Key findings

Our research reveals producers of thought leadership, particularly laggards, must up their games to consistently deliver high-value content that exceeds consumers’ heightened expectations.

Key findings

01. TL Consumers devour thought leadership when it’s good.

TL Consumers (68%) overwhelmingly told us that high-quality thought leadership is very or extremely important for addressing their organization’s most pressing business challenges. In fact, a near two-thirds majority (61%) say it’s been of high value or extremely high value in choosing partner firms during the past five years.

Moreover, thought leadership appears hypercritical in helping B2B organizations sort through and purchase high-ticket, complex services and products such as those offered by the tech sector.

TL Done Well Drives B2B Customer Engagement

TL producers who reframe B2B organizational challenges in a problem-solving context are better positioned to sell a unique solution. How executives use thought leadership:

Figure 1
Response base: 3,500+ B2B executive decision makers

02. TL Producers don’t realize just how important thought leadership is to their largest customers.

TL Consumers at $20 billion+ revenue firms rated thought leadership’s importance at 4.33 on a 1-5 scale. But only 23% say the content was extremely valuable in helping them choose a B2B firm over the last five years. Sadly, many TL consumers told us the quality of the content they consume could be better.

Our recommendation:

Produce content that reveals explicit evidence that your solution works – whether that evidence is your client work or companies your firm has studied.

Go deeper by focusing your content development resources on fewer topics rather than more.
To decide where to focus, emphasize key client problems that your company has decided to “own.” Focus on those client challenges where your organization has unique solutions that have delivered measurable business improvements.
Bring the right mix of content and marketing tactics to attract the right audience – short- and long-form content, transmedia content (light text with data viz) and targeted campaigns that focus on client pain points and convey your firm’s unique challenge-solving capabilities.
Teach business developers/salespeople to knowledgeably continue the discussion with customers that your TL generates.

Produce content that reveals explicit evidence that your solution works – whether that evidence is your client work or companies your firm has studied.

Executives use thought leadership to inform a wide variety of decisions; IT services and technology decisions lead the way, with technology choices at the top.

Percent of Executives Who Use Thought Leadership from Companies in These Sectors Before Deciding Which Firm

Figure 2
Response base: 152

03. Creating high-value content is extraordinarily difficult for most TL Producers.

We believe this in part is because only about one in 10 producers of thought leadership put primary research at the center of their thought leadership content development efforts. We asked producers of thought leadership to tell us which of the following approaches best fit the way they develop most of their content:

A marketing-centric model, driven by brand and/or product marketers

A journalistic-publishing model, driven by editors and writers (often coming from the media)

A video-centric model, driven by broadcast and video producers

A sales-centric model, driven by their sales organization

A research-centric model, driven by a thought leadership research function

The marketing-centric model was named most frequently (by 36%), followed by the journalistic publishing model (28%). The research-driven model was selected by the fewest respondents: only 11%. However, the TL Leaders were more than twice as likely to take a research-centric model to develop content than the TL Laggards (23% vs. 9%).The art and science of extracting profound insights from research data and internal experts is a major challenge for many B2B organizations – a sentiment shared across all industry segments studied. The biggest TL research challenge: deciding how to gather data.Research design is where big insights begin (or don’t). This includes determining what issues to research – and not! And when it comes to qualitative research, twice as many TL Leaders (32%) as TL Laggards (15%) believe such interviews will be the most important research method to use over the next five years. A much higher percentage of TL Laggards (54%) believe that quantitative online surveys will be the most important TL research method.

Our recommendation:

Use both quantitative and qualitative research (especially qualitative) to understand how the best companies solve issues differently from the rest. Superficial surveys won’t do it here. Case study interviews that dive deeply into customer challenges and solutions will yield great insights on what the best of the best are doing.

Technology-based companies are most confident in their ability to develop thought leadership from research.

How thought leadership producers rate their effectiveness
in creating high-value content from primary research

Figure 3
Response Base: 163

Scale of 1-5:
1=not at all effective 2=somewhat effective 3=moderately effective 4= highly effective 5=extremely effective

04. B2B customers want thought leadership with evidence of Producers' problem-solving capabilities.

Most TL Consumers use thought leadership content in every step in solving key business challenges. That puts the onus on producers to ensure that their content clearly articulates how, where, and why their solutions are most effective at resolving customers’ business needs. In fact, TL Consumers ranked feasibility and novelty of the solutions highlighted in the thought leadership they received from TL Producers 3 and 4; TL Producers rated it 7 and 6 out of 9 choices.

Our recommendation:

Ratchet up your TL research to develop big, counterintuitive ideas – concepts that convey your company’s unique problem-solving expertise and superior knowledge built on a foundation of empirically sound research (facts and figures) and case examples.

Provide details on the methods used and exceptions to consider when attempting to solve business challenges with the solutions highlighted in your thought leadership content. Transparency is critical, as is validation that your solutions are as effective as you claim them to be.

