How to measure your thought leadership?

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Measuring your thought leadership starts with your objectives.

The key to measuring a thought leadership campaign is to start at the beginning.  When planning your campaign, carefully define the objectives and gain senior management buy-in.

An example of thought leadership objectives and measurement

For their Innovation 1000 Global Campaign, Booz & Co’s objective is threefold:

1. Place Booz & Company in top tier business media worldwide as a leader in innovation thinking and research
2. Provide an effective vehicle to interest and engage clients and prospective clients
3. Secure speaking engagements.

How do they measure these three objectives?:

1. They track media coverage, social media mentions, traffic to booz.com and strategy-business.com – the study is cited each year in nearly 200 publications around the globe, spanning 27 countries.
2. They track the interest, leads and sales generated directly and indirectly as a result of Innovation 1000.
3. They compare the speaking engagement targets against the number of speaking engagements in prior years.

What else can you measure?

The measurements Booz & Co apply may not be relevant to other thought leadership campaigns.

The key remains identifying the activities you want to measure.  You can even assign scores that you work out with the sales team.  For example if someone has been engaged at every touch point of your program they are ranked very highly.

Other measurement criteria could include:

• Visits to the content webpage
• E mail click through rates
• Video views
• Attendance at webinars
• Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook followers
• The number of names who opt in to download e books or white papers
• Attendance at talks
• Third party support
• Media coverage across tier one (mainstream) and tier two media (trade)
• Measurement of tone and the key messages
• Speaking engagements
• One-on-one client contact
• New prospect engagement
• Qualitative, researched client feedback
• Internal impact i.e. how do employees view it, how do they use it, is it useful to prompt conversations with clients
• New business pipeline
• Brand reputation (using research and then benchmarking tools)
• Google rankings on agreed search terms
• Klout score for your thought leadership champion
• (If you have any more suggestions please add in the comments section) 

More sophisticated thought leadership measurement

Depending on the tools you use for measurement, you can start becoming quite sophisticated in your measurement of things like: the segment of clients and prospects that respond best to your thought leadership content and why; seasonal impact; impact depending on the day and the time of day.

The beauty of almost all of this is that it can be done automatically.

I’m a director at Sydney-based, Cannings Corporate Communications. Please check out my book: Brand Stand: seven steps to thought leadership,  follow me on twitter @thoughtstrategy or join me on LinkedIn.