By Paul Brunato & Bob Finlayson

For B2B companies, building trust and credibility with their target audience is critical to driving long-term growth and forming lasting partnerships. A potent way to establish trust and demonstrate expertise is through thought leadership.

Before we delve into the use of thought leadership to build trust in your B2B brand and strategies for positioning your brand as an authority, let's briefly discuss the significance of trust in B2B marketing.

Why Trust Matters

Buyers – especially B2B buyers – have access to an immense amount of information about solutions to their challenges. With abundant choices, trust often becomes the differentiating factor that influences decision-making.

A trusted B2B brand is more likely to receive referrals, command a premium price and foster long-term customer loyalty. Thought leadership is an effective way to build trust by demonstrating your company's expertise, commitment to innovation and dedication to addressing customer challenges.

Establishing Thought Leadership

To establish thought leadership in your industry, consider these five steps.

1. Identify your areas of expertise and your experts. Sounds obvious, but companies occasionally try to project expertise in an area where they lack it. Or, more often, subject matter experts (SMEs) aren't available to work on content creation, forcing marketers to stand in as experts. This typically results in generic content – not ideal for thought leadership. 

Conduct a survey of your SMEs, their backgrounds, and areas of expertise. Tools like LinkedIn or a company knowledge management system can make this task manageable even in large enterprises. Ensure the process to engage SMEs respects their time and avoids unreasonable deadlines. 

Most SMEs understand the importance of creating quality thought leadership content, but having executive management’s commitment to this type of content can help facilitate cooperation with your experts.

2. Find the overlap between your expertise and your customers' needs. Use data from customer personas and social panels, along with input from your sales teams, to understand your customers' concerns, worries, challenges, and opportunities. This insight will help you align your areas of expertise with what your customers truly care about. Thought leadership content that doesn't resonate with your customers is a wasted resource, as is creating sales materials disguised as thought leadership content. 

Outside-in content – where you discuss a customer challenge and showcase your expertise as it relates to solving that challenge – will be much more engaging to your customers than inside-out content that pitches the benefits of your products. There is, of course, a time for such content, but it’s further down the customer journey. 

3. Create high-quality content. Again, this may sound obvious, but a cursory glance at corporate content reveals that quality isn’t always prioritized. Your content should address your customers’ problems and challenges while showcasing your firm’s expertise. 

To maximize the size of your audience, your content should be presented in a wide range of formats (blog posts, white papers, e-books, articles, infographics, videos and webinars/podcasts), and be delivered to your target audience through a wide range of channels (social media, trade and business media, email, newsletters, events, etc.). Make your content work harder for your company by using it across multiple channels in multiple formats. For example, a high-quality thought leadership article can be turned into multiple social media posts, an infographic and even a video.

4. Participate in industry events. Identify conferences and trade shows where your SMEs can speak to share your company’s expertise and network with potential customers. Every speaking opportunity can also be used for content creation; repurpose your SMEs' speeches as articles or blogs, record videos for later editing, and create social posts based on the content for real-time and post-event engagement. 

Publishing an ongoing stream of high-quality thought leadership content will bring your brand to the attention of conference organizers, and may result in a speaking slot at their next event. 

5. Partner with industry influencers. Collaborate with respected industry leaders and organizations to co-create content or participate in joint webinars and events. This can amplify your message and extend your reach to a broader audience. 

Be sure to consider as possible partners industry analysts and other industry influencers, trade associations, important vendors and customers, and media outlets. 

Putting Thought Leadership to Work

Thought leadership content should be leveraged across your marketing, communications and sales departments. Such content will fuel your demand-generation marketing activities, support your sales team's account-based sales efforts, and provide input for all your internal and external communications and public relations programs.

Organize your thought leadership content to support your marketing and business goals. For example, a thought leadership campaign can warm up a market prior to a new product launch or an industry event.

Adopt a publisher's mindset for your thought leadership content. Maintain a detailed content calendar specifying what content will be published when and on what channel. Coordinate this calendar with your company’s product roadmap, investor relations calendar, and schedule of other planned announcements.

Finally, create social media guidelines that encourage SMEs and employees to share your content on their social networks. Whenever possible, embed links in the content to make it easy to share. Also, notify your SMEs when content is published. This ensures they see the results of their participation in the process and encourages them to share the content.

Conclusion

Building trust in your B2B brand is crucial for long-term success, and thought leadership is a powerful strategy to achieve this goal. By sharing valuable insights that help your customers solve their business challenges, you will engage your audience, position your brand as a trusted authority, build credibility and drive growth.

If you need help upgrading your thought leadership program or launching one that leverages cutting edge AI tools and processes for understanding your audience's perspective, Bold Marketing & Communications can help. Contact our founders, Paul Brunato or Bob Finlayson for a free consultation.

Note: A version of this article appeared on the Bold Marketing & Communications LinkedIn page.