Proof and expertise valued most by all

TL consumers value feasibility and novelty much more than producers.
But both say evidence that the solution works is the foremost priority; depth of knowledge is the second highest priortiy.

	TL Consumers' Ranking	TL Producers' Ranking
Evidence that the solution works	1	1
Depth of knowledge on how to solve it	2	2
Feasibility of solution	3	7
Novelty of solution	4	6
Relevance of topic	5	4
Clarity of communication	6	5
Coherence of concept	7	3
Illuminating facts & figures	8	8
Rigor of argument / persuasiveness	9	9

Figure 4

05. The biggest marketing challenge for TL Producers is managing the tug-of-war over spending.

Limited resources may get tighter if the global economy heads into an extended recession. This means TL Producers must prioritize which functions get a greater share of marketing attention and expenditures. In fact, our research shows that compared with Laggards, Leaders rely much more on audio-visual approaches (i.e., videos, podcasts, and webinars) to share their best and brightest points of view. That may be because videos and webinars, if produced with ultra-high production values, can be more expensive to create than other forms of thought leadership – which Leader firms, particularly those with deeper pockets, might be more apt to invest in.

Our recommendation:

Look outside-in to understand which client challenges are of highest priority. Then focus your investments on fewer but tightly aligned thought leadership initiatives. You should also execute marketing campaigns that reuse insights and takeaways (wash, rinse, repeat) across multiple channels and a variety of long-, short-, and medium-size formats.
To do this, B2B organizations – including thought leadership program leaders and representatives from sales, marketing, communications, business development and corporate strategy teams – must have objective discussions about what content is of highest priority and most likely to resonate with clients.
Focus thought leadership on issues connected to your biggest revenue opportunities, and where customers are most likely to need help understanding your firm’s value proposition and unique solutions.

Remember: Thought leadership is not a zero-sum game within marketing. What is good for marketing should also be good for business development.

This shows the range across industries of the spend on TL as a percentage of revenue.
Average TL spend: 5.9% of revenue

7.2% in tech
6.5% in management consulting
5.2% in IT services

06. Getting your thought leaders to talk to the camera or mic is the best promotional tactic.

TL Producers told us that the most effective promotional tactics were videos and podcasts. Least effective was static infographics.

Interactive data visualizations were considered extremely effective. In-person conferences are rated higher than virtual ones. (Zoom fatigue is clearly a major factor.)

Our recommendation:

Understand that just because you build it, they may not come. Success requires deep understanding of the medium chosen; special infrastructure and speaker training (not all SMEs are born to do videos and podcasts); great topic and moderator selection; and excellent campaigning to get the word out to targets.

Moreover, use multiple platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Google & Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud) in addition to owned web properties to ensure your audio/video content is available in places that your viewers/listeners frequent!

Understand that not all SMEs are comfortable speaking in-person or in a studio. Therefore, be careful which SMEs you select to evangelize your firm's thought leadership.

Which form of thought leadership will dominate in the future?

Long-form (books, magazine-length articles, etc.)
Short-form (blogs, infographics, list-icles, etc.)
Video
Podcast (audio)

Watch Jason Mlicki of Rattleback explain how leaders use digital content in their publishing efforts:

A strong thought leadership culture is an essential element in building, extending, and sustaining thought leadership programs that deliver ROI (i.e., return on ideas) and perhaps ever-appreciating returns on more conventional ROI measures. In fact, with a strong thought leadership culture, your program can withstand many black swan events that B2B organizations typically confront – like the untimely exodus of a CEO and/or others on the executive team who are staunch supporters of thought leadership or marketplace setbacks (self-inflicted wounds or rival outperformance), as well as unpredictable economic downturns.

In fact, with a strong thought leadership culture, your program can withstand many black swan events that B2B organizations typically confront

Moreover, a strong culture of thought leadership will reinforce the organization’s commitment to invest in the knowledge capital (people, research methodologies, campaign outreach) necessary to not only survive but also thrive in times thick and thin.

Our research reveals that companies that claim to be highly effective at thought leadership were far more likely to have a strong thought leadership culture (71%) than companies that believe they are less effective at thought leadership (43%).

Our recommendation:

Look beyond your internal values to see how your company is perceived by customers, partners, and influencers. Make sure your values, beliefs, and behaviors are supportive of a culture of thought leadership. Assess your organization’s openness to new ideas.

Evaluate how much it values customer education. Does it use these insights to develop new expertise and knowledge to uniquely solve those client challenges your firm wants to own and be associated with?

Leading TL Producers have built cultures much more supportive of thought leadership.

Where should the thought leadership function report?

CMO
CEO
CSO (strategy)
COO

Percent of leaders and laggards that describe their culture as "highly" or "extremely" supportive of thought leadership.

Figure 5
Response base: 152 TL Producers