Creating Thought Leadership and Not Just Press Releases

In B2B tech industries, unless you are a leading brand and are almost guaranteed media pick up from your press release distribution activities you are going to be hard pressed to make serious headway into engaging with media.

One way is to use your customers as advocates for the company and pitch their success stories to the journalist community. That’s a very good tactic and an approach that I have used on several occasions to good effect. However media outreach is not just about switching on the light bulb a couple of times but about a continued flicker over a sustained period of time. To achieve this end goal you sometimes need to also consider other weapons in your arsenal and thought leadership is an appropriate and effective tactic.

Thought leadership aims to engage your organisation with media and their subscribers (and hopefully your future prospects). In the context which I am talking, it means innovative ideas with the confidence to promote or share those ideas with actionable distilled insights. The idea is to develop recognition from the outside world that your company deeply understand its business, the needs of its customers and the broader market in which it operates. Done well, it can help to differentiate your organisation from the competitive pack.

The question remains how do you go about considering candidate avenues for thought leadership and then develop thought leadership materials you can use to promote your organisation? A good PR firm that you can partner with is the right avenue but if they havent proposed the idea, here are some suggestions:

• Look at your current offering and understand the profile of your customers. Are they enterprises, small and medium businesses, specific industry verticals?
• Investigate the challenges they face. Don’t just look at the problems that your current solutions address but look to understand their challenges as a whole. As an example for Enterprises, do they have a proliferation or technologies? Are they facing increased internal complexity? Are they looking at consolidating technologies to standards? Are they facing increasing regulatory challenges? Examples for SMB’s – What keeps them up at night? Do they face challenges with how to grow their business? What is their exit strategy if any? What you are doing here is trying to attach to some of the wider business issues that your target customers are facing.
• Screen the media and web for challenges in your chosen sector. What is the sector talking about?
• Brainstorm areas that your solution can address, now armed with a broader understanding of your market and an understanding of what is currently resonating in the market-space.
• Develop some hypotheses that you can test and outline your unique points of view.
  Points of view are statements outlining your organisation position. Without any evidence, they are just hearsay and will not stand the test of scrutiny by media or their subscribers.

The ways to test for and obtain substantiating materials are several:

• Screen for third party published research to back up your points of view
• Investigate your customers who can attest to the points of view you are making
• Commission third party analysts to add weight and add credence to your thought leadership. Whitepapers can be useful tools as an example.
• Conduct your own market research to substantiate your points

The next steps are to develop talk tracks for your key spokespeople and pitch the news to your target media. One way is to look at media forward features to plan ripe times for your media pitch. Another useful tactic is to pitch to a select set of media and then follow up with a wider press release. I have used the thought leadership route to good effect in several companies and measured the increased results through third party media monitoring services to determine relative share of voice against the competition in specific publications and within a certain time period. Settling for the status quo is far less exciting than demonstrating how your organisation can attach to the burning issues facing your intended target audience.