Growing Business with Thought Leadership

This final installment in a series of posts on launching a thought leadership program focuses on rolling out your campaign smartly and strategically.

While it can be tough, it’s not impossible to rally your team around thought leadership. First and foremost, don’t try to tackle everything at once; it’s best if you roll out the program by breaking down the process into a series of incremental steps. Start by thinking about what kinds of problems you are helping your clients to solve, and then coach your experts to articulate ways that they have excelled in addressing those problems. Remember to use simple language, since your clients and potential clients may not understand design or technical jargon.

And last, it’s important to create some metrics. Metrics are the tools to help you reach a goal, but they’re not the endgame. Of course, you want to quantify your efforts by citing numbers of impressions, circulation stats, and the like. But you also want to make sure that you are consistent with your messages, getting in the right types of publications, and covering the kind of topics that will reach—and impress—your core audiences. We sometimes forget that clients are people, too, and they want to interact and engage with your firm and its top experts. By launching a thought leadership program, you’ll give them plenty of reasons to reach out to you!

This article, written by Tami Hausman, was originally published in SMPS/The Marketer magazine.