

Developing and executing a thought leadership strategy is very effective, but it is not easy. Apart from the discipline required to maintain your mastery of the subject matter there are the important issues of strategy development and content creation to consider. Are there easier, more effective ways to solve for these challenges?

Our research on high growth professional services firms provides some answers. The chart below shows outsourcing done by High Growth firms (those growing by at least 20% annual growth rate) compared to the outsourcing practices of their No Growth peers (those firms showing no growth or shrinkage). High growth firms do much more outsourcing across the board.

Note the categories most closely tied to thought leadership content strategy (strategy development, research), content production (thought leadership content) and promotion (SEO, Public Relations). In all these categories, High Growth firms are much more likely to use specialized outside resources. So, the data is clear. Outsourcing key aspects of your thought leadership content strategy, production and promotion is associated with faster growth and higher profitability. Doing it well really does pay off.

What Cannot Be Outsourced?

The thought leadership part. Your marketing partner cannot be the thought leader on your behalf. You must have the expertise. Turning that expertise into polished content? That you can get help with. But delivering on that promise is up to you.

The other component that cannot be outsourced is integrating that thought leadership into service delivery. If the products and services you deliver don’t reflect that thought leadership you will disappoint you clients. You must walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

A Final Thought

Thought leadership is a very appealing concept. To many B2B firms it sounds like an ideal fit. And for many firms it is a good fit and a smart strategy. But to get effectiveness from a thought leadership approach it must be done well. Your thought leadership content must be both relevant and insightful and lead a client to considering your firm or solution to meet the challenges they’re facing.

Good thought leadership starts with good thinking and good analysis. But that alone is not sufficient. You must find a way to make your insights visible to your target audience or you will find yourself in the position of being a thought leader without any followers.

The post B2B Thought Leadership Content: Elevating Your Brand’s Authority and Driving Business Growth appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

As Earth perishes from drought and famine, the protagonist played by Matthew McConaughey embarks on a time-sensitive journey across the universe in search of a new home for humanity. Midway through the movie, McConaughey and the team of scientists arrive at their first planet to explore, one situated in close proximity to a black hole. Because of this proximity, the planet has 130% of earth’s gravity and also experiences an extreme time dilation, making it so that one hour on the planet equals 7 years on Earth! The stakes are high and every second matters. Without summarizing the whole movie, I’ll limit my plot synopsis to mention that things do not go to plan for the team that visits the planet. Too much time passes. 

The scene that stuns me is actually the one that follows this thrilling sequence on the planet. When McConaughey and team return to their spacecraft, he is greeted by the one team member who stayed behind to study the planet from above. He is now an old man. 23 years have passed. The emotion of this scene is remarkable, not only because of the intense action, but because the movie awakens us to the realities of the powerful forces at work in the universe—time, space, and gravity.

The mysterious force of gravity is the most vivid analogy I can use to describe the power of a successful inbound content marketing plan. Similar to how larger bodies of mass in space have increased potential pulling power of gravity, at Hinge we’ve used an inbound content marketing program for years—and have witnessed first hand the way it can pull buyers towards a firm’s brand.

In this article, we will enter the gravity well of inbound content marketing. We’ll explore why and how inbound content marketing is one of the most powerful ways professional services firms can enhance their visibility and reputations today. We’ll define inbound content marketing, discuss its benefits and challenges, and provide you with a roadmap to implementing your own inbound content marketing program.

By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of how inbound content marketing works and how you can begin harnessing this powerful force at your firm. 

So journey with me! Let’s begin by providing a definition of the term inbound content marketing. 

What is Inbound Content Marketing?

Inbound content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing valuable and relevant content with a target audience for the purpose of educating them on your individual/corporate expertise and capabilities.

This is in contrast to outbound marketing activities, which involve more traditional forms of advertising such as television commercials, print ads, direct mail, and even paid social media ads.

Examples of Inbound Content Marketing

Examples of inbound content marketing can include a combination of many different marketing techniques, including the writing of blog posts, production of videos, publication of whitepapers, and more. An inbound content marketing program can range in size depending on the amount of bandwidth a particular team has for implementing the strategy. Regardless of its scope, every inbound content marketing strategy has the same goal—to provide your target audience with accessible content that helps them solve their business problems while simultaneously demonstrating your expertise.

Let’s review a real-world example… this blog post! I am writing this blog post with the intention of ranking for the keyword “inbound content marketing.” This article is completely free for anyone to read and my intent is to educate you on everything I know about inbound content marketing. I also intend to demonstrate my expertise on the subject through my experience delivering content marketing programs at Hinge. 

But is inbound content marketing still relevant to today’s buyers? Let’s take a look.

The Case for Inbound Content Marketing

We can’t pretend that content marketing is anything new, so why should professional services marketers care about it today? Is it an outdated approach?

When trying to solve big “why” questions like this, we at Hinge like to turn to the data. Does data on professional services buyers support investing in an inbound content marketing program? The answer is a resounding YES! And for more than one reason.

Inbound content marketing cultivates potential customers in three ways:

1. Finding you
2. Evaluating you
3. Closing the sale

Let’s take a look at recent data on professional services buyer behavior and see how strategic inbound content marketing enhances the power of your brand.

Inbound Content Marketing Helps Prospects Find You

It’s not a surprise that over the last decade buyer behavior is gradually shifting to the digital environment. One of the consequences of this is that the ways potential buyers find you is expanding into a more diverse set of channels. In the chart below, we see the list of the top ways buyers search for solutions to their work-related problems.

Professional services marketing has always relied on a strong backbone of networking and referrals from peers and colleagues. But today we find that other channels are increasingly important too! 

Let’s focus on the second channel: buyers are turning to search engines like Google for answers. Nearly tied with the perennial top channel, referrals, search engines play an essential role in the business development environment today. So the question to ask is “when your buyers turn to search for problems, will your firm appear in the results?”

For most professional services firms, ranking in search engines is a real pain point. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technical marketing skill that requires ongoing dedication to build traction. And it is here where we find one of the primary use cases of inbound content marketing. High-quality content that is relevant and practical has the best chance of ranking on Google. And of course, higher rankings on search engines means people interested in your expertise are more likely to discover you.

The visibility rewards compound overtime too. As marketing teams produce more and more content on their websites, their ability to rank for more competitive keywords gets stronger. Organic SEO benefits are possible too as people share your content or add backlinks to your content on their websites. 

Looking back at our Interstellar gravity metaphor, the more content you publish to your website, the more mass you’re adding to your digital planet. If it’s the right substance, then you’ll start pulling in the right audience to engage with your firm’s brand.

As I mentioned above, buyers are using many channels to search for work-related problems today. So while we highlighted SEO, let’s also look at how other content-based techniques help professional services firms increase their visibility.

The research shows that buyers are turning to channels where they can listen to an expert speak on a topic (e.g., podcasts), read blog articles, and consume premium content in the forms of guides, ebooks, webinars, and/or videos. All of these channels can be part of an integrated inbound content marketing program.

While outbound strategies might be the fastest way to getting new eyeballs on your brand, marketers have known that organic visibility is always preferable. It is a slower approach. But buyers searching for solutions and finding your original thought leadership content is an excellent way to be found and begin a relationship.

Content Marketing Helps Prospects Evaluate You

The benefits of inbound content marketing aren’t limited to being found. Our research shows that content marketing also plays a key role when your business is being evaluated as a possible service provider. The chart below shows what buyers care about most when evaluating you as a service provider. Can you find the connection with inbound content marketing?

When comparing two or more firms, buyers are looking most often for industry knowledge and subject matter expertise. In the high-stakes environment of evaluating firms, what brings buyers comfort is knowing that a service provider has a rich understanding of their industry and that they have the expertise to solve their particular problems.

High-quality thought leadership content, written by competent experts at your firm, fills this gap. Potential buyers want to understand your firm’s unique perspective. What separates you from the competition? You can educate them and validate your expertise with accessible, relevant content.

It’s important to take into consideration that buyers will continue to consult your firm’s website and engage with your brand throughout the evaluation process. They will pass your information and website URL to their colleagues. They may subscribe to your email list and receive promotions you send out to your list. During this evaluation period, continuing to validate your firm’s expertise is key.

Content that engages prospects directly like webinars can be particularly potent pieces of your inbound content marketing system for these individuals considering your firm as a service provider. Oftentimes this is the weakest part of a content marketing strategy. But investment into content marketing techniques that help to nurture relationships is essential.

