How to Maximize your Thought Leadership ROI

Paul Berry, the cofounder of HuffPost, said the same thing about B2B marketing.

The B2B thought leader survey results are only the beginning. To maximize its potential, you need a comprehensive campaign that is strategic and integrated. This will ensure its longevity and impact as well as your ROI.

Flagship content

A survey-based campaign starts with a thought-leadership piece that is high-value and authoritative. This can be published on your website as a report or whitepaper, eBook, benchmarking tool, or eBook.

Your target audience should be able to understand three critical points in your flagship content:

Your survey’s headline results

You can help businesses exploit the opportunities and prepare them for the dangers.

Expert advice on how you can capitalize on the opportunities and protect yourself against the threats

The campaign starts

Your efforts and resources have been well spent. Keep your IP active on the website. Your integrated campaign can begin once your centerpiece content is published.

Grist’s approach to maximizing B2B survey impact is aligned with the three phases of the customer journey.

Each piece of content produced from your survey must have a clear role in nurturing and targeting the audience. Each article must have one of the following:

Attract prospects to the content of your flagship (attract).

Convert them into qualified leads.

They will be nurtured through the sales process (close).

Attracting prospects

Your clients and prospects must be attracted to the campaign’s first phase. You can use a wide range of activities at this stage to reach your clients and candidates across all sales and marketing channels.

I am sharing and Promoting Results on Social Media and Other Channels – infographics and blogs, tweets and videos, SlideShare presentations, and SlideShare presentations.

Promoting the highlights to existing contacts through e-newsletters

Conducting a PR campaign for the survey results

It is essential to release sectoral and regional results to extend the “Attract” phase and increase its momentum.

Whatever tactics you choose, the goal of this stage is to get potential buyers to your high-value content.

Convert prospects into leads.

After attracting prospects, convert them into sales leads. You can collect the information you need to track and qualify leads by granting access to the main content and asking for email addresses.

Events for prospects and clients are also essential engagement activities at the “Convert” stage. These could be webinars or roundtable sessions in which you can discuss and present the survey themes and findings.

Event and social feeds can provide additional content assets to fuel the ‘top of funnel’ activity stream.

Closing of the sale

The first step in the convert and the close process is convincing visitors to download thought leadership content in exchange for their contact information. Your survey results can help you lubricate the conversion of qualified leads to clients.

Your research can help you create sales support materials tailored to your prospects’ needs, no matter where they are in their decision-making process. Data and insights from surveys can be used to enhance sales presentations, slide decks, and bid documents. Crib sheets can be created for your sales team. These sheets should highlight the survey results and provide suggestions for sales conversations.

Prospects who have downloaded multiple pieces of content, such as how-to guides and case studies, or visited pricing and product pages indicate a desire to buy. The ultimate goal of a qualified lead is to complete a form to show that they would like to be contacted directly by sales.

Campaign in action

Grist and Coleman Parkes, our research partner, have developed a highly successful integrated marketing campaign around the digital transformation to market CA Technologies’ software company CA Technologies.

This case study shows how CA’s survey-based engagement campaign helped to build its brand, generate leads, and support sales activity.

Many B2B companies like CA have realized the value of surveys as content marketing tools and sources of competitive intelligence. We can help you create a content marketing strategy that maximizes your survey and design the best content assets.