B2B Thought Leadership Marketing: Rethinking Content Experiences in 2021

More than 90% of B2B marketers use thought leadership and other types of digital marketing to bolster customer acquisition and retention. But are all 90% of these marketers getting the results they’re looking for? And if not, what’s getting in the way of success?

Whether thought leadership is really worth including in your content marketing strategy depends entirely on the approach you’re taking. B2B marketers cannot afford thought leadership content that is poorly written, fails to engage target audiences, and isn’t created in an efficient manner.

In this blog post, we’ll explore:

According to Hinge Marketing, 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.

By highlighting the expertise of thought leaders, or subject matter experts within your organization, you’ll ensure your thought leadership marketing plan will lead your target market to trust your company as an important source of information.

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Therefore, thought leadership can be thought of as a tactic within a larger content marketing strategy.

With 90% of B2B marketers using thought leadership and other types of content marketing, it goes without saying that the content marketing landscape is more saturated than ever before.

The struggle to produce content consistently and quickly to meet the ever-increasing demands from stakeholders is among today’s top content marketing challenges. In fact, content creation was the number one challenge that B2B marketers attributed to any lack of success from their content marketing efforts.

To quickly and consistently produce thought leadership content, your content marketing strategy must include an efficient process, an understanding of your goals, and an awareness of what your audience is looking for.

In our Whitepaper with the Content Marketing Institute, we explored research from the PR firm Edelman and LinkedIn. According to the research, 53% of decision-makers spend meaningful time (1+ hours per week) experiencing thought leadership content, and 71% of these decision-makers consider thought leadership “one of the best ways to get a sense of the type and caliber of an organization’s thinking.”

However, only 17% of decision-makers said the thought leadership they experience is “very good” or “excellent.” While there are various reasons for sub-par content, one factor today’s B2B content marketers can control is how it’s delivered. To increase your engagement rate, the format and design of your thought leadership content should capture your audience’s attention and enhance the information being presented.

To incorporate thought leadership in a way that enables your B2B to keep up with today’s content generation demands, employ the following tactics:

B2B marketers might find it overwhelming to incorporate these components into their content creation process. Fortunately, content creation platforms like Foleon can solve the common problems of creating engaging content quickly and at scale to keep up with the demands facing your business.

To learn more about how interactive content platforms can help you achieve results from your content marketing plan, visit our blog post Leveraging Data to Maximize the ROI of "Extra-Web" Content.

We sought to address these challenges in our whitepaper with CMI, The Experience Matters: Today’s Innovative B2B Marketers Overcome Content Creation Barriers. Read it for more ways to create intelligent content experiences.