Image credit: Riccardo Annandale via Unsplash
By: Jenna Wigman
Savvy brands have long understood that maintaining a PR strategy is an essential part of their marketing and overall growth. However, the rapidly shifting media landscape has completely changed the approach, straying away from what once may have been viewed as a fairly straightforward process. While creating a press release to announce your company news and blasting it out to the world is still a key pillar of an effective PR strategy, it is no longer the cornerstone around which you should build your brand communications. Thought leadership development can be deployed on both a brand and individual level by engaging with timely industry topics that allow you to better communicate your company ethos and personality in a manner that audiences are much more receptive to.
Boosting Inbound Sales
While a carefully timed news announcement can certainly pique the interest of audiences outside of your existing network, a placement or speaking engagement on a probing topic that answers broader industry questions allows you to get in front of new audiences. By being highly strategic with the kinds of customers you’re looking to reach, you can target your placement and messaging to offer potential customers solutions your brand is able to solve, without being too salesy.
Having a respected publication or event selecting your brand to speak to an industry topic is a vital legitimizing factor that will showcase your point of view and unique value proposition far better than even the best advertising campaigns. Rather than having customers come to you when they are in dire straits for your offerings, you will now position yourself to guide them to see the value in your brand and make the outreach based on your point of view.
Humanizing Your Brand Offering
A well-positioned spokesperson can certainly be impactful in marketing your brand, but by leveraging your key stakeholders as the “face” of your brand, you’re able to add a more human and relatable factor to your brand presence. By connecting with your customers and industry peers over ideas that are relevant to their needs, clear, and easy to understand, you are able to mimic human connection from a distance. While having peer-to-peer conversations remains the gold standard for establishing lasting connections, it would be impossible to actually connect with the volume of potential customers that you would need in order to reach your brand’s growth goals. Thought leadership opportunities can allow you to add a more conversational and personable tone to timely industry topics, which can help expand your brand’s exposure in a way that is often more meaningful than a news release.
Showing Who You Are, Not Just What You Do
It is essential that your customers understand what your offering is as a brand, but it is even more valuable to distill the core message of who you are as a brand in order to build long-term loyalty. By contributing a bylined article at a top industry publication or speaking at a major conference, you are able to broadcast your message about your brand’s unique point of view on the industries that you operate in, which can provide a more well-optimized platform in order to convey the nuances that make your company stand out from its competitors. With younger generations caring more and more about brand’s stances on ESG and other social issues, creating a strategic thought leadership platform that allows you to show the makeup of what your brand truly stands for can be a long-term differentiation factor that builds lifelong customers–not just vanity metrics like “fans” and “likes.”
Though the term “thought leader” can be intimidating, aligning with a strategic partner can guide you through the process of distilling your brand vision and identifying topical pillars of conversation. In today’s crowded media landscape, building a clear thought leadership strategy can make the difference between your brand being known and being looked up to and esteemed.