How Can Original Research Help You Become a Thought Leader?
To be considered a thought leader, a company has to consistently demonstrate that its knowledge and expertise are both trustworthy and ahead of the trends. It’s a high bar, but reaching it can really pay off in building your brand and winning customers.
So, how do you get there? There are many paths to thought leadership distinction, but there’s one that can give you an instant leg up, immediately boosting your credibility and making your content compelling and memorable.
Original research.
Why? Because original research matters to your customers
In a recent study of over 1,100 U.S. business executives conducted by LinkedIn, 88% of respondents said that thought leadership can enhance their perceptions of an organization, and 48% said that thought leadership can influence their purchase decision. In another study, nearly three in four executives (74%) said that original research is particularly influential in their purchase process.
A well-designed research project enhances your thought-leadership program, in two critical ways:
- It establishes your company as one that listens to its customers and solves their problems
- It provides a wealth of material for your marketing and sales teams to leverage
A Feast for Your Marketing and Sales Teams
Senior-level executives and decision-makers love knowing what is going with their prospective customers and where their companies stand within their industries. Original research can give them the intelligence they crave. Thought leadership can help them gain insight into their customer base, understand unmet needs, and even identify potential market opportunities. Depending on how the research is structured, they can also see what the competition is doing and assess whether they’re ahead of or behind the curve on industry trends. They may also gain comfort in knowing that some of the challenges they struggle with are pain points for others as well.
A robust, thoughtfully-crafted research project should provide you with valuable information that becomes fuel for a wide variety of marketing and sales endeavors. Once conducted, a marketing team will be able to produce:
- White papers
- Blog posts
- Newsletters
- Sales pitches and presentations
- Webinars
- Speaking engagements (and help you land them)
- Videos
- Other content
Whichever initiatives you undertake, the output will be relevant and useful to your customers and prospects, because you’ll be speaking directly to their issues—an incredibly attractive offering.
Beyond marketing campaigns, your sales staff will be able to use the same original research to understand their own customer’s challenges and strengthen their pitches with compelling, data-driven talking points. And that will help them land new business, because a thought leadership program backed by original research shows prospects that you have a unique knowledge base and perspective that others don’t have.
BONUS: Original research frequently gets cross-cited on other outreach initiatives beyond your own. Your customers may use and link to your study in order to help sustain their own content marketing programs. Research even occasionally gets picked up by the press, which exposes your company to an exponentially larger audience.
Demonstrates you care
Choosing to go with one vendor over another often comes down to the buyer’s perception that the provider is committed to understanding and solving their business problems.
By using original research in your published content, you can demonstrate a true investment in learning about your customers and their industry. It’s one way to prove to them that, beyond being well-informed and competent, your company cares about them, is listening to their needs, and—most importantly—can help.
As you gain information your customers can use, you will also reap greater insights for yourself. By mapping your customer’s current environment—what they need, what they’re struggling with, and the marketplace opportunities that presents—you are simultaneously identifying key areas where your business might be able to help them.
Getting started
In our experience, the key to a successful original research project is that it is done well. A thought leadership program is only as good as the data and content it relies on. If you want the highest quality content with the greatest ROI, you need experts to design and conduct the research, experts who can find the story in the data.
That’s where Willow can help.