Thought leadership has consistently been identified as both a trend and a priority for B2B content marketing in general (See MarTech Advisor, LinkedIn and Edelman). Despite being on many agencies’ radars, thought leadership remains an under-used strategy for agency new business. We often incorporate thought leadership as part of our new business strategy for clients, and it has played an instrumental role in some of our biggest client success stories. To give one example, thought leadership helped a client land their biggest piece of new business ever in their 23-year history.
Take a look at this impressive list of reasons why agency leaders should invest in thought leadership. When agency leaders become known as thought leaders, the benefits extend to both the individual and the agency.
*Some of these benefits are attributed specifically to public speaking, a thought leadership tactic.
Here are some common examples of thought leadership tactics:
Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, there is a thought leadership tactic that can work for you. Regardless of your resources, with only minimal time required, you can incorporate thought leadership tactics into your agency’s growth strategy—even if it’s just one piece of content or one speaking event per quarter. You can even partner with a content specialist who can capture your ideas (the “thought leadership” part) and have them do the heavy lifting on the actual writing. The takeaway is that it is very manageable to make thought leadership tactics part of your new business mix.
Most sources say your first step should be to make a list of opportunities, but even before that, you should define your strategy and goals. You want your thought leadership efforts to be aligned with your new business strategy and overall business goals.
Before you start compiling lists, here are some foundational considerations:
Will speaking be part of your thought leadership strategy? In most cases, the answer should be “yes.” Public speaking and writing for industry publications are two of our favorite thought leadership strategies because we know they get results when properly executed. I’ll include a bit more information about these two strategies below. Are the other tactics less effective? Not necessarily, but their impact is usually dependent on the size of the audience you’ve already established. Publishing a blog post and video series to your own website and social channels may have limited effectiveness if only a couple of hundred people are tuned in and listening. You can get greater exposure faster by tapping into other organizations’ networks, which is the case with public speaking and writing for industry publications.
Once you have your foundational questions answered, and after you’ve identified which thought leadership tactics are the best fit, THEN you start doing research and making lists.
For conferences and events, you can start compiling a spreadsheet of dates, locations, audience composition, and other key factors.
As you put together a conference spreadsheet, here are some more considerations:
Keep in mind that if you don’t have a strong speaker resume to start, it is more realistic to target smaller, regional events before aiming for the national conferences. Keep those “longer shot” events in your spreadsheet, but perhaps in a separate tab.
For articles, after covering foundational considerations, you can then make a list of target publications, track the URLs of their submissions requirement pages, any submission deadlines, who their audiences are, and notes about what types of content they accept.
Influence & Co. surveyed 153 editors to learn more about what type of content they are looking for from contributors (NeilPatel.com). Make note of the top five reasons they declined to use guest content:
If you are going to submit an article to a publication, do your homework first. It makes no sense to spend hours writing an article but then waste the opportunity because you didn’t spend another few hours carefully fine-tuning it.
Here are some questions to consider:
If you aren’t already investing in thought leadership to grow your agency, why not? The lifetime value of a published article in a venue like Forbes, AdAge, AdWeek, Entrepreneur.com, or Harvard Business Review is great. It says something about the caliber of your agency’s leadership and expertise, long after the content starts to become dated and loses some of its relevance. An article can be re-purposed as social media content across your social channels. It can be referenced in e-Newsletters and presentations; it can be the core talking point for a lead generation or lead nurturing email. One well-written article can reap dividends. And a collection of strong articles is proof that your perspective is worth publishing—so says every editor that gave your submissions the green light.
For speaking events, you can generate multiple emails both pre and post-event, provided they are going out to people for whom the event is relevant (and not your entire list). A single speaking engagement can generate multiple social posts. You can turn content from your presentation into a blog post, a podcast, or video, just to name a few ideas. It’s also possible to use speaking topics and related content as talking points for a lead generation or lead nurturing email, so long as it is relevant to the recipient. These are all tactics that we’ve used successfully and know they work for generating agency new business. How can you use these ideas to grow your agency?
Image credits: thought leadership for agencies © iStockphoto/filadendron; thought leadership strategy © iStockphoto/SetsukoN; public speaking for agency leaders © iStockphoto/filadendron; submitting articles for thought leadership © iStockphoto/Eoneren.