Content Marketing Helps Close the Sale

We understand that at the end of the day deals need to close. And while many may consider the objective of closing the sale to be left to partners and business development representatives, data shows us that your inbound content marketing techniques can benefit here too.

In our study, we asked professional services buyers what “tipped the scale” for them when they made their final selection decision. Here are the top five deciding factors:

1. Existing relationship
2. Relevant experience/past performance
3. Talented staff/team skills
4. Knowledge of industry/subject matter expertise
5. Client service (flexibility/responsiveness/timeliness)

Once again the data points us at three things that intersect with a strong inbound content marketing program. 

We see that buyers want proof of experience and past performance. Case stories and project overviews are great examples of content that can address this need. For example, in Hinge’s monthly webinars, we try to include  client stories and results as a core part of the content.

Number three on the list is your talented team and the skills your team possesses. A strong content marketing program is an effective way to demonstrate your team’s  expertise on particular issues. When your experts are also contributors to your content marketing program, buyers get a small sample of what it might be like to work with your team. The content has validated the team members and their expertise in a public way that can give buyers an opportunity to familiarize themselves with your team before even working with you. 

Then on the list we see number four appear again—knowledge of industry and subject matter expertise. The inbound content marketing techniques you implement provide prospective buyers with confidence and validation when making a buying decision.

So from the top of your marketing funnel, where you attract new prospects, all the way down to the bottom, where you close the sale, an inbound content marketing program can play an important role for professional services marketers. 

The question is no longer why should you do inbound content marketing, but why don’t you? In the animation below, you can see my reaction anytime a marketing team begins to give up on their inbound content marketing program.

The Main Problem with Inbound Content Marketing

One thing is true about inbound content marketing that hasn’t been mentioned yet… it’s challenging. There’s no getting around the fact that building a high-quality inbound content marketing system comes with a cost. Time, effort, and lots of testing are required to maintain a growing inbound content marketing program. But one challenge with inbound content marketing stands above the rest.

The most common thing we hear when we work with our clients on their content marketing program is how hard it is to engage their experts in the content creation process. In the world of professional services, our top experts are the people most qualified to contribute powerful thought leadership content… But they are busy delivering work for their clients and selling more work. So how do we get them to participate in our content marketing program?

Organizing Your Team of Experts

Of course there is no one answer to the problem of engaging your firm’s thought leaders. Every expert is different. Some have ambitions to raise their professional profile while others are unconvinced that their thought leadership will benefit the firm. However, there are two primary strategies professional services marketers can implement to engage their experts in the content creation process.

First, you need to make sure that the experts understand why thought leadership content benefits both them and the firm. For starters, you can reiterate some of the data and points from earlier in this article. Educate them on your potential buyers and the role that high-quality content plays in the buyer journey of your prospects.

If that’s not enough to convince them, then educate them on some of the other benefits that come with being more visible with their expertise. Below in Figure 4 we see data from another research project we did on highly visible professional services experts. We asked them what benefits they enjoy the most from being thought leaders. 

The second strategy for engaging experts in the content creation process is to make it easy for them. From experience let me tell you… it’s never good to simply send an email to a colleague and ask them to write a 1,000 word blog post. Unless you are working with a true content creation fanatic, you will likely not get a positive response. Instead, you need to demonstrate to the expert that you can help them make the process smooth. 

If the assignment is to writing an article, then a top way to ease the burden on your expert is to engage an outside industry writer to take on the heavy lifting. Schedule an interview with the writer and the experts. To prepare for the interview, draft an outline of the piece. Schedule an interview between the expert and the writer, record it, and ask the expert to talk about each section of the outline. Allow the writer an opportunity to ask questions. In this scenario, the writer tackles the labor of writing and allows the expert to function more as a contributor and editor.

This concept of making things easier on your expert extends across all kinds of content. You want to work to the strengths of your experts. If they are strong speakers and presenters then lean into content creation that gives them the opportunity to use that gift. Record video interviews for social media clips, bring them on as webinar guests, or support their efforts to secure more speaking engagements. 

Demonstrating to experts that you are taking their strengths into consideration will go a long way into making the content creation process better for your team. Here is how an expert will react when you make the content creation process easy for them.

Tears of joy.

Quality content creation will never come without its challenges. But with creative thinking and an expert-centered approach, you’ll be able to prevail.

Implementing an Inbound Content Marketing Plan

At this point you may be inspired to continue to develop your firm’s inbound content marketing program. As we have mentioned above, the benefits are plenty and the challenges can be conquered. So what are the steps you have to take in order to implement a successful inbound content marketing plan?

While we go into deeper detail in our article on brand development, let’s summarize the key factors that can make or break your inbound content marketing program. And let’s do so by asking some important questions. If you can answer these questions, then you’ll be well on your way to creating a robust inbound content marketing plan.

1. Have you identified your target clients?

No one can be all things to all people in marketing. Years of experience and research on professional services marketing have revealed to us that firms that grow faster and are more profitable often have a narrow focus. They solve specific problems for a particular group of target clients. As a marketer focusing on building a strategy, having a clear understanding of your target clients is non negotiable.

2. Have you researched your clients recently?

The fastest growing firms are also companies that are more likely to have researched their clients recently and more often. Understanding your target clients and the problems they face is an important aspect of running your business and also developing an inbound content marketing strategy.

The marketplace is changing faster than ever right now. But still many firms insist on carrying on without conducting ANY forms of research on their clients or marketplace. We believe this is a mistake.

Client research yields insights that translate directly to your marketing strategy. Understanding, for example, how your current clients found you can help you decide which marketing techniques to double-down on and which to kill. 

3. Is your brand positioning differentiated from your competition?

This is another question that is hard to answer without research. One thing we find through our Visible Firm program with our clients is that their competitive landscape is much larger than they think it is. Professional services firms consistently underestimate the number of competitors lurking in their ecosystem.

Therefore, it is crucial that your brand positioning is differentiated. This differentiation will be reflected on your website and in all your messaging and brand assets. Your team should be equipped with brand guidelines and key messages that keep them aligned on what makes your firm unique.

Strong brand positioning will also guide your marketing efforts when it comes to selecting issues and topics to write about. This differentiated, research-based approach is much better than creating content in a vacuum.

4. What are your firm’s marketing strengths?

Once you’re able to answer the three questions above with confidence, then you can  consider which marketing techniques inbound content marketing techniques to use. Here you’ll want to turn your attention inward and assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses.

When evaluating your team’s skill set, think about marketing techniques in three categories: writing, speaking, and networking. While networking may not have a lot to do with inbound content marketing, speaking and writing certainly do. Selecting marketing techniques that align with the strengths of your team is the goal. And if possible, develop a visibility plan for each of your experts so they have a clear path forward.

For example, you may want to consider guiding your most skilled writers towards the creation of more technical, in-depth content. This could come in the form of a white-paper, research report, or guide. Your gifted speakers, on the other hand, may be more suited for strategies that lean into social media content. Platforms like LinkedIn continue to give additional exposure to original video content.

5. Is your marketing infrastructure working for you?

You can create excellent content and still miss the mark if your primary brand assets and infrastructure are outdated, broken, or completely missing. Inbound content marketing programs extend beyond the pieces of content themselves. They rely on many pieces of infrastructure which support them and extend their impact. 

At a minimum, your firms should have these key pieces of marketing infrastructure to support a robust inbound content marketing program:

• High-performance website
• CRM 
• Email marketing/automation
• Active social media channels

The most common shortfall for professional services firms is their website. In a recent article, I listed 21 traits of poorly designed websites that you can use to assess your own website. When it comes to your content marketing program, your website is the primary hub. If you invest time in creating a piece of unique content, it should have an easy-to-find place on your website so that your prospects and clients can access it.

Your marketing infrastructure and brand assets need to work in harmony with your content marketing strategy. Avoid any disconnects that would make content inaccessible to your target clients.

6. Are you continuing to update your content?

A piece of content is never finished. This is another common mistake we see when we work with our clients and research the competitive landscape. Content you create is always available to be reviewed, updated, and republished at a new time and date. Moreover, longer pieces of content can be broken down into smaller pieces and reused elsewhere—social media, webinars, even videos!. 

Let’s consider a blog post as an example. If you posted an 800 word blog post one year ago but it is yet to get any SEO traction, perhaps this is an opportunity to try again. Leaving the article there with no updates is not going to make it magically improve. So revisit the post. What was the original intent? Is the post keyword-driven? Is there more that could be added to the article? In our experience, the answers here are almost always yes. 

