This content was created by Peter Winick. This content was uploaded by Peter Winick. This is a YouTube video titled "Thought Leadership Marketing - Thought Leadership Leverage" (created June 10, 2015) featuring Peter Winick of Thought Leadership Leverage. It is an instructional/talk-style presentation in which Winick explains how to run thought leadership marketing: define highly specific target audiences, research where they consume content, repurpose content into preferred formats, perform targeted PR/outreach with tracking, and measure success by business metrics rather than placements. The talk emphasizes ongoing, systemized marketing for authors and thought leaders.
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Peter Winick here with Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I want to talk to you about thought leadership marketing. Thought leadership marketing is public relations meets branding meets marketing meets lead generation, and it works particularly well for authors and thought leaders. The world that we live in today is a long-tail world. A long-tail world means that we want to find niche populations that we've defined with a great level of specificity. So the first thing that you need to do if you're going to develop a thought leadership marketing campaign is to define your target audiences as specifically as you can. For example, if your content is sales-based, salespeople is a pretty broad category. Newly minted sales managers in the pharmaceutical industry is a pretty specific niche. Once you know who you're targeting, the next thing you need to do is a bit of research. Figure out where they're hanging out and where they're getting their information from, both online and offline. Things like the top 50 blogs that they read on a regular basis, the events that they're attending, the associations that they're members of, the conferences that they're attending. Who are they following on Twitter? What LinkedIn groups are they members of? As well as some traditional media like trade publications. Once you've done the research and have a list of where these people are getting their content from, Then you need to look through that list and ask, how do they consume content? Usually there are some themes that you can pick up on. It could be a 1,000-word blog post, a Q&A with an expert, videos, podcasts. It could be articles that are written in a 5-step or 7-step or whatever. Then take a look at your content library. What do you have? What format is it in? Regardless of what's there, make sure that you can repurpose that content into the formats that your audiences are consuming. For example, say you have a lot of articles but your audience is looking for video. Take your most popular articles and turn them into videos. Now that we know who we're looking for, where they're hanging out, how they like to consume content, and having created a library of content to meet those needs, it's time to shift gears and create some outreach collateral. This is more standard PR 101 where you're talking to your audience the owner of that media outlet, or the publisher or editor, and you're telling them why your content is of value to their followers, readers, and listeners. It's pretty standard. Be sure to have some tracking mechanisms in place so that you know when to pitch your follow-up process, whether that's email, phone, or whatever works best for you. Turn that process into a system and deploy it. Now, the final variable to thought leadership marketing is we don't celebrate a win when we get a placement. That's old-school PR thinking, and it just doesn't work in today's world. A placement in a medium, in a blog, in a traditional publication, is step one of the process. The real wins are decided upfront. What are our business metrics? As a result of people seeing this content, what do we want them to do? Typically, we want them to reach out to us as an author and as a thought leader and ask us about our services, offerings, and solutions that were brought up in the thought leadership marketing piece that they were exposed to. So for example, they read an article about a problem that you can solve. Now they want to call you and say, hey, saw this piece that you did about problem X. We have that problem here, and we'd like to talk about how you might solve that. That solution could be a lot of different things: consulting, training, assessment tools. So again, in thought leadership marketing, you have to figure out who you're trying to communicate with, where they're hanging out and receiving their information, and that what you have to offer to them is in the various formats that they prefer. You have to pitch it, you have to track it, and you have to know what success looks like before you launch a campaign. This is not an event-driven process. It's not like a book launch or a specific event that you're trying to promote. Thought leadership marketing should be an ongoing part of what you do. This should become ingrained into your organization and how you market and present yourself to the communities that matter to you. I'm Peter Winick for Thought Leadership Leverage. Thank you.
