Tim Parker's blog

In a TED talk, Andrew Stanton of Toy Story and Finding Nemo fame, lays out the lessons he’s learned about good storytelling. There is a lot that students of thought leadership can learn from Mr. Stanton.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for B2B content marketers today is creating strong content, quickly and consistently (see chart). The standard is continually rising for both the quantity of great ideas and how compelling they must be to stand out in an increasingly cluttered marketplace.

But as Jeff Pundyk, former publisher of McKinsey Quarterly, once remarked to me: “Producing anything good is hard.” Producing strong, original content is never easy, and producing it in quantity is many times harder.

Mostly Yes, and a little bit No. Let me tell you a story.

About a month ago I got a call from “one of the country’s biggest search engine optimization firms,” based in California. Since the sales guy was appealingly non-pushy, I agreed to talk with an ‘SEO technician’ next. He turned out to be the man with the sales patter and claimed to be able to do lots of impressive things — including so-called ‘offsite optimization’ — without telling me how he’d do it. So I ducked the follow-on conversation (by not answering any calls from a certain area code for three weeks).

It might seem odd to turn to the literary masters for lessons on business writing. But I think there are some we can learn. And the first has to do with clarity.

Lots of companies actually.

Especially those that:

• Primarily sell expertise: I.e., professional services firms, especially management consultancies and IT services companies
• Sell complex products with associated services: E.g., call center telephony systems, business intelligence software
• Sell complex products with advantages the market needs to be educated about: E.g., targeted marketing data, intellectual property, ergonomic office furniture, industrial bearings

It wasn’t always this way.

Anyone who invests in thought leadership wants a good return on their investment, whether in leads generated, engagements closed or reputation enhanced. But there are many ways companies can make sure they don’t get a good payback. Here are the 10 worst ones we commonly see, from strategic misjudgments about portfolios to tactical ones such as how to write copy.

We just conducted our third consecutive study on the use social media for marketing by management consulting firms (with AMCF and Research Now). We found that social media is becoming ever more important to those firms and to their clients. And we wondered, as it does, how will that affect the importance of thought leadership?

Usually companies publish thought leadership to be more visible in the marketplace. But sometimes when they publish research-based material, they do everything right until, at the very end, they inadvertently dilute the impact and limit their audience.

Good writing is important in business as everyone knows. And it’s especially important for professional services firms publishing articles, research studies and white papers. These things show off a firm’s expertise and so are actual samples of the firm’s product. A sales brochure for a printer, for instance, is not.

And yet a lot of professional firms’ materials are not well written.

Why? 

I think there are at least two key reasons.

Real insights, in the world of business as much as in any other field, take a lot of work to produce. They especially require research. It’s a myth propagated by the “Attain thought leadership in 5 easy steps” crowd, that all you have to do is come up with a good idea, and then hey, write a book, give a speech etc. and you’re there. (A Google search on “5 Steps” + “thought leadership” today gets a million returns.) But in fact all the best (and enduring) ideas are underpinned by substantial study of the real world and the development of a model to explain the findings.

But in business, our intended audience — executives — rarely has time to read weighty reports, so what’s a publisher to do?

The point of thought leadership marketing of course is to attract prospective customers with interesting and relevant points of view. Also to position your firm or yourself as an expert on a topic, build reputation and credibility, and thereby make it easier to sell your services when the time arises.

But for firms that don’t have a well-established reputation already, there is an irony. If you don’t push the material out, how will anyone know about it? And if you do push it out to people, is that legitimate permission marketing anymore? Or is it its evil antithesis, interruption marketing?

In February this year, Google rolled out an algorithm change called Panda, intended to give lower rankings to content farms. These are sites that host not very original content specifically written to capture search enquiries and generate advertising revenue. If you are wondering why this matters, let me explain how they generate that content.

We have long known that how much good thought leadership you can generate in a professional services firm relies on one or both of two things: the ease of extracting new insights from practicing professionals, and whether or not the firm does dedicated research. This week I saw a model that neatly ties these things together.

A post I read today made me wonder what I would find if I looked for management truths derived from the story of Apple Inc. Scratting, by the way, is the process of grinding apples into cider between huge stones. The blogoshphere would be a better place if there were less of it.