7. How are you challenging your team?

Finally, when an inbound content marketing program is running well, consider how your team might tackle bigger challenges that enhance your reputation. Should your firm start a podcast? How about a series of webinars? Or maybe you could consider commissioning original research on your industry that could be turned into a number of different pieces of content (see below).

Your inbound content marketing program will never arrive at its destination. There are always more ways to increase your firm’s visibility and enhance its reputation. As a marketing leader, be sure to continue to challenge your team to accomplish all it can building a strong content marketing program.

A Final Thought

We’ve made the case and shared why you should leverage the gravitational force of an inbound content marketing program. The benefits are innumerable. The challenges exist but can be overcome. 

Inbound content marketing reaches your prospective buyers in a way that most outbound techniques cannot. By the nature of how these marketing efforts are designed, when buyers find you organically because of your subject matter expertise, they are more likely to trust you as a service provider.

Of course, we know the journey is not simple. And you may want some support. If you’d like to speak with a Hinge expert on how to develop your firm’s inbound marketing program, then reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you.

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As the world’s largest platforms strive to grow their dominance of the online user’s experience, marketers need to take a more comprehensive, multi-layered approach for their firms to survive and thrive. After all, these platforms are not only forums for engagement; they now compete for your audience’s attention and time.

This comprehensive approach is called integrated marketing.

This article will answer the most frequently asked questions about integrated marketing communications:

1. What is integrated marketing communications?
2. What is owned media?
3. What are the top owned media best practices?
4. What are the top owned media mistakes people make?
5. What are the top tools practitioners need to get the most benefit from owned media?
6. What is earned media?
7. What are the top earned media best practices?
8. What are the top earned media mistakes people make?
9. What are the top tools practitioners need to get the most benefit from earned media?
10. What is paid media?
11. What are the top paid media best practices?
12. What are the top paid media mistakes people make?
13. What are the top tools practitioners need to get the most benefit from paid media?
14. What is shared media?
15. What are the top shared media best practices?
16. What are the top shared media mistakes people make?
17. What are the top tools practitioners need to get the most benefit from shared media?
18. How do you combine owned, earned, paid, and shared media into an integrated marketing communications plan?

What is integrated marketing communications?

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) combines different marketing techniques and media channels into a single campaign. For this reason, IMC campaigns are sometimes referred to as cross-channel marketing campaigns. The components of these campaigns include:

1. Owned media
2. Earned media
3. Paid media
4. Shared media

By pushing messages through the different channels, campaigns are able to reach a target audience that consists of buyers and their influencers. Executed well, an integrated campaign can reach a broader audience, reinforce messages, improve efficiency, and lower costs.

Owned Media

What is owned media?

Owned media can be defined as anything that is controlled directly by a particular individual or organization. This includes, but is not limited to, websites and email communication. From a marketing perspective, website content (think product pages or thought leadership content) and email communications are critical pieces for success in IMC.

What are the top owned media best practices?

1. Regularly produce and update content.

Owned media content should be produced AND updated regularly. Be sure to produce new content regularly, even if it’s just a blog post or two a month on your website. More content gives you a better chance to gain rankings and traffic, but many struggle just to get started and remain consistent.

2. Continuously monitor the performance of content.

As your content gets older, it may become irrelevant or even inaccurate. Keeping tabs on content that drives regular visibility (e.g., a blog post that starts ranking in search results) is important to avoid presenting outdated information.

3. Ensure you have bio pages to highlight your subject matter experts.

Ideally, your subject matter experts will author or be involved in content creation. Their expertise is vital to differentiate your content and provide value. Each of your experts should have a dedicated bio page that showcases their recent content. Press kits are also recommended and can be helpful in securing speaking engagements, podcast appearances, and guest contributions.

What are the biggest owned media mistakes and misunderstandings?

1. Abandoning integrated marketing campaigns too soon.

Organizations often take the first step toward an integrated marketing strategy only to abandon their strategy just a few months into their efforts when the ROI fails to meet their expectations. Keep in mind these efforts take time. Most won’t yield search engine results for at least six months. At that point you can start relying on a regular cadence of traffic coming to your site. If you have premium content (gated long-form content such as executive guides), you can start to grow your email list.

2. Forgetting to update content.

Another mistake we often see is failing to update existing content. As mentioned earlier, updating and republishing your blog content can be a very effective way to get quick wins. Identifying content that consistently drives organic traffic is the first step. Oftentimes, this content might be old and outdated. Updating and republishing this content sends positive signals to search engine algorithms and often results in higher rankings and increased traffic.

3. Promoting only newly released content.

Also overlooked is repromoting older content to your email list. Some of your older content is likely still relevant. Do not hesitate to repromote this content no matter how old. Many wrongly believe the only time they can send out content to their list is the day they release it.

What tools can you use to ensure the effectiveness of your initiatives?

A website on a user-friendly CMS (content management system) such as WordPress is critical to any integrated marketing strategy. You must be able to add new content, update old content, and capture new email addresses to grow your list. If this requires a developer’s help, you will likely need to upgrade your website.

A good email marketing platform will also be necessary. If you’re starting out, tools like Mailchimp and Constant Contact will suffice. If you need a platform that can program campaigns, suppress lists, and score leads, Pardot, Eloqua, and Hubspot are good options.

Finally, you must know how your efforts are performing. Free tools like Google Analytics are essential. Google Analytics gives you the ability to identify your traffic sources (e.g., search engines, social media, email) and which content draws the most traffic and converts at higher rates.

Earned Media

What is earned media?

Earned media is public attention you obtain without paying for it. In the digital ecosystem, earned media are unpaid brand mentions on websites and platforms that you don’t own. Examples of earned media include speaking engagements, guest articles, podcast interviews, and mentions on strategic partner websites.

What are the top earned media best practices?

1. Earned media starts with your own website.

You need to blog frequently and consistently on the topics you want to be known for. You can also repurpose your content as a video or webinar. Why? Because owned media will drive earned media. All event organizers and publishers will ask for your website URL to find proof you have the expertise to deliver a talk or write an article about the topics you’re pitching to them. Moreover, keyword-rich blog articles that explore the what’s, why’s, and how’s of a topic can draw traffic from bloggers, journalists, and editors looking for information and sources. To increase your chances of being found by them, you need to bolster your blog article with statistics and insights into trends.

2. Find out what your target pubs and events are looking for.

Whether you’re pitching to publications or event organizers, you need to demonstrate you’re what they’re looking for. So what are they looking for?

First, an authority on a relevant, timely topic. A growing number are interested in topics that are making the headlines. The best topic is one that fills a gap. If your target publication has featured many articles on the reasons behind the Great Resignation, an article that explores, say, what has become of mid-career folks who quit their jobs to start their own business will provide a fresh perspective on a topic that has generated thousands of articles across many industries.

Second, an expert who offers added value to their audience. Readers and event attendees are hungry for proven methods and solutions to new and evolving challenges. And they want insights from recognized experts.

Third, an expert who has written and spoken about this topic before. This point underscores the importance of including educational videos and blogs on your website.

Fourth, you have a large following. Like you, event organizers and publishers are continually looking to expand their audience reach. Experts with a significant number of engaged followers on social media, for instance, have a distinct advantage over those who don’t.

3. Share your insights with the media.

If you’ve never been externally published, serving as a source for insightful quotes is a great way to gain third-party credibility across different pubs and platforms. You can increase the likelihood that pubs pick up your quotes or comments by providing message supports, such as statistics, infographics, or soundbites. These supports will help your comment stand out from other quotes flooding journalists’ and bloggers’ inboxes.

If you’re a strong writer and have time to develop a full length article, try guest blogging, a favorite technique among high growth firms for its high impact. Like expert commentary, it helps to underscore your authority to your audience and signals to search engines that you’re a recognized authority on your topic. When external websites and platforms mention you or link back to your website, your search engine ranking receives a nice boost, leading to more site visitors, digital leads and conversions.

Before pitching any article ideas, do your homework. Publications with a solid domain authority (DA) are good targets. Research which publications with good DA address your audience’s needs. Find out their audience reach. And identify topics or angles of topics they haven’t covered. The key is to position yourself as an expert offering the publication’s audience a proven yet differentiated approach to their challenges.

