Traditionally, sellers have been looking for buyers and so the focus has always been on push based marketing efforts. These include things like mass mailing campaigns, participating in trade-shows, advertising and the type. Besides being very expensive, this traditional approach is losing its sting. In the age of Content Marketing, the important question to ask is How do you use Content Marketing to Build Thought Leadership ?

Companies worldwide are investing in strategic marketing content to actively influence the customer buying process and create a thought leadership position. Marketing your services via the content you create gives you the opportunity to help prospects rather than over-sell to them.

Focusing on Content Marketing to Build Thought Leadership

To get your content marketing strategy right, you need to focus on a few basics

1. Content should be aligned with the positioning and overall marketing strategy. Conducting a messaging workshop usually helps in arriving at a messaging strategy for your business. Read our free ebook on Conducting a messaging workshop
2. A content dashboard needs to be properly planned. What content will be published by whom and in what form. How will it be used in the marketing plan. Read our free ebook on Planning for a content dashboard
3. Content needs to be managed like any other project. You need a specialized team to take care of your content requirements. Read our free ebook on Content project – Getting together a dream team
4. Content can and should be re-purposed to form new exciting forms of content (after all, every content piece has a limited life). Read our free ebook on The art of re-purposing and cross-promotions
5. Leverage content to generate community following and leads – don’t just create content, propagate it in channels, where your target customer resides, make it available and track interested cases. Use marketing automation, analytics and tracking well . Read our free ebooks on Expanding your social networks & Analyzing your marketing campaigns effectively
6. Generate thought leadership with content – If the content provided through your website continually provides consumers and clients with intelligent insights, then your company has an opportunity to be perceived as a thought leader in the industry.

Content can manifest itself in many forms. Ideally it should be in a form that is easy to consume by your target audience. At the very basic level, it is web page content, landing pages, CTA definitions. At a strategic level, organizations are increasingly using tools like white papers, e-books, blogs, webinars, to engage with target customers and manage lead generation .

A Summary of this series of blogs

1. So Marketing has changed! Time to stop complaining & leverage the change – 5 easy steps – This is where we summarize what has changed in marketing and how you can systematically plan to leverage the change.
2. Invest in content marketing to build thought leadership and a strong following – Content marketing is like any other project. Plan it well and create fantastic content that can then be leveraged in different campaigns that you plan to run
3. Expand your social networks, Listen, contribute, participate – Social networks offer you a great potential to manage viral marketing. It also offers you the capability of reaching a larger (& right) target audience very efficiently.
4. Publish content, be useful to your target audience – Having created content, make sure that you propagate it well across your various channels. Re-purpose content, cross-promote and analyze your efforts regularly
5. Measure, Analyze, Track and take decisions – No matter which channel you use to propagate your content, measure, analyze and track to take meaningful decisions. If thing are not working, change them in real time
6. Build and nurture leads – Nurture relationships with potential prospects till they are ready to do business with you.

I hope this post was able to give you some ideas about how you can go about using Content Marketing to Build Thought Leadership. It is something a lot of marketers are doing around the world. So make sure that you get it right.

Best regards,
Atul Dhakappa