Thought Leadership Insights, Episode 6

In the sixth episode of Thought Leadership Insights, FT Longitude’s co-founder and CEO Rob Mitchell shares his thoughts on what makes successful thought leadership campaigns as well as discussing how thought leadership fits in with content marketing. We also explore FT Longitude’s latest thinking on measuring the effectiveness of thought leadership campaigns, as well as future trends in thought leadership we can expect to see.

Topics covered

00:00 Introduction
01:10 What is thought leadership?
02:20 How to distinguish thought leadership from content marketing
04:10 The relationship between thought leadership and content marketing
05:45 Can you do content marketing without thought leadership?
06:40 The current state of thought leadership today
08:00 Evaluating thought leadership
09:30 Making a campaign commercial
10:50 Measuring thought leadership
12:50 Mistakes people make with their thought leadership
15:00 How will thought leadership evolve?

Listen to our other podcasts:

Episode 7: Peter Richards on managing thought leadership programmes

Episode 5 | Episode 4 | Episode 3 | Episode 2 | Episode 1

Podcast Transcript

Interviewer: Welcome to the podcast, Rob.

Rob: Thank you very much, Fergal.

Interviewer: We’ve spoken on these podcast about various aspects of thought leadership, about some of the research that FT Longitude has done. Today, it would be good to talk about what makes a successful thought leadership campaign. And I’m just wondering … a good place to start would be to talk about thought leadership and how FT Longitude sees thought leadership. And maybe, also, to distinguish thought leadership from content marketing, which … it seems in the market that terms are used interchangeably quite often and just some clarity around that would be very helpful.

Rob: Yeah, a good question. So, I probably should start by giving our view what we think thought leadership is, because, you’re right, there are many different definitions out there. Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get a different perspective on what exactly thought leadership is. From our point of view, anything about thought leadership has got to contain original thinking. And if you haven’t got anything original to say, then you’re not a thought leader.

The second thing is that thought leadership has to have some kind of call to action, it has to influence people in some way or get them to change their thinking or their behaviour. What I think is really important to add that thought leadership’s not just some sort of lofty, ivory tower activity. Ideas are really important, but it’s not just about those ideas. It’s really important to think about what you do with those ideas. People who do thought leadership well recognise that it’s got to have a very clear marketing rationale behind it. You’ve got to have a very clear line of sight into how your thought leadership is going to enhance your reputation, your relationships and your revenues.

Interviewer: Interesting, that’s very interesting. Now, clearly, content marketing is a much broader term, a much broader area. What are the distinctions, do you think, worth making here?

Rob: You’re right. There’s a lot of confusion, I think, in the market, about these two terms. People very often use them interchangeably. We’ve taken the view at FT Longitude to call ourselves thought leadership specialists. We don’t call ourselves a content marketing agency. And that’s deliberate, because, from our point of view, there’s a very clear distinction between the two. Thought leadership is really just one aspect of a much broader content marketing universe.

I’ve talked already about thought leadership needing to be original and needing to be adding to the conversation. That’s not always true in content marketing, which, sometimes, can just be entertaining and there’s nothing wrong with that. But thought leadership has to be moving the conversation on, adding to it, generating new insight. I think the second difference is that thought leadership is all about quality and not quantity. If you invest in thought leadership, then you know that it’s a long-term game, it takes time and effort, it’s not something that you can churn out quickly. And you’ll also know that companies that do good thought leadership have only a handful of messages that they own. They recognise that there’s a scarcity of good ideas and they need to focus their message around those few key concepts.

One of the trends that we hear a lot of, at the moment, is that companies don’t want to do lots and lots and lots of thought leadership campaigns. That doesn’t really work. They only do fewer, bigger, better campaigns. And that’s quite distinct from content marketing, where my view is that often the emphasis is on quantity and trying to bombard your audiences with messaging, in preview of search engine optimization rankings and just constantly trying to get front of mind with your audience.

Interviewer: Very useful distinctions, Rob. Can you talk a bit about the relationship between thought leadership and content marketing, and how they fit together?

Rob: I think the key point to make here is that thought leadership, as I said, is a subset or subcategory of a broader content marketing industry. To do thought leadership well … and I think you have to embed it into that broader content management framework. So, content marketing for me is all about the funnel, all about the content funnel and the buyer journey, where you’re driving people, your audience, down that funnel. You start at the top with building awareness and then you drive them through the interest or the consideration stage, the desire stage and the action stage of actually buying something, because content marketing is all about driving revenues and getting people to take some action and then, ultimately, selling.

Thought leadership, from my point of view, occupies the top layer of that funnel, of that content funnel. It’s all about building awareness and credibility, but also starting to tee up that commercial conversation, because you’ve got to have that line of sight through to the commercial outcome you’re trying to drive. And then, as you get into the content marketing funnel that layers below, that’s when you start to get people into the consideration of your services, it’s when you get them thinking about analysing different offerings from different providers before they actually make the purchase. And those layers require a different type of content, and not so much thought leadership. So when you get into the consideration stage, it’s things like case studies, credentials, product webinars and so on.

So, thought leadership for me occupies the top of the content marketing funnel, but it’s very much embedded into it, and then you drive people down through different sorts of content until you get that commercial outcome you’re looking for.

Interviewer: Right, that’s very interesting. And I guess, on the other hand, what about doing content marketing without thought leadership?

Rob: I think you can and you see lots of examples of this, you know, of content marketing campaigns that companies run. But my perspective on this is that you could do content marketing without thought leadership, but certainly in the B2B space you’re not gonna get noticed. You’re not gonna get the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise to your clients and you’re not gonna cut through what is a very, very crowded marketplace. There’s a lot of content, everyone’s trying to reach the same audience, everyone’s trying to communicate with the C-suite. If you haven’t got thought leadership, you haven’t got original thinking, original insights, then you’re going to get ignored. And you have to establish that credibility with your audience in the first place and that’s where thought leadership can help.

Interviewer: Right, that’s very interesting. Now you’ve talked about the fact that thought leadership … one of the things that...

PODCAST: Rob Mitchell on successful thought leadership campaigns