4. Speak at events, webinars, and podcasts.

When buyers of professional services look for experts who can help, they attend events—online and in person. What’s more, over the past two years podcast consumption has steadily grown not only in the number of listeners but the number of podcasts that regular listeners consume.

Whether you’re speaking at events or being interviewed, focus on topics that align with your expertise and your audiences’ needs. A growing number of events require speakers to center their presentations on case studies. Some require vendors to co-present with their clients.

Why are case studies becoming a requirement? Buyers who invest in attending events are looking for solutions that work and people they can work with. Case studies will show proof of your solution’s effectiveness and instill trust in your expertise.

The downside to case studies is the challenge of receiving a client’s approval. Clients often don’t want to give the appearance they’re in trouble or need help. Many clients have stringent policies that might restrict case studies altogether.

One way to overcome a client’s reluctance is to position the presentation as a way to tout their innovation or successful implementation of industry best practices. In short, avoid the use of the term “case study.”

What are the biggest earned media mistakes and misunderstandings?

1. Thought leaders are celebrities.

In professional services, earned media has two objectives: to build your reputation as an authority in your areas of expertise and to improve your website’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT). More EAT means more website traffic and digital leads you can shepherd through the marketing funnel. Celebrity is about popularity. Thought leadership is about professional expertise and visibility. Celebrity can be gained by creating buzz. Thought leadership involves gaining recognition for your place in the sandbox of expert ideas and insights. We call thought leaders Visible Experts, known and sought after not only by their clients but other experts in their industry.

2. Digital PR is a separate discipline from SEO.

When we think of SEO, the technical tactics for websites often come to mind. In fact, there are two sides to SEO: onsite and offsite strategies. Onsite strategies include keywords, meta descriptions, and more. These strategies establish your website’s relevance. But to improve your site’s search engine rankings, you need to establish authority and trustworthiness. You do this by building relationships with third parties who can influence your buyers’ decisions. These third parties are the publications your buyers read, the events they attend, and the podcasts they listen to, among others. By featuring you or your content on their platforms, and showing their willingness to lend you their audience, these third parties are vouching for your authority and trustworthiness.

A final word on SEO and earned media. Those coveted keywords you can’t score high enough through your website? You can pursue them through earned media from higher ranking sites and platforms.

3. Earned media is all about backlink building.

On the contrary, earned media is all about initiating and strengthening relationships with pubs, writers, podcasters, and event producers. The nexus of those relationships is your high quality expert content. Backlink building will tarnish your reputation. These third parties know when that’s your main goal. In fact, top tier publications like The New York Times don’t provide backlinks—only mentions.

Moreover, search engines have become more sophisticated over the past decade. Positive brand mentions count. Google, for instance, has guidelines for their third party quality raters to look for factors such as whether an expert has presented in conferences.

4. Earned media should focus on your corporate brand.

In today’s digital environment, your brand reflects what people discover about your business online. If you were to do a search on your business name, you’re likely to find information beyond what you do and who you are. You might also find what former and current employees say about what you’re like as an employer. This is your employer brand.

Why focus on both corporate and employer brand? In today’s tight labor market, you’re more likely to attract talent if you have a good reputation as an employer. Second, many buyers factor into their purchase decisions whether a vendor shares their values, especially those values linked to how companies treat employees and the communities they serve.

What tools can you use to ensure the effectiveness of your initiatives?

A good database of contacts is a must. Companies like Cision, Muckrack, and Meltwater provide the names and contact information of bloggers, journalists, and their editors. Each platform has its benefits and disadvantages and caters to specific users.

If these tools are outside of your budget’s reach, you can set up alerts on your topics to identify the bloggers, journalists, podcasters, events, and the publications that cover them. Once you have your list of contacts, read up on them. This will help you develop pitches tailored to their needs, interests, and requirements.

Paid Media

What is Paid Media?

Paid media is any type of paid advertisement. The five main categories of paid media are offline ads, social media ads, PPC/SEM, audio ads, and display ads. Examples of paid media include a YouTube campaign, digital billboard, newspaper ad, online article exchange, or a link building opportunity.

1. Paid media starts with your own website.

For paid media to function appropriately, the process should begin with optimizing your website. Your website should be set up for conversion tracking by taking these steps:

• identify a landing page that highlights a service/job posting your business offers
• make sure that landing page contains the content that will be highly correlated to the paid media advertisement you’re going to purchase
• ensure that tracking is set up to properly attribute marketing attribution back to your paid campaigns
• make sure that the landing page already has a suitable conversion rate

For paid media, your landing page should never be more than one click away from your conversion opportunity. A user should have multiple opportunities to click from your landing page to convertible content.

2. Demographic profiling is your next critical step.

Start by taking a sample of your best clients. Next, create a demographic profile using your sample. Another approach is to identify a custom profile for a user you think might match the need for your services. Keep in mind you can create more than one demographic profile and run them alongside each other. No matter how many profiles you create, you must define what that client looks like on paper so you can best match the target user to the options your paid media opportunity provides.

You can identify different checkpoints throughout your campaign where you will monitor campaign performance. You can use this time to measure which demographics are responding the most or least to your campaign so you can make adjustments to your strategy. You can choose different time triggers to stop one profile/ad group from running if it doesn’t hit predefined benchmarks.

3. Paid media should be highly measured.

It’s important to know if the key performance indicators (KPIs) involved in your paid campaign are based on impressions, engagement, candidates, or sales opportunities. If you’re participating in a paid campaign, you will need to report these KPIs to internal stakeholders. Of critical importance is knowing the correct terminology and which KPIs are important to which report. If you know the meaning of the KPIs you’re using, every single KPI should tell you a story.

What are the top paid media best practices?

1. Set a budget for expense/ROI purposes.

Decide how much you’ve allocated for your integrated marketing campaign. Define the amount you’re willing to spend to achieve the results you want. Make sure to more than double your marketing expenditure as a benchmark revenue goal for the integrated marketing campaign.

If I know that our professional services/B2B service line needs to stay flat this year against a prior year’s revenue goals, as a marketer I know that I need to at least replicate the campaign strategy that was performed in previous years. If I want to grow the business, I know that I have to level up the campaign strategy in order to meet that objective. Integrated marketing campaigns are an excellent way to achieve financial growth in a challenging economic market and a great way to produce a measurable ROI.

2. Automate how you use paid media to interact with potential clients

Once you have built a campaign that works or performs well, you can scale up to meet higher revenue goals or scale down if you surpass your internal goals for specific silos or segments of your business. The point is this: Once you can capitalize on something that works, you essentially have a “dial” or “control” built that can impact the bottom line of your business at will. Some marketers might even refer to this as gamifying and personalizing your marketing strategies.

3. Tell your business’ stories about what you do and why and how you’ve overcome failures.

Our favorite thing to do with any company or brand we engage with is to tell a story online for them and for their clients to engage with. We do this so that they can impact their potential customers with relevant messages they can follow and consume in bite size chunks. We keep an eye on the content we are promoting online to ensure that our campaign strategy is reaching all the segments of their business that we would like to impact.

Social media requires frequent posting in order to stay engaged with your audiences. You can stretch these marketing stories as far out as you can to take full advantage of the content you create.

What are the biggest paid media mistakes and misunderstandings?

1. Testing more than one variable at a time.

A/B testing is a crucial step in placing a digital media buy. However, remember to test only one variable at a time; otherwise you won’t know what’s working and what’s not. If you’re concerned that your ad copy isn’t resonating with your audience, it will be impossible to identify that as the breakdown if you’re also testing the media changes simultaneously.

2. Delivering exactly the same message across multiple channels.

One of the biggest mistakes we see brands make when it comes to paid media is not giving each individual channel a unique message. Your customers should have the opportunity to follow you on each paid channel for a unique reason. For instance, you might post relevant service-related marketing research on Instagram, but on LinkedIn you might post company culture messaging if your firm would like to reach potential job candidates. Segmenting your messaging into separate communication silos is very helpful when you’re trying to fine tune your messaging strategy.

3. Forgetting to share and celebrate their successes.

We often remind clients to measure their results. Why? Because no matter how small the success, the results will give you (as the marketer) good reason to reach out and win over your internal stakeholders. If your ad has produced even moderate success, report it to upper management and stakeholders.