I thought this might be a good time to unveil my inner geek and let you in on my favorite and indispensable content management tools. Most of them are free, some of them are unashamedly technical, and they are all good.

There are of course, lots of blog posts that tell us thought leadership is easy, or easier than we think, and I owe it to a recent one of these on HubSpot’s (otherwise) excellent site for prompting me to write this post. The truth is that developing good thought leadership content is hard. 

Sometimes, Yes. I explained in a post in October that nonetheless, we haven’t found a better term for it. Since then I’ve had time to observe some occasions when it’s legitimately applied and others when it isn’t. And I think there are some useful lessons to be learned.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we’ve entered the era of “content marketing.” Content marketing budgets are going up; companies are falling over themselves to hire journalists to write stuff for them; and so on. But while everyone is rushing to produce content, do they know which content matters?

The publication last month of the book Content Rules has again highlighted the growing importance of content marketing. I’m not sure content actually rules just yet—B2B firms on average spend about 25% of their marketing budgets on content marketing (data here). But there are three forces inexorably pushing it that way—at the expense of traditional advertising. Online for instance, we have almost complete control over the content we choose to digest. Also, social media have put word of mouth on steroids —an ad doesn’t have much of a chance if 40 out of 50 people already say the product sucks. Accordingly, since banner ads were first introduced in 1995, click-though rates have fallen from around 5% to about 0.2% today (data here).

At the Bloom Group we are serious about helping people produce quality content, and we have a rigorous set of criteria by which we evaluate both ours and others'. But there is another critical component to creating great content that we rarely ever talk about, and that’s fervor, or passion.

Most B2B blogs aren’t read by decision makers and don’t drive business. This was brought home to me last week when a friend at a law firm told me they don’t do social media marketing because the blogosphere is an ocean of bad content and “even the name blog suggests a fat, unwieldy, ugly thing that demands to be fed—regardless of what it is fed. Think Jabba the Hut!”

OK, there are 12, but bear with me.

I have grown weary of blog post titles with numbers in. There are so many appear now every day that if, for instance, you google 5 Social Media you will find literally hundreds of blog posts with titles that include it, for instance, “5 B2B Social Media Marketing Benefits.” I had hoped this was a fad that would pass. However, since it hasn’t, I decided find out what is going on.

Producing more and better content is now the single biggest issue for professional services firms and many other B2B companies too. Here are just some of the places it has popped up in the last few weeks; it was the number one issue for marketers at a meeting of the Association of Management Consulting Firms in NYC last month; Sourceforconsulting.com showed in a recent report that “finding something distinctive to say” is the top issue for every Tier 1 consulting firm in the UK; and a recent report from Junta 42 found that “for businesses with existing content marketing strategies, the largest challenge is producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers”. There have been more, but you get the point. 

More and more companies outside of management consulting and IT are undertaking thought leadership marketing. And progressively more of them are building topic microsites. Perhaps Neil Rackham has put his finger on why.

Lots, if it’s much like most of them. Many of them leave me wondering how they help the firms that produce them. Let me take one of the best as an example.

I talked last week with a friend at a consulting firm about the challenges of extracting thought leadership material from a firm’s professionals, and how the process often degenerates into a long series of rewrites. This is actually very common, and I thought it might be helpful to explain how and why it happens.

There are so many survey reports being published at this time on content and thought leadership marketing that I feel slightly less bad we haven't done one for a few months. Between them they show all kinds of insights and raise all kinds of questions. 

Eccolo media has just published their excellent third consecutive annual report on B2B technology collateral – the results of a survey into how B2B tech buyers consume vendors’ content as they go through technology purchasing decisions. The Eccolo folks have drawn a number of conclusions that coincide with trends we too have seen in the market. 

 I sometimes wish that Thought Leadership were called something else. First the phrase smacks of business jargon, and second, I don’t like having to explain it to half the people who ask us what we do. Third, it’s 's easy to poke fun at. But it is useful, and it is valid.

In an article we published in June we explained why we think that topic microsites will supersede white papers for B2B marketing (see here). In my last couple of posts I showed the many different elements that have been incorporated into some emerging topic microsites (here) and explained which characteristics are essential (here). One of those essential characteristics is an in-depth point of view.

In this post, I’ll go into a little more detail and explain why articles alone aren’t enough and why they need to congregate around an overarching point of view.