In this playbook, we’ll show you how to implement three distinct strategies that promise to bring your vision of free PR and impressive bylines to life while driving tangible marketing results in the process.
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Lead With Your expertise
Build Your Lead Machine
Level Up Your Tech Stack
Step 1
Building thought leadership starts with saying something interesting.
Take a series of original, novel, and thought-provoking stances on a topic you know a lot about.
Consistently publish those perspectives in the form of articles, podcasts, videos, newsletters, native social posts, and other digital media and content.
Actively promote your content to trade press and national publications, as well as across your own social platforms and through focused email outreach to ensure it reaches the right audiences.
It’s time to launch your first thought leadership campaign! Here’s what you do:
1
Conduct in-depth market research on who you’re trying to reach and what they care about. Build a list of people you would love to read your content and find commonalities between them.
2
Develop an original perspective by leveraging first-party data, customer surveys, or even surveys of prospects from your audience list.
3
Elevate an executive or Subject Matter Expert as a truth teller and must-read in your space. Craft your first piece and let the ideas flow from there.
4
Bylines beget bylines: Build a body of work you’re proud of and leverage those pieces in pitches to more prominent publications.
Step 2
Turn thought leadership into leads.
Turn interviews, surveys, and data visualizations into the focal point of articles for external placement, the company blog, and content-driven ad campaigns.
Leverage articles, case studies, and comparison/buyer’s guides in newsletters, retargeting ads, and nurture campaigns.
Create persuasive sales enablement materials, personalized follow-up templates, demo videos, and pitch decks to turn qualified leads into customers.
Build the professional brands of your subject matter experts and executives via external placements.
Blog actively to build credibility and drive new organic search rankings.
Launch LinkedIn and Facebook feed ads to introduce your brand to a wider, relevant audience.
Leverage trade press inventory to surface branded content for readers.
Post regularly to your brand’s social channels.
Develop longform reports, guides, and other premium content in line with core messaging themes and guidelines.
Package thought leadership content in a series of newsletters that keep the your company top-of-mind for target prospects.
Launch targeted nurture campaigns that serve mid-funnel content to industry professionals who have previously engaged with your brand.
Build remarketing and lookalike audiences based on who engages with our LinkedIn and Facebook ads and visits your website.
Continually optimize conversion units, automated follow-up campaigns, and other bottom-of-funnel marketing activities.
Leverage retargeting and analytics capabilities to identify who is ready to buy.
Make direct pitches to these decision-makers via LinkedIn InMail and 1-to-1 sales follow-ups.
Create persuasive sales collateral to help close the deal!
Continuously learn from what resonates and drives results
Identify high-intent audiences that convert
Leverage your leads as seed lists for lookalike audiences for future campaigns
Step 3
Your content will only engage people if you show them where to find it.
The CRM tracks every single lead’s engagement across all channels (e.g. social, web, text, email) inside a convenient timeline. It’s worth noting that the time and effort needed to implement the CRM correctly and realize its full value is substantial and should be handled by someone in a specialist role.
It’s not realistic or even good practice to manually follow up with every person who ever engages with your marketing. The right tool provides a robust enough framework to automatically reach out to every lead in a way that feels tailored and authentic.
Track each lead’s engagement with your content and campaigns across channels to identify those contacts who are most likely to convert into sales-qualified opportunities.
Surface leads who repeatedly engage with your content and visit your website for more targeted, 1-to-1 outreach based on the content that has interested them. Depending on the size and structure of your org, your marketing team could share a daily or weekly “hot leads” sheet with sales.
Get buy-in from your entire organization to monitor, understand, and actively engage with the company’s CRM and performance dashboards on a regular basis. Stop arguing about opinions and start analyzing data.
By tracking your KPIs in real-time dashboards, you can get into the business of identifying trends, setting tangible goals, improving underperforming campaigns, and doubling down on what works. Develop a “marketing bible” of tests and their results to avoid constantly reinventing the wheel and paying to learn the same lesson twice.
Learn More
At Thunderfoot, we help expertise-led companies and organizations build thought leadership and launch successful marketing programs by deploying our team of digital experts and creatives to execute on the four strategies outlined in this playbook.
We’ve learned a lot from working with these brands and we’d love to talk with you about your project to see what past experience we can leverage to accomplish your goals.
