Tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market – share

This is a continuation of the post on the 4/1/2010 on how to take your thought leadership position to market.

I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this.  I have covered the first two (1. Make it a strategic business imperative; 2. Know your audience) and today I will cover the third:

1. Share openly

The three remaining will be covered in subsequent posts, they are:

1. Cultivate the media
2. Write and speak about your campaign
3.  Pump up your content online

Action 3 – Share openly

All the true industry thought leaders I have come across have willingly and openly shared their information. The very nature of thought leadership means exactly what it says – being a leader with your thoughts. And being a leader with your thoughts means being brave and going first; saying things that no-one else has either thought of or dared to say.

It means taking the lead on an issue or topic and owning it. It is nonsense to hide behind the excuse you hear so often: ‘But this is strategic information.’

Willingly and openly sharing information may appear to be obvious but I cannot tell you how many companies I have come across who shy away from sharing their intellectual property.

Thought leaders aren’t scared

Timidity, fear and reticence are not words that sit well with true thought leadership. Being a thought leader means rising above the crowd, sticking your neck out, being prepared to take a sometimes controversial point of view and going where no-one else has ventured before.

Forget what the competition thinks or what the competition will do with the information. You are the brand/company taking the lead – they are the laggards.

It will take them a long time to get up to speed in your chosen area of thought leadership. If they want to enter your space and you have done a good job in planning and rolling out your strategy, they will look like Johnny-come-lately.

The potency of a great thought leadership campaign is that your audience will feel the genuine intent. They will view it as something fresh, something that adds value to their lives and something that no-one else is giving them.

They will respect you for it.

Thought leadership is one of the most powerful ways to create customer loyalty, which produces that most potent of market forces, word-of-mouth or customer evangelism.

It is through your thought leadership actions or the act of openly sharing valuable information that you provide the platform for creating that special brand connection with your audiences.

Tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market – audience

This is a continuation of the post on 27/12/2009 on how to take your thought leadership position to market.

I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this.

I have covered the first (1. Make it a strategic business imperative) and today I will cover the second:

1. Know your audience

 The four remaining will be covered in subsequent posts, they are:

1. Share openly
2. Cultivate the media
3. Write and speak about your campaign
4.  Pump up your content online

Action 2: Know your audiences

Knowing your audience intimately should be a prerequisite for any brand campaign, let alone a thought leadership campaign.

To know your audiences means to understand their needs and to understand how you can add value to their lives. The best thought leadership ideas mainly come from the desire to enrich the quality of the target audiences’ lives.

Once a company puts itself in the shoes of its target audiences, it is better able to identify their needs and how it can influence what that audience should think, feel and do with its services or products.

How do you get to know your audience? If your marketing department hasn’t already done so, you research them: where they live, what they consume, what micro and macro issues impact their lives, what their dreams and aspirations are, what their perceptions are of your brand and what values they associate with your brand.

Thought leadership means engaging with your audience

Where possible you also talk directly with them through focus groups or online. You could live with them or go on site visits with a community leader. Combine this with customer visits with the sales team; picking up the phone and speaking to them; hosting coffee chats or customer lunches; and using that wonderful two-way, online communications tool called a blog to facilitate dialogue.

Depending on your business and the nature of the product or service you sell, it is up to you to pick which forms of communication are best suited to your customer group.

The point is you should be listening to what they have to say in order to understand the issues important in their lives as well as the factors impacting their purchasing decisions.  This combined with a number of other factors such as your areas of specialty, pockets of intellectual property you may already have and others, should inform the direction you take with your thought leadership campaign.

The more you understand about your audience the more able you are to form a relationship based on trust and mutual understanding.

Remember their point of view is all about them not you.  You don’t have to agree with why an audience feels or acts they way they do you merely have to understand it and know how to provide information that addresses this.    

How to take your thought leadership campaign to market – strategic business imperative

I have never come across a thought leader who didn’t share his or her thoughts the two just don’t go hand in hand.

However, how you take your thought leadership position to market is critical to the success of your campaign and the degree to which you are viewed as a thought leader.

Once you have a thought leadership position worked out, there are six critical actions needed to help you or your brand achieve thought leadership status:

1. Make it a strategic business imperative
2. Know your audience
3. Share openly
4. Cultivate the media
5. Write and speak about your campaign
6.  Pump up your content online

In this post I am going to speak about the first and will cover the others in subsequent posts.

This is not a box-ticking exercise – you don’t have to complete all of these to drive your thought leadership position.  You will, however, need the first two and preferably you will need to carry out one or two of the others well to help get your point of view out there.

Action 1:  Make it a strategic business or brand imperative

By making your thought leadership campaign a strategic business imperative it will more easily slot into the short-, medium- or long-term business objectives of the company. Given this, and having identified a thought leadership champion, makes it much easier to position this as a strategic business imperative because you have already won senior management support. It is even better if the thought leadership campaign/idea is owned by the CEO or managing director.

Ownership at the top ensures commitment at a senior level, board buy-in and an easier ‘sell’ to the various departments, staff, third party endorsers and suppliers who may be involved in the campaign.

It also ensures commitment at a senior level and alignment of other business activities to the thought leadership campaign.

Thought leadership needs senior support

Without senior management commitment you run the risk of the organization’s skeptics squeezing the life out of the thought leadership effort.

At times things can go awry or the campaign is not delivering as fast or as well as it should.  At this point the avoidance or blame game begins and so starts the death spiral for the campaign…that is unless the CEO or senior management sees the thought leadership campaign as integral to the organization’s strategy and is still prepared to back it as a result.   

If a leader makes success non-negotiable it is amazing how much impetus it can give the campaign.

Make no mistake, you will still need to make sure that you have a well thought out and presented plan.  This should cover the thought leadership idea in detail but also, importantly, how you intend to roll it out.

As part of this you should identify clear objectives, your rationale for doing this and measurable outcomes.  The more measurable your outcomes the more likely you are to gain credibility for the campaign across the senior management ranks and for future funding.