SEPTEMBER 17, 2024
It’s a challenging time for B2B marketers. There’s more competition for buyers than ever, purchasing budgets are tight, and buying cycles are becoming more drawn out. Clearly, it’s critical to use the best, most effective marketing tools – one of those being carefully planned and executed thought leadership content.
As we recently wrote in Three Ways Thought Leadership Can Boost Your Business, compelling thought leadership content can act as a powerful marketing tool that makes executives rethink their challenges and change their perception of your solutions.
75% of decision makers and C-suite executives say that thought leadership has led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering.
– 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report
In our blog, we cited data from the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report demonstrating that thought leadership can stimulate demand for your products and services, influence the likelihood of decision makers engaging with you, and protect your existing customers.
According to the Edelman-LinkedIn Report, there are two additional points to consider when investing in thought leadership as part of your marketing strategy.
1. Thought leadership is more impactful if you cite strong research and data, help buyers understand their business challenges, and offer concrete guidance.
Effective thought leadership content elevates you above others and gives your company a strong, competitive edge. To achieve that, decision makers in the LinkedIn-Edelman Report say the highest-quality thought leadership references strong research and data (55%), helps them better understand challenges and opportunities facing their business (44%), and offers concrete guidance and case studies (43%).
One way to gain an advantage in creating excellent thought leadership content is to sponsor Gartner C-level Communities. Our team uses its expertise and a data-driven approach to help sponsors curate their thought leadership content for our C-level executive members.
Our proprietary Leadership Perspective Survey of thousands of executives – along with our team’s expert guidance and understanding of the data – helps align your thought leadership with executives’ critical priorities and initiatives. Our approach ensures that your thought leadership will be as timely and relevant as possible to executives.
In addition to creating relevant content, our research can help you better understand your buyers’ specific business challenges so that your messaging and positioning will meet their needs. Finally, our team works with sponsors on topic, speaker and format selection to ensure that your thought leadership offers something impactful to executives.
2. Be careful of creating thought leadership that is under-resourced, misused, or not measured appropriately.
Despite the clear power of thought leadership to drive business results, the Edelman-LinkedIn report found that most organizations say it is under-resourced and not used effectively or measured appropriately.
One in five companies say it doesn’t have a process for measuring the effectiveness of its thought leadership content, and 30% of producers of thought leadership say their organization does not know how to use thought leadership as a sales or marketing tool.
One way your thought leadership will get powerful results is to work with Gartner to offer it to the right audience – C-level decision makers. Our communities and programs are exclusively offered to C-level executives from the world’s leading organizations, and these active practitioners and decision makers are seeking new insights and solutions when they participate in events.
The powerful networks Gartner provides will ensure that your thought leadership will not be wasted on the wrong audience – or no audience. The right audience, together with our research and insights into executives’ critical priorities, can maximize the potential of your thought leadership investment.
86% of decision makers say that they are moderately or very likely to invite organizations that consistently produce high-quality thought leadership to participate in the RFP process.
– 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report
Provided you create it expertly, thought leadership can truly drive business results. According to the Edelman-LinkedIn Report, thought leadership “makes buyers reexamine their assumptions and inoculates you against competitors trying to woo away your customers.”
Gartner’s research and expert guidance can help you avoid one of the pitfalls of producing thought leadership – according to the report – which is that only about half of the decision makers who regularly consume thought leadership say it’s “good,” and even fewer say it’s “very good” or “excellent.”
Contact us to learn more about the proprietary insights and full-service team that can help your thought leadership engagement succeed.
Sponsors can connect with executives from leading organizations and offer their high-quality thought leadership at more than 420 programs worldwide. Gartner C-level Communities has more than 14,000 participating C-level executives from 7,400 organizations in 107 communities around the world.