Keeping stakeholders up to date gives more weight to your marketing efforts and engages you in a dialogue that could spark new ideas or alert you to information you didn’t know existed. It might also give you the opportunity to explain a nuance of your campaign strategy in a more detailed fashion. We have found that upper management has a lot of history and knowledge when it comes to company operations. But when it comes to tactical application of new ideas and concepts, upper management might not know every nuance of your strategy. If you’re able to articulate your strategy to upper management, they can offer assistance to help you fill in gaps you may encounter along the way.

Shared Media

What is shared media?

Shared media is any type of promotional content that is shared to a group of people in order to reach new or existing customers or audiences that may be interested in your business’ services or products.

What are the top shared media best practices?

1. Solve your audience’s problem—help them!

Do you know the main business challenges of your target audiences? If you don’t, you may need to take a step back and perform market research in order to find out the answer to that question. If you do know the answer, making sure that your content is relevant to your audience’s needs and problems is the first step in getting proper engagement on shared social media platforms. It’s also the first step in making sure you win over your website visitors and convert them into clients or employees.

2. A visual story is always better.

Whether that visual is painted in your mind with good story telling or it’s based on a graphic or video you saw, people consume concepts and understand them when they are accompanied by pictures/images/video. They become sticky to our minds and that is precisely where you want your marketing message to resonate. Taking the time to create that image for your buyer is important.

3. Use relevant hashtags.

Some people argue that using too many hashtags negatively affects what you’re sharing. That’s not always true. By including hashtags, you’re giving the consumer a way to follow your content by topic. It’s ok if your content crosses over and is relevant to various topics. Making sure to include the hashtags that place your content in these topics is important.

It’s also important to be consistent with your hashtag usage. Save the ones that you use most frequently so that you can reuse them time and time again. All of the social media platforms have sections of their platform where they aggregate content for their users to peruse. These areas are:

• TikTok: ForYou Page
• Instagram: Explore Page
• Facebook: Newsfeed
• LinkedIn: Newsfeed
• Twitter: Explore
• YouTube: New To You (dated 7/21)

Using hashtags helps your firm’s shared content show up in your target audience’s preferred social media placement.

When using email, TV commercials, billboard advertisements, or other forms of shared media, it’s important to include hashtags so that offline conversations can be pulled together online by the hashtag’s usage.

What are the biggest shared media mistakes and misunderstandings?

1. Budgeting little to no time for creating collateral

Rushing too close to the finish line when creating promotional content is the biggest mistake with shared media. We are all guilty of it. However, sometimes it’s better to miss the opportunity than to misstep the opportunity. When you’re producing shared media such as videos, emails, written messages and graphics, it’s important to allow yourself as the marketer to think through how all those pieces work together. If you don’t have time to map them onto a promotional calendar, you have not given yourself enough time.

2. Sharing too much too quickly. Break your messages into smaller, bite-sized chunks

Particularly on social media, but even on your website and in your customers’ inboxes, people are busy. They do not have time to scroll through an endless litany that shows how knowledgeable you’re. You need to boil your message down to sound bites. Sound bites are quick, insightful, and memorable. They need to be associated with imagery, audio and/or video so that they stick in your audience’s mind.

3. Not breaking the shared media portion of your integrated campaign into launch phases

What is a launch date and why would you use one? A launch date is a date you have pinpointed on your calendar that you, as a marketer, will begin to market your idea, service line or product. To begin breaking up your campaign into launch phases, identify your launch date. Now go backwards from that date two months. This period will be considered your pre-launch period. Going forward from that date is considered your post-launch period. All three launch phases, as we like to call them, are part of your shared media campaign. This shared media portion of your integrated campaign will last at least four months.

From there, identify how much content you would like to share weekly. What would you like your cadence/frequency to be? Take into account how long it might take a website visitor to convert into an MQL (marketing qualified lead). If you’re selling a service line that is expensive or complex, perhaps your audience will need more time to acclimate to the idea of engaging with your professional services firm and this service line.

What tools can you use to ensure the effectiveness of your initiatives?

Tracking & Attribution Tools

Google Analytics: Having proper tracking and attribution methods in place before the campaigns begin is critical. This is so that you can properly track the effectiveness of each arm of your integrated marketing campaign and make adjustments while the campaigns are running. For instance, you may see that an email subject line is underperforming and need to run an A/B test to improve email open rates. Or you may see that your paid media ads on one social platform are not improving and as such, you need to cut some of them or make adjustments to the bidding strategy to improve their performance. Without proper tracking and attribution, you would never know that any of these marketing problems existed and you would not be able to remedy them.

Putting it all together: the High Growth Study Integrated Marcoms Campaign

Earned Media Campaign

The earned marketing campaign has two objectives:

1. Generate interest in the study itself
2. Obtain placements for Hinge visible experts

To obtain earned media, we executed the following tactics.

Press Release

First, we developed an educational press release that focused on the four main competitive advantages of the fastest growing firms: expert talent, business process automation, advanced marketing techniques, and data-driven strategies. The press release read like a news article on the study’s most fascinating findings, rather than a plug for either the study or Hinge Research Institute. Moreover, we built in soundbites throughout the release to offer journalists and bloggers material they could readily use.

Interviews and Guest Articles

Second, we reached out to bloggers, journalists, podcasters, and publications with tailored messages describing how the study linked to trends and why the story was a good fit for their audience. This effort resulted in interviews and guest articles, each one differentiated in content from the rest by drawing on different data from the study.

Herein lies the many benefits of using research as content. One, it offers rich, unique data that can form the basis of articles. Two, it offers industry insights you and your audience can use. In the B2B world, people keep an eye out for data they can use to make the right calls. Research studies demonstrate you have insights they need and help build your authority and visibility as an expert. 

Speaking Engagements

Third, we reached out to industry associations whose members we knew wanted—and needed—lessons from their industry’s fast growing firms about how to lead through an uncertain marketplace where the only constant was disruption. These associations offered speaking opportunities at in-person and online events.

Fourth, we used speaking engagements as opportunities to generate interest in next year’s annual survey. Larger participant numbers convey the research report’s credibility, leading to more interest in accessing the study, as well as in participating in future studies.

Owned Marketing Campaign

The Landing Page

We created a landing page for users that highlights everything included in the study. We included an overview, a “what the user will learn,” and a breakdown of the sample. To access the premium research quickly, users only had to provide their name and email address.

Tip: Only ask for what is necessary at this stage. Asking for too much information will lead to lower conversion rates. We recommend no more than Name, Email, and Industry.

Blogs

We created a series of blog posts explaining the highlights and insights from the data in the study. Each article focused on keyword targets that may be picked up by search engines for enhanced reach.

Tip: Look for keywords with higher search volumes and lower difficulty levels, but do not force irrelevant keywords into your blog title.

Webinars

We produced and scheduled a series of live webinars with at least two of our subject-matter experts, each one taking a deep dive into the data. The webinars allowed, if not encouraged, participants to comment and pose questions throughout. They also helped participants not only make sense of the study’s results but also demonstrated how participants could use the insights to make informed business decisions.

Tip: Be sure to record the webinar so you can turn the live webinar into an on-demand recording also available for download on your website after the live event.

All of these pieces of owned media can then be shared with your email list in the upcoming months of the original study release. Email has been shown to be the most effective way to drive engagement and consumption of research. Email will also be effective to drive registrations to your free webinars.

Paid Marketing Campaign

The objectives of the paid marketing campaign were to:

1. Drive professional services industry leaders (through web traffic) to complete the marketing research survey.
2. Produce more visibility and product awareness around the upcoming Hinge 2022 High Growth Research Study.
3. Increase news organization awareness of the Hinge 2022 High Growth Research Study.
4. We wanted marketing professionals in the professional services industry to see and be made aware of our report. We wanted marketers to know how they could use the findings of the research report for marketing content for their firms.

The results of the first objective were that we were able to produce a number of professional services respondents to the marketing survey. 1150 firms were represented in the marketing research study. They represented $216 billion in combined B2B revenue dollars.

The results of the second objective were that our web traffic to the specific pages we were advertising and elevating received 33.56% more traffic the previous year when we were marketing the 2021 High Growth Study.

This rise in web traffic impacted email subscribers as well. By placing numerous offers throughout our website to encourage downloads of the report, we were able to gain 790 unique new email subscribers. Offers were placed on our homepage, main blog page, featured in our library, and within relevant blog posts.

(Homepage offer example above)

The results of the third objective were that the educational press release went to the wire and we had over 300 pickups by news organizations. Although many marketers balk at the idea of press releases, when written in a style that’s non-promotional and more educational, press releases can drive traffic to a firm’s website and lead to earned media.

