The Next Big Thing in Thought Leadership

Did you know that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase a product when brands deliver personalized experiences? Hyper-personalization—a technique that tailors content to specific groups of customers through data analytics, automation, and other technologies—is one of the next big things in marketing.

Then there's a performance marketing and contextual marketing—two concepts that will also define the future of marketing.

You might wonder what the above has to do with thought leadership. We believe marketers can generate successful results by incorporating these techniques into their thought leadership marketing plan.

Let us explain more.

1. Incorporate Performance Marketing Into Your Thought Leadership Strategy

Unlike performance marketing—when a brand only pays a marketing-first agency after achieving a specific goal, such as reaching a certain number of clicks or conversions—thought leadership hasn't been results-based. However, it's time to start measuring the effectiveness of your thought leadership strategy to determine its return on investment. That means using analytical tools to ascertain the success of blog posts, speeches, thought leadership podcasts, and videos—the No.1 media format among marketers, according to HubSpot's State of Inbound Marketing Trends 2022. Doing so will help you invest in content that resonates with your audience. You might discover that a particular content type doesn't achieve the desired results, allowing you to spend more time on others.

Take thought leadership videos. You can measure views, play rates, watch times, social media shares, and other metrics that help you decide which video types gain the most traction with your desired demographic. For example, you can learn which videos people are talking about on Twitter. Or discover which videos generate the most click-through rates to your website or online store.

Research from McKinsey reveals that companies report marketing efficiency boosts of up to 30 percent without increasing their budgets when investing in data-driven performance marketing. Using this technique when creating thought leadership content could prove just as successful.

2. Think About Hyper-Personalization in a Thought Leader's Voice

Hyper-personalization is a marketing technique that helps brands understand their customers deeper. Marketers use analytics, automation, AI, and other technologies to create personalized content unique to a specific individual or group. That might sound like the opposite of successful thought leadership, which involves creating content for large audiences. However, we think these two marketing concepts will intertwine in the near future.

Driving thought leadership in the context of hyper-personalization is pretty easy, and we're surprised more marketers need to start using this approach. It allows you to segment audiences based on shared characteristics and create unique thought leadership marketing campaigns for different groups. Say you create TL content for the marketing sector. You might want to publish blog posts that target B2C audiences and cover topics such as big data technology, data-driven marketing, and research-based marketing in the context of generating new customers. You can create separate blog posts for B2B audiences with CMO insights about the B2B marketing landscape. This approach will help you engage both groups rather than waste time creating generic content. 

Another way to integrate hyper-personalization into your thought leadership strategy is to use something called geolocation targeting. It tracks IP addresses and GPS coordinates, allowing you to present custom content to audiences from different locations. Say you create TL content for the transportation industry. You can create blog posts, videos, and webinars for domestic and international leads. Driving thought leadership in this way will help you make content more relevant to unique audiences.

Analytics tools—specifically AI-powered—prove particularly useful when thinking about hyper-personalization in a thought leader's voice. The best tools generate real-time analytics about the people who engage with your TL content, and you can use these insights to create more targeted and personalized content in the future.

3. Use Contextual Marketing in Your Thought Leadership Marketing Strategy

Contextual marketing involves delivering targeted advertising based on search terms or web-browsing activity. It helps marketers increase brand awareness among consumers who might be interested in their products and services rather than appealing to the general public. For example, a company that manufactures sneakers might advertise in an online news article about athletics.

We think marketers will apply the principles of contextual marketing to their thought leadership strategy in the future. Say a brand publishes a thought leadership survey about information technology trends and wants to promote its research to audiences interested in this topic. The brand could advertise the survey in banner ads on popular IT news websites, increasing awareness and reaching more people. Thought leadership marketing strategies that incorporate contextual marketing could result in more click-throughs to their survey landing page and encourage more survey downloads. Before downloading the survey, an individual must provide personal details, which a company can add to their marketing contact lists and improve their long-term thought leadership strategy.

The Future of Marketing in a Thought Leader's Voice: Final Word

Performance marketing, contextual marketing, and hyper-personalization are some of the hottest trends in marketing. These techniques make it easier to connect with audiences and increase brand awareness. We think thought leadership can take inspiration from these strategies and help marketers think in a thought leader's voice.

Takeaways

●     Marketing techniques like performance marketing, contextual marketing, and hyper-personalization will dominate the future of marketing.

●     Brands can incorporate these strategies into their thought leadership framework. For example, creating thought leadership content based on real-time analytics—an idea inspired by performance marketing—could help companies identify patterns and trends in TL content and establish which content types resonate the most with audiences.

●     In the future, think about marketing in a thought leader's voice and learn to take inspiration from the latest marketing trends when creating TL content.