Accelerating your customer’s journey: How and why thought leadership influences the decision to buy

Is your company renowned in its industry as a source of innovative ideas and thinking? Can you present that knowledge to your customers in a way that is compelling and actionable, and that reinforces your brand as the go-to provider of solutions to today’s biggest business problems?

In business, the motivation to transform has never been greater. Today, mega trends such as sustainability, digitalisation and the shift to hybrid working are propelling business transformation. But these are complex, challenging issues. So it’s easy to see why organisations are looking for help with ideas, insights and expertise. Where does thought leadership come in?

To be competitive, companies need to show that they are genuine thought leaders in these areas. And as our research shows, this needs to happen long before the formal tendering process leads to a commercial conversation.

Today’s buyers use up to ten channels to research, form opinions and fact find during the purchasing process, creating far greater efficiency in selling than ever before. Equally, the opportunities to directly engage and influence your buyers are decreasing with a growing emphasis on self-service models. But these changes in how companies select strategic partners highlights the value of thought leadership and the role it has to play in influencing buying decisions.

To help marketers better understand how these challenging factors come into play, our virtual thought leadership customer journey masterclass has been built to share best practice in creating thought leadership content and campaigns that map to every stage of the buying process.

Whatever your level of experience or seniority, our specialists will help you to:

1. Understand how thought leadership influences today’s complex customer journeys

We’ll explore how to strike a balance between “influencing the influencers” versus “influencing the buyers” and teach you how to set your thought leadership up for today’s buyers’ emphasis on self-service

2. Create thought leadership that helps your customers make sense of complex challenges and navigate their way to the right solution

Business audiences want content that communicates ideas and demonstrates that your business has relevant, interesting things to say on how you can help them to solve their fundamental challenges. We’ll unpack how to do this intelligently and with integrity – with real thought leadership at the heart of it.

3. Map your content strategy to the customer journey, so you provide customer with the information they want, every step of the way

We’ll share ideas on how to use thought leadership to build associations between your brand and your chosen topic – and audience – both before, during and after the sell. And we’ll explain what content works, where and when in the process.

4. Build an engagement trail: getting noticed, building rapport, and accelerating decisions

What gets these business leaders’ attention in the first place? There are a lot of factors that influence whether thought leadership is consumed, ranging from good headlines and strong storytelling to careful targeting of messages by role. We share our secrets on the best way to pass the ‘must read’ test and how to help your customers reach a decision faster.