The results of the fourth objective were that we were able to drive traffic to the individual landing page of the market research report. The screenshot below shows one social media channel, LinkedIn, that placed ads to advertise the market research study. The results show that we were well over benchmark for many of the KPIs we were tracking—specifically, click through rate.

Shared Marketing Campaign

The objectives of the shared marketing campaign were similar to those of the paid marketing campaign. We essentially “share”, pun intended, the same objectives. To recap, those were:

1. Entice professional services industry leaders to complete the marketing research survey.
2. Produce more visibility and product awareness around the upcoming Hinge 2022 High Growth Research Study.
3. Increase news organization awareness of the study
4. We wanted people in the professional services industry to see and be made aware of our report. We wanted them to know what they could do with the findings.

The important thing to note for the shared media campaign is that we received a lift in our engagement rate on our social profiles. This created “engaged” audience members and email subscribers. It also caused website traffic to spike during the promotion. Last, we received a record number of 110 button clicks on our LinkedIn profile, a 23.6% lift over the previous period.

Here you can see that our target demographic of marketing professionals were the largest chunk of the visitors to our LinkedIn page for the two months we were running our integrated marketing campaign. Typically, business development is the largest industry segment that visits our LinkedIn profile.

We also are starting to receive more activity through short form video content on TikTok stories, YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels.

A Final Thought

The challenges of gaining online visibility are mounting. The world’s most widely used search engines and social media platforms continue to adjust their algorithms in ways that keep users on their sites.

Strategies that once worked wonders will likely prove less effective against the algorithm changes. What does work is an integrated marketing communications strategy centered on distributing key messages and meeting users where they are, combining owned, earned, paid, and shared media.

But to get integrated marketing communications campaigns right, firms will need access to skilled, seasoned talent that knows what success looks like and how to achieve it.

The post The Power of Integrated Marketing: How Owned, Earned, Paid, and Shared Media Can Drive Visibility in a Zero-Click World appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

But what does it actually mean to be a thought leader? How do you become one? Is it in fact a good marketing strategy for the professional services firm? The answers to these questions, and more, are what we will cover in this post.

Let’s start with an understanding of what thought leadership marketing actually is.

Thought Leadership Marketing Defined

Thought leadership marketing is the process of increasing the visibility of specialized expertise and accelerating market influence to accomplish marketing goals, such as building brand strength or generating new business. It is accomplished by creating insightful analysis and content and making that thought leadership visible to your target markets.

Thought leaders are individuals or firms recognized for their specialized expertise and their influence on the development of their discipline. They are both subject matter experts and influencers. They lead the thinking of their field of expertise.

Thought Leadership vs. Content Marketing

Thought leadership is often confused with content marketing. Content marketing is a much broader discipline. It involves using content to attract, educate and close new business. Thought leadership is a specific strategy within the broader concept of content marketing.

For example, a firm might publish helpful content that explains confusing terms and concepts without offering any innovative or advanced thinking. Another firm may offer entertaining or humorous content. Both of these are content marketing strategies, but neither would be considered thought leadership.

Thought Leadership Must Be Made Visible

Thought leadership involves more than expertise and an understanding of industry best practices.

It’s being the expert that brings a fresh, insightful perspective to a common problem or anticipates emerging trends. Often a thought leader’s perspective is at odds with conventional wisdom — even controversial. But a successful thought leader can turn that new insight into tomorrow’s best practice.

Now, having great insights is not enough. Those insights need to be widely visible if they are to become influential.

And this is where many potential thought leaders stumble. They have the expertise and the insight, but no one sees it. Think of it as invisible expertise.

Watch the On-Demand Webinar “Brand You: Build a Powerful Personal Brand in Any Economy” 

Five Levels of Visibility

Our research has been able to identify five distinct levels of visible thought leadership. Each level has increasing levels of influence and impact.

Level 1: The Resident Experts

Recognized as an expert by clients, staff and colleagues that work directly with the thought leader, these individuals are not well known outside of their firm. External influence is minimal.

Level 2: The Local Heroes

Known in their local market or small industry niche, these individual experts’ reputations have moved beyond the boundaries of their firms. Occasionally they attract new business based on their thought leadership.

Level 3: The Rising Stars

These individuals’ reputations are moving onto a regional stage. They are becoming more widely known as influencers and are attracting new business and commanding higher fees. Influence is growing.

Level 4: The Industry Rock Stars

These are the nationally recognized names within their industries. They are influential thought leaders, and they draw top-tier opportunities to their firm. They are sought out as keynote speakers at major industry events and are often quoted in the press. 

Level 5: The Global Superstars

These individuals’ visibility and reputation for thought leadership have developed beyond their niche and industry. Their influence extends to many industries and, in some cases, to the general public. Business flows to their firms, and major brands clamor to be associated with them. Their opinions can influence societies as a whole.

How to Develop Your Thought Leadership Strategy

Developing your strategy for thought leadership is the best place to start. If you get the strategy right everything else is easier. Without a strategy you are likely to be unfocused and much less effective.

Here are the steps to follow.

1. Define Your Target

Who are you trying to reach? Is it a certain industry? A specific corporate role such as the CEO or CFO? Referral sources as well as target clients?

When you know whom you are trying to reach a lot of other specifics start to fall into place. But a word of caution is in order. Don’t be overly broad in your targeting.The narrower and more specific you can be the faster you will progress. Focus drives faster progress.

2. Research Your Target

Pay special attention to their business challenges and important issues and concerns. These will ultimately influence how you position your expertise and what issues you create your thought leadership content around.

There are a variety of different research methods and strategies you can use to collect your information. Don’t just rely on your “gut instinct” or anecdotal evidence. The stronger your research, the more confidence you can have in your strategy.

3. Specify Your Areas of Expertise

You can’t be an expert in everything. Instead, try to focus your area of expertise on as small a niche as is economically viable. As with your target market, the narrower the niche the faster the growth.

Look for an area where your natural interest and the important priorities of your target market overlap. You become a thought leader by offering insights into an area of importance to your target audience.

4. Develop Your Content Strategy

What will you write and speak about? What is your unique angle or insight that makes it thought provoking or practical? Your content needs to be valuable enough for people to use and recommend it.

How do you develop such valuable content? We’ll explore that in the next section.

5. Develop Your Visibility strategy

How will you make your valuable content visible to your target audience? This question can be partially answered by the research you conducted earlier. Where does your target audience turn for new ideas and inspiration? What publications do they read? What blogs do they follow? Who do they already turn to as thought leaders?

Each of the above becomes a possible way to reach your target. Speak at a conference they attend. Publish articles in trade publications. Establish relationships with existing experts in related areas. The sections below on making your thought leadership visible should give you a place to start. Another valuable resource is our book on becoming a Visible Expert^®.

When you have documented your thought leadership strategy you are in a position to create insightful thought-leading content.

Watch the On-Demand Webinar “Brand You: Build a Powerful Personal Brand in Any Economy” 

How to Develop Thought Leadership Content

How do you develop the insights and content that moves a field forward? While there is no formula that can guarantee you will become an insightful, influential thinking, there are meaningful steps you can take to take your expertise to the next level. Deeper, more relevant insights make better thought leadership content.

1. Narrow Your Focus

Our research on high-profile experts shows that narrowing your focus greatly increases the likelihood of deepening your expertise. The narrower your focus, the faster your ascent to leadership.

The reason is pretty simple. Going narrower almost always allows you to accumulate experience and insight faster. That accelerates the process and improves the impact of your content.

2. Do Original Research

Conducting original research on a topic gives you a huge advantage. High-quality research produces new insights that can be applied to clients’ challenges and shared with others. It is one of the key paths to thought leadership. New research findings are the raw material of thought leadership content.

3. Take a Contrarian Perspective

A fresh perspective is another hallmark of thought leader level thinking. Perhaps it’s taking a client’s perspective on a challenge when everyone else is viewing it through his or her own lens. Or when everyone is headed in one direction, you explore the opposite view.

A contrarian perspective doesn’t mean being quarrelsome or negative. It means looking at a problem from a novel angle.

4. Mash Up Your Expertise

Sometimes great insight comes from applying the methods and thinking from one discipline to another: putting two seemingly unrelated fields of expertise together. For example, what happens when you apply design thinking to accounting services? The result may be a novel insight that influences the thinking of others.

