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| Using Thought Leadership to Drive Sales Thought Leadership: Beyond the White Paper Best Practices in Managing Thought Leadership Assets
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Integrated Thought Leadership In today’s crowded market, mergers, acquisitions, partnerships and identity changes often blur the distinctions among competitors. But, an effective Thought Leadership program can help your company stand out as a visionary with a true understanding of the factors that shape your customers’ environments. Many companies have proactively developed an arsenal of white papers and are wondering how to best leverage this valuable information. White papers are a great start, but they are just one element of Thought Leadership. In fact, white papers are often not the best way to reach some of your audience segments. Thought Leadership (TL)—the intellectual capital of your individual employees and the collective organization—should be presented as a series of initiatives, comprised of many elements. Each component has a varying shelf life based on factors, such as time, content, and the market environment and, therefore, needs to be monitored for value and use. As every initiative is brought to market, it is important to map it to the sales cycle and educate your salespeople on how “the right content at the right time” can help them to succeed. Let's take a closer look at the multiple touchpoints that comprise an integrated TL initiative: As an example, we’ll assume that a company is introducing a Thought Leadership initiative for new software that helps enterprises comply with environmental regulations. The campaign’s definition, message, scope, and estimated duration are at the core of the program and drive the development of all its elements. As such, the company should consider which TL components can best support its demand generation efforts (direct mail, advertising, trade shows) in addition to its internal sales enablement launch plan.
Content from the above TL program can be modified and adapted for the business, technology, and media tracks. Also consider how you can leverage TL content to best support your company’s demand gen and sales enablement programs. To learn how Launch International can take your thought leadership program to a whole new level, contact us at 215-230-4340 or info@launchintl.com.
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