Often, CEOs who are disappointed with their marketing team's results are focused too narrowly on short-term performance metrics.

Savvy marketers, on the other hand, know that allocating 100% of resources toward stringing together multiple quarters of growth can be in conflict with longer-range sustainability and margin goals.

Over time, competition and diminishing returns from that approach can make growth unsustainable, particularly if you are achieving that growth primarily through paid channels. A deeper look may reveal a short-sighted approach that is artificially limiting your audience to those already in the buying funnel.

Ironically, the CEO who may be unintentionally compromising the health of your marketing program may very well be core to the solution.

You can turn the tables by educating leadership about the benefits of stimulating market demand with future (and current) buyers through thought leadership. And you can provide compelling evidence that thought leadership can be transformational in improving the health of your business.

How do marketing leaders successfully sell the boss on the ROI of thought leadership?

First, let's agree on some key areas where thought leadership makes the needle move:

• Consider the value of stimulating demand from audiences not currently in the buying funnel. When you educate on a growing problem for which you have a solution, your audience sees you as a smart and credible source for solving a challenge they may not have even known they had.
• Or you may read an industry article and realize this leader is a visionary you would rather work for than your current leadership. How valuable would it be to you to attract top employee talent from competitors?
• And what about the ability to keep existing customers, partners, and suppliers because you are the leading "thinker" in your category?

Those are all audiences that are likely willing to invest more with you because they view your return worthy of a higher investment. That's what good thought leadership achieves.

Thought leadership enables you to uncover prospects nobody else is talking to. If you're the No. 1 thought leader in your field, decision-makers will already know about you. And they will already have made a decision to do business with you before they approach you.

You're the preferred provider, in a category of one, that your competition cannot touch.

Here's how marketers can make the thought leadership argument to their CEO.

The Data: Thought Leadership Impacts Business Relationships, $ Decisions

More than half of marketers spend the majority of their budget generating leads, and yet 68% of B2B businesses report they struggle to generate leads.

Furthermore, a stunning 95% of business clients in the B2B world aren't actively seeking goods or services from your category. They are your sleeper audiences, which are largely being ignored.

Those numbers tell you there's got to be a better way.

The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, which surveyed 3,000+ management-level professionals, revealed the following key insights:

Thought leadership that spurs business leaders to rethink their challenges is a powerful tool for stimulating demand for your business's products and services:

• 75% said a piece of thought leadership led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering.
• 60% said a piece of thought leadership made them feel they were missing out on a significant business opportunity.

Thought leadership can lead an offense-driven strategy to grow share:

• 70% said a piece of thought leadership had led them to question continuing with an existing supplier.
• 51% said a thought leadership piece made them realize other suppliers were smarter or more visionary.
• And among who said a piece of thought leadership caused them to question whether they should continue working with a current supplier, 25% said they went on to significantly reduce or end their relationship with that supplier.

Thought Leadership Content: The Fuel for Efficient Lead Generation

Content—the powerful conduit of thought leadership—is three times more effective in lead generation than marketing.

Why? Because content that is valuable to your audience is about teaching and inspiring, not about selling.

Our guard is up when we are being sold to. We are skeptical or even dismissive when we believe a person or brand is motivated by their interests and does not have our interests or the interests of our relationship weighted higher.

In addition to its effectiveness, thought leadership is often more economical. The cost of investment is 62% less for content marketing aimed at demand creation than a lead generation strategy. Lead generators are competing for a small audience of buyers already in the market. Offering high-quality, free content to the vast audience not in the market offers greater reach and without competition, so you can focus on connecting and building meaningful relationships as opposed to advertising that contributes to low-margin transactions.

Thought leadership can be used to improve results at all stages of the buyer journey:

• Pre-demand. Prospects are not in the funnel and have no awareness of the problem they need to solve. You are establishing your credibility, teeing up the problem with the status quo, and positioning yourself as an adviser.
• Early demand. Prospects are aware of the problem and kicking the tires for potential solution providers, but doing so in a stealth mode. Here, you are separating yourself by actively listening, showing empathy, providing proven solutions, and positioning yourself as a teacher—more focused on their needs and the success of the relationship than your own goals.
• Entering conversations with solution providers. Thought leadership at this stage reinforces trust and credibility and aims at better informing the buyer. You're positioning yourself as someone worthy of having a relationship with, versus just conducting a transaction with. This is the one area where you'll compete heavily with or complement your own performance marketing.
• Post-purchase. A real, long-term relationship continues through continued thought leadership content to fuel your audiences with ways to improve their results by deepening their knowledge.

What you're doing is framing a challenge, putting some urgency on it, and providing your own solution from a really inspirational, no-strings-attached perspective. The result is that not only your buyers but also your potential buyers are thinking, "Oh wow, I do have this problem and I need to get ahead of it."

But they're also thinking that you're the most cutting-edge, smart thinker on this topic. And if they're not seeing their supplier in the same way they see you as a thought leader, then there is a good likelihood they're thinking, "Maybe I'm not with the smartest, best provider. And maybe I should think about making a change." Just as the Edelman report reinforced.

In the post-purchase part of the cycle, don't forget about reinforcing that the buyer made a good decision. And continue to provide value-added thought leadership. Make sure you're not asking for something from the customer; instead, you're looking to give them something of value and trying to better understand what's important to them.

Here are some measures for the effectiveness of thought leadership:

• Media share of voice
• Stageside leads (leads generated from speaking engagements) at speaking events
• Earned media opportunities
• Customer referrals
• Visitor-to-lead volume and conversion rates
• SEO visibility—growth in domain authority compared with the competition
• Attraction of the best talent in your business sector

Elevate With Thought Leadership

When you have thought leadership (which is all about teaching, not selling) present across your entire buying funnel, you're ahead of the game.

It will go a long way toward retaining a customer, which is way less expensive than finding a new one to replace them. You'll also generate referrals from really happy people.

When someone makes a purchase, there is an expectation that the supplier will deliver on the promise—what the product or service has promised that it will solve for you. What may be unexpected is how thought leadership, layered on top of that service/product experience, can stimulate demand and reinforce your buyers' decision, elevating your position in the market in monumental ways.

More Resources on the Role of Thought Leadership in B2B Marketing

So, You Want to Be a Thought Leader? A Framework and Guide for Your Thought Leadership Strategy

Your Thought Leadership Content: Emphasize Experience (Or Pay the Google Penalty)

Cultivating an Internal Team of Thought Leaders Will Help Promote Your Brand

Six Ways to Build Brand Influence Using Thought Leaders in Your Organization