5. Interact With Other Experts

Having a good working relationship with other experts helps you in a couple of important ways:

First, it gives you access to the most advanced and influential thinking. Influential thought leaders talk with each other. You help each other get smarter and helps you develop more insightful content.

Second, your colleagues become your amplifiers. They add credibility to you through their association with you. You are a part of “the club” of influential experts, and they will often share your latest thinking or refer new business to you.

Watch the On-Demand Webinar “Brand You: Build a Powerful Personal Brand in Any Economy” 

How to Make Thought Leadership Visible

The challenge with expertise in general and thought leadership in particular is that they are invisible. You can’t tell a thought leader by how they look.

Nor does declaring yourself a thought leader make you one. It could just as easily backfire.

Instead, thought leadership must be demonstrated. Generally this happens in one of three ways:

1. Direct Interaction and Networking

This approach involves working with people directly, perhaps as a client or coworker — interacting with colleagues in meetings, in educational settings or at conferences. The interaction, however, must allow the professionals to demonstrate their competence.

Interacting at a cocktail party or networking event probably won’t cut it.

The interaction needs to be substantive enough that people can sample the thought leader’s expertise. Think of it as an expertise appetizer.

2. Writing

Writing the definitive best-selling book on a topic is the gold standard of thought leadership. But if a book sounds overwhelming, there are other ways that you can convey your expertise through writing. Articles in trade publications, blog posts, white papers and executive guides can also communicate your insights and build your reputation.

Of course, not all writing builds thought leadership. As a matter of fact, if done carelessly, it can easily reveal a real lack of leadership.

3. Speaking

Public speaking is another good way to demonstrate thought leadership. For many experts, speaking engagements are their single best source of new business leads.

Live speaking events are also a great way to meet new people and get fresh input. Sometimes audience questions can be a source of new insights and inspiration.

Watch the On-Demand Webinar “Brand You: Build a Powerful Personal Brand in Any Economy” 

Sharing Your Thought Leadership

How do you spread the word about your thought-leading content? There are a wide variety of potential techniques to share the insights you are developing. A good cross section of the most popular techniques is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Online and offline marketing techniques

Notice that the figure illustrates a balance of traditional offline techniques, such as networking and speaking engagements, and their newer online counterparts, such as social media and webinars. Interestingly, for each offline technique there is a corresponding online technique.

The most successful firms understand where their potential clients look for thought leadership and make their content visible in those channels. 

How Your Firm Benefits From Thought Leadership Marketing

Thought leadership not only benefits the subject matter expert but also the professional services firm they are associated with. Many of these are intuitive, but our recent research study on high-visibility experts has documented them in some detail.

1. Faster Growth

Thought leaders’ single biggest impact is their ability to drive firm growth. Highly visible thought leadership attracts clients who want or need greater expertise. The leads are more qualified and easier to generate. Prospects close more quickly with less effort and greater success. 

2. Higher Billing Rates

There is a direct relationship between the visibility of a subject matter expert’s thought leadership and the billing rate that expert is able to charge. This relationship is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Relative hourly rates buyers will pay, by Visible Expert level

3. A Stronger Brand

If you can combine thought leadership with greater visibility your brand will become significantly stronger. That brand not only drives growth and profitability, it also creates a more valuable firm.

And when you make thought leadership one of your primary marketing strategies, you create a strong differentiator (specialized expertise) and a powerful strategic focus.

4. Attract the Best Talent

The best people want to work with industry leaders. Thought leadership is a great way to demonstrate the quality of your firm and attract employees who themselves want to become thought leaders. In a time when top talent is in high demand, thought leadership is a potent recruiting tool.

5. The Best Opportunities Come to You

Leading subject matter experts not only attract the best new clients and the most talented people, they also yield the best strategic partners and business relationships. When other organizations look to an industry for potential partners they look first for thought leaders.

Leading brands tend to want to work with other leading brands. High visibility experts report that they have their pick of teaming relationships, marketing partnerships and other strategic business opportunities. Thought leadership marketing not only helps you get ahead, it also makes it easier to stay ahead.

Free Resource

The Rebranding Guide for Professional Services Firms

Learn More

The post Thought Leadership Marketing for the Subject Matter Expert appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

In this video blog, Lee Frederiksen addresses the differences between the two similar concepts, thought leadership and content marketing.

Video Transcription

Hi. I want to talk about the difference between thought leadership and content marketing, and this is something a lot of people kind of struggle with.

They’re not the same thing.

Thought Leadership vs. Content Marketing

Thought leadership is a process where you’re creating new, unknown, novel insights about things that are important to people within your profession. It…are the kind of insights that actually get adopted, and they influence future practice by the whole profession, and, of course, you have to make those insights visible. Having those insights and sitting in a Starbucks by yourself isn’t going to cut it. You have to make them visible to the world.

Content Marketing

Now, content marketing is something different. It’s where you’re providing useful content. It isn’t necessarily thought leadership, but it’s useful to the person, the audience you’re reaching. It’s also related to the services you do. Therefore, you’re helping people understand what kind of work you do, and, of course, you have to make that visible to the target audience.

Conclusion

So, if you think about them together, thought leadership is kind of a subset of content marketing, where content marketing is more general. If you want to get to the bottom of this, and increase your thought leadership or master content marketing, go to hingeuniversity.com and check out the Visible Expert course. I think you’ll find it very helpful.

The post Thought Leadership vs Content Marketing [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

This is the third and final segment in a three-part video series. This video explores how Speaking can help make your thought leadership more visible in the technology space.

Video Transcription

Hi. I’m Liz Harr, and you’re watching the final of a three-part series on how technology services firms can raise the spectrum of visibility around their thought leadership. Now, if you watched the first two, you might remember that we talked about two strategies in particular that we found to be very, very effective in raising visibility around thought leadership. And that is, number one, direct contact, allowing your audience to directly experience your expertise through a modicum of ways. The second strategy that I talked about is writing. So, proving and demonstrating your expertise through well-written thought leadership that has a whole system of things in back of it to support that.

Today, what I’m going to talk about is the final strategy, and that is speaking. Now, you might recall from the other two videos, the tricky thing about expertise in general, and thought leadership more specifically, is that these are invisible. You can’t just lay a claim that you’re a thought leader or an expert and have people believe it, you have to demonstrate it. And that’s what I’m talking about in this three-part series.

Now, speaking is an excellent way to demonstrate and prove that you are the thought leader you say you are. First and foremost, and I think probably an obvious reason is that when you are speaking to an audience, you’re speaking to a targeted audience, number one, and you’re speaking to a captive targeted audience, number two. It’s almost as if everyone in the room has raised their hand and already said, “I’m convinced. Tell me more.” That’s where you want your audience to be. But another reason that speaking works so well is how it ties to referrals. Now, you might remember in some of the other video segments where I talked about the importance of referrals in professional services business. And I think we’ve all experienced that, where we’ve received a referral from somebody who hasn’t even worked with us. Well, there’s something called expertise-based referrals. And these are made from folks who just have an idea, maybe it was through seeing some of our thought leadership, but also through hearing us speak. They just have an idea, without ever having worked with us, that we are able to solve the problem that the rest of the world is trying to solve.

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So, take a look at this chart, I just wanna show you some of this research that I’m referring to. In this particular chart, what you’re seeing are sources of what I’m talking about, expertise-based referrals. Look at the number one, 30% of the expertise-based referrals that are being made are made because someone heard you speak. It’s as simple as that. Speaking is such an effective way to demonstrate your thought leadership, and people are convinced in a way that other strategies don’t necessarily convince.

Now, the other thing I’d like to mention is, when you tie a speaking strategy to a well-honed writing strategy, it makes it all the easier to be tapped as that premier keynote speaker or the panelist sitting at the table with other preeminent thought leaders in your space. Speaking doesn’t necessarily work when you’re just chasing after random events and you get in front of the wrong audience, you can end up wasting a lot of time. But when tied to other strategies, speaking really works in terms of demonstrating your expertise and raising the spectrum of visibility for your thought leadership.

So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this series and that you’ll be taking the next, and very practical steps of incorporating direct contact, writing and speaking into your visibility strategy.

