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Thought Leadership: Your Way to Generate Leads

Posted on June 23, 2010 in Marketing & Business Development

In marketing and sales, there are many tactics to generate leads. But, none is more powerful at generating warm leads, while also positioning you as an expert and “intelligently branding” your company, than thought leadership.

Thought leadership is a highly effective sales and marketing tool that creates an environment for prospects to ‘try before they buy’ and/or ‘better understand their problem and the available solutions’. With a well crafted tool, your thought leadership can provide an opportunity to cement relationships with your prospects, establish your reputation as an expert—building credibility, and develop qualified leads while shortening the sales cycle.

Below are three key thought leadership marketing tools:

  • Author Articles. Create articles and promote them through your website, blog, and social networks. Keep the articles to one page and look for third party websites or publications that may want to republish to their audiences who are ultimately your prospects.
  • Develop White Papers. White papers are authoritative reports issued by your company to illustrate the details, applications, or problem/solutions of technologies, products, and/or services being sold. This tool can be one of the most effective ways to generate leads. In fact, MarketingSherpa has reported that 69% of prospects download a white paper as part of their buying cycle.
  • Deliver Speeches (via webinars, speaking engagements, lunch and learns). Share your thought leadership in person by giving speeches on relevant topics. You can also record or pre-record these speeches and provide them on your website.

    • Remember that in order to be effective, your thought leadership piece must be educational and immediately communicate added value. So, keep the sales for the follow up.

    It’s not enough to create thought leadership tools; you must promote them and capture leads. You want your prospects to read the article/white paper or listen to your message and then buy your product/service that solves the problem (their problem) in the tool they just read or heard.

    Putting Thought Leadership in Play

    Just as the tools vary, so does the promotion. Here is one of many approaches to generate leads with a white paper on your website.

    Add the image of the thought leadership piece to the homepage of your website with a top-notch headline like “The 5 Resolutions Every Marketer Must Make in the New Year”.
    Create a “squeeze” webpage that the user visits once they click on the homepage image. This page is where the user submits their information (your warm lead) to access the PDF white paper.
    Now that you have the lead, marketing and sales need to meet. The lead now goes to sales for follow up.
    At this point, your leads should be scored in your CRM system, and sales should be working through the opportunity management process. Marketing should work with sales to remarket to the leads and find other ways to convert them into buyers.

    With these steps, you are well on your way to generating leads and shortening your sales cycle as you position yourself as an expert and “intelligently brand” your company.