{"id":642,"date":"2021-06-02T07:45:52","date_gmt":"2021-06-02T07:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stratitude.co.za\/blog\/?p=642"},"modified":"2022-03-28T08:32:21","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T08:32:21","slug":"thought-leadership-silver-bullet-content-marketing-arsenal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stratitude.co.za\/blog\/thought-leadership-silver-bullet-content-marketing-arsenal\/","title":{"rendered":"Thought leadership \u2013 the silver bullet in your content marketing arsenal"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the B2B sales environment getting increasingly more competitive, and decision-makers seeing little or no differentiation between competitors, there is a clever tactic that marketers should pay more attention to \u2013 thought leadership<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Seventy percent of B2B decision-makers make their decisions on potential suppliers or service providers before contacting them, and typically, there are six to ten people involved in the decision-making process of purchasing a complex B2B solution. And this begs the question \u2013 what do they base their opinion on if they have already made a decision before meeting a potential supplier, and from where do they get their information?<\/p>\n

A recent Gartner study \u2013 The new B2B buying journey<\/a> \u2013 found that each decision-maker has four to five sources of information that forms their opinion of a potential supplier. These sources include Google, social media, company websites and the news.<\/p>\n

So, what informs their decisions? Is it a community manager who answers their questions online? Do they make decisions based on the most reputable brands that are out there?<\/p>\n

In a B2B context, there is no best brand \u2013 there is only \u2018trust\u2019. A combination of building trust through relationships and answering questions is key to a B2B marketing strategy. Thought leadership is a simple tactic to build trust and elevate a brand above other players in the industry.<\/p>\n

Thought leadership is about having an informed point of view about your industry, the issues that affect it and what the future holds. By leveraging the knowledge and experience within a business to provide expert opinion on relevant topics, and to best answer potential clients\u2019 questions \u2013 especially ones that haven\u2019t crossed their minds yet \u2013 B2B businesses are able to get valuable airtime beyond their product or service offering.<\/p>\n

Thought leadership is by no means a new concept, but we find that companies often struggle to use the knowledge and expertise that exist within their businesses, to their advantage. This is because they are either too close to the business to see the opportunities, or they don\u2019t have the expertise to extract the information and craft it into content that an industry would take notice of and engage with.<\/p>\n

Here are a few tips to help leverage thought leadership in your business:<\/p>\n