Thought leaders are able to garner a disproportionate share of new business. This is especially the case in the affluent market as wealthy individuals have the resources to find and retain the very best professionals in all disciplines. There are a number of essentials to becoming a thought leader, but perhaps the most important is content. “Content should reflect the intellectual capital of the thought leader,” says Hannah Shaw Grove, an authority on marketing to the affluent and the executive editor of Private Wealth magazine. “Published content is usually the first way people will become aware of a professional or a company and their respective areas of expertise.” Because of this, content should be produced thoughtfully and carefully to achieve the best results. The following three criteria will provide a helpful blueprint:
Criterion 1: Concentrate on cutting-edge topics. Considering your audiences, your thought leadership content has to be state-of-the-art, solutions-oriented and actionable. It has to provide answers and a way for segments of the affluent or their centers of influence to benefit from those answers. “Marketing via thought leadership is de rigueur right now, especially in the financial sector,” says Grove. “As such, you need to be able to deliver meaningful insights and value that your competitors cannot match.”
Implementation
- Your thought leadership content cannot be a retread of generally known information. Even when dealing with common knowledge, you need to provide a different perspective with new insights.
- Your thought leadership content must result in clear, workable solutions. You must deliver results-based answers that will make a difference in the lives of the financial elite and their closest allies and influencers.
Criterion 2: The content must be tightly constructed. The logic that connects the needs and wants of your target audiences to the solutions you advocate must be as indisputable as possible. Your conclusions must build on and proceed systematically from previous arguments and defensible assumptions.
Implementation
- You cannot presume that the value of your thought leadership content will be implicitly recognized. You must take steps to ensure that the target audiences are aware of the value you are providing and how it can be leveraged most effectively.
- You must always connect all the dots. Failing to make sure your audience understands how all the pieces fit together and can be applied to them may result in confusion and inaction. According to Grove, “The best thought leadership initiatives are those that are built around well-constructed arguments and have a clear sense of utility and application.”
Criterion 3: There needs to be a “call to action.” If you want wealthy clients, there has to be something in your thought leadership content that draws them and their inner circle of advisors to you looking for more information or a way to engage. In essence, the combination of your thought leadership content and the method and style of communicating to select audiences is highly sophisticated advice-ertising.
Implementation
- You need to provide an education, but it’s a mistake to think that your audiences are going to learn in total what you know. You have to bring your audience up the learning curve, most likely over an extended period of time and with several installments of content, to the level where they can appreciate your expertise and be more discerning consumers.
- The decisive element of a thought leadership campaign is making sure that your target audiences understand how they can work with you to achieve their goals. They should be crystal clear about your expertise, accessibility and role, so that no other options or professionals are considered.
Given the substantial time and resources needed to develop high-caliber thought leadership initiatives, it only makes good sense to do it extremely well. “Thought leadership techniques build reputations in the near-term that allow for the pursuit of business growth in the long-term,” explains Grove. “These are methods that can take months, even years, to deliver results so they need to be planned and executed with precision and, where possible, include metrics for critical responses and behavior.”
The desire to generate and publish content is flourishing across industries and sectors, facilitated greatly by the Internet. The three steps described previously, along with strict guidelines that ensure topics and components support well-defined overarching goals, will help you develop strong content that stands apart from your competitors.