Watch the previous sections from this series:

Making Thought Leadership Visible for Technology Firms 1: Direct Contact

Making Thought Leadership Visible for Technology Firms 2: Writing

The post Making Thought Leadership Visible for Technology Firms 3: Speaking [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

This is the second, in a three-part video series on how professional services executives, within the technology services sphere, can make their thought leadership more visible. This video explores the second strategy, Writing.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Liz Harr and you’re watching the second of a three-part series on how technology services firms can raise the spectrum of visibility around their thought leadership. Now, remember if you watched the first video, you’ll already know this. But the reason we’re talking about raising visibility around something like thought leadership is because it is an excellent way to disseminate your expertise. And we know in the world of professional services how important expertise is in terms of driving new business our way.

So in the first series, I talked about the importance of direct contact and letting others experience your expertise directly, through either advising clients or working with a prospective audience through free assessments, that kind of thing, or even mentoring peers and colleagues. That all helps drive referrals your way and it helps secure visibility around your expertise.

Today I’m gonna talk about the efficacy of another strategy and that’s “Writing.” Now, let’s go back to expertise and thought leadership for a moment. The tricky thing about expertise in general and thought leadership more specifically, is that these are intangibles, these are invisible. You can’t tell a thought leader by the way they look or walk or talk nor does the claim that you are a thought leader make you one. The way that you lay claim around being a thought leader is through demonstrating it and that’s what I’m talking about in this video series.

So today I’ll focus on “writing” and how that contributes to raising visibility around your thought leadership. Now let’s talk about, “Why writing?” I wanna show you a chart here and this is from some research that we conducted recently. And look at the top three reasons here that technology services buyers find experts. The criteria they’re using, the first three are all directly attributed to writing online search, they’re going online and they’re looking for evidence thought leadership opinion content pieces on how to solve the problem they’re looking to solve.

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Second is recommendations. If you listened to the first video, you would have heard me talk about the importance of referrals in professional services. And getting recommendations are a primary way that buyers look for experts.

Finally, publications, reading your thought leadership and publications. Now writing has an impact on all three of these and this accounts for 70% of the ways technology services buyers indeed look for experts.

Now that we know why writing is important and how it contributes, let’s talk about what you do. I’m not just talking about a blog here or there or being in social media. For every writing tool and strategy that you have, there needs to be an entire system in back of it that would make it work. So when I talk about a blog, for example, sure, a blog is great but it needs to be properly optimized so that the search engines can find it. It needs to be in the proper channels on your website and in social media so the humans can find it. It needs to live on your website, it needs to live on other reputable online publications as a guest blog.

So there are a lot of pieces that need to be in back of every singular piece of content and thought leadership that you might write. And when you do it that way, you’re creating this whole system of visibility around your thought leadership.

Now, I think everyone in professional services would agree with me that there’s an awful lot of junk out there and that’s why writing as powerful as it can be, it can be powerful on the other end of the spectrum, and instead of making you a credible thought leader, it can actually raise skepticism about you as a thought leader if you don’t write consistently or if it’s not on target with the things that your audience cares about, or most importantly, if it isn’t in fact, a piece of thought leadership. If it doesn’t have an informed perspective or a unique angle on how your audience is trying to solve their problem.

So, I hope that you have found this useful and that you’ll think about incorporating writing as part of your overall strategy for raising visibility around your thought leadership.

The post Making Thought Leadership Visible for Technology Firms 2: Writing [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

This is the first, in a three-part video series on how professional services executives, specifically those selling technology services, can make their thought leadership more visible. This video explores the first strategy, Direct Contact.

Video Transcription

Hi. I’m Liz Harr and you’re watching the first of a three-part video series on how professional services executives, specifically those selling technology services, can make their thought leadership more visible. I’m gonna be talking about three different strategies for doing just that. But before I get to that, let’s talk about why we’re talking about this in the first place.

As we know, in the world of professional services, expertise drives the needle in the balance of more business back to us, as executives in professional services, like nothing else. And one of the best ways to promote your expertise is through thought leadership. So, that’s why we’re spending time talking about how you can make your thought leadership more visible and, at the end of the day, secure more business.

Now, the first strategy that I’ll be talking about is what I’ll refer to as direct contact. And the notion around direct contact is very simple. What I’m talking about is allowing your audience the experience to interact with you directly and experience your expertise. And the way that you can do this…I’m not necessarily talking about networking events and cocktail parties, those don’t quite cut it. What I’m talking about are real direct interactions, perhaps as an advisor to your client, perhaps as a mentor to your peers or your colleagues, perhaps as a partner to a non-competing visible expert in your space, but also to your prospective audience. Think in terms of free consultations, free assessments. So, these are real opportunities for your audience, the folks that you care about at the end of the day, to directly interact with you and experience what you’re an expert in.

The Visible Expert Book: Download for Free

Now, why does direct contact work? Well, it’s for a couple of reasons. The other thing we know about professional services is referrals make the world go round. And we know from our research on referrals that one of the primary ways to secure referrals is through what we call expertise-based referrals. So, all that means is somebody perceives you as an expert because they worked with you and have that experience, or they saw your thought leadership, but somehow you’ve convinced them of your expertise. And these folks will refer you based on that. So, since referrals are so important, it’s important to secure those expertise-based referrals.

Another reason that direct contact is so important. I’m gonna show you a chart. Take a look at this. In some of our research that we did on visible expertise, we talked to buyers of technology services and we asked them, “What convinces you that someone is the expert that they’re claiming they are?” And look at the top one here on the chart. You can see that having a visible track record of your expertise is, in fact, the number one criteria. So, when you use direct contact as a channel for allowing people to experience your expertise, to really experience that track record that you say you have in your thought leadership, it has a halo effect of, in turn, bringing credibility to you as an expert, bringing credibility to your thought leadership, and raising the spectrum of visibility around your thought leadership.

So, I hope I’ll see you at the next two video segments where we’ll talk about the other two strategies to make your thought leadership more visible.

The post Making Thought Leadership Visible for Technology Firms 1: Direct Contact [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

In the last video, in our five-part series about how to develop thought leadership insights, Lee Frederiksen discusses the benefits of having good relationships with other experts.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Lee Frederiksen and today I want to talk to you about how to develop thought leadership insights. This is our fifth session in a five-part series on what you can do to really develop those insights that help make you recognized as a thought leader.

The first thing we talked about was narrowing your focus. The second thing is doing original research – something that people haven’t done before. The third thing is take a contrarian point of view. Look at things differently. The fourth one was mashing up your expertise – trying to include the perspectives of some other disciplines, some other models in it.

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Now we want to talk about the fifth one which is interacting with other experts. Now on one level you may be surprised because you think well, if other experts aren’t they going to be my competitors for thought leadership? Yes and No. They are in that they will have different thoughts. But there’s a couple of big benefits by having good relationships with other experts.

One of them is that when people turn to that other expert and they say “what about Jane or what about John? What do you think of them?” That expert is going to know you and say “Oh yeah they’ve got some good insights!” So it’s going to help really reinforce the notion that you are in fact a thought leader.

But there is a second important benefit and that is hanging around with other thought leaders is going to keep you at the forefront of you game. It’s going to keep you up-to-date with what’s happening and what’s going to happen next. So by incorporating some of those insights into your own thinking you actually move your thinking forward and move you into the position of being recognized as a thought leader.

Watch Earlier Posts in This Series:

1: Narrow Your Focus

2: Do Original Research

3: Take a Contrarian Perspective

4: Mash up Your Expertise

The post How to Develop Thought Leadership Insights 5: Interact With Other Experts [VIDEO] appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

This video is the fourth in a five-part series about how to develop thought leadership insights. This video talks about mashing up your expertise.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Lee Frederiksen. Today I want to continue on our series about how to develop thought leadership insights. This is about how can you get those types of insightful perspectives that really make you a thought leader.

Now, previously, we’ve talked about some other strategies. First, narrowing your focus. The second one, doing some original research that hasn’t been done before. The third one is kind of taking a contrarian or opposite view of things. So, kind of do your analysis and see if there’s some insights.

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Today we want to focus on the fourth strategy, that is what we call, mashing up your expertise. And what we mean by that is simply, look outside your individual specialty area. You’ve narrowed your specialty area but look outside, look at a different discipline. If you’re an accountant, try to see this from a strategist point of view. If you are an attorney, try to see it from an accountant’s point of view.

In other words take a completely different disciple, a different expertise and try to apply that to the issues that you’re focused on. And I think that what you’ll find out is that sometimes a new perspective, new models, new ways of thinking of something can really open up your insights that can propel you to a thought leadership position.

Watch Earlier Posts in This Series:

1: Narrow Your Focus

2: Do Original Research

3. Take a Contrarian Perspective

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