Thought Leadership Best Practices: #1 – Start With Market Intelligence

Common Practice #1

Publish thought leadership based on practitioner suggestions

Best Practice #1

Develop thought leadership informed by market intelligence

Have you ever encountered a situation where the decision to mobilize marketing resources, and spend significant marketing dollars on a thought leadership initiative has been based on nothing more than one individuals suggestion, idea (or diktat)?  In our experience, and we confess to having been guilty of this at one time or another, this happens all to often.  Someone has a brainwave during their morning shower, is stimulated by a client conversation or an article they read in the Harvard Business Review and without further consideration the wheels of the thought leadership train are put into motion.

Now in many cases these ideas may be very good ones – if a client or a major publication is talking about the issue that’s evidence that it matters to someone.  But the question isn’t whether the idea is good or of interest to someone.  The question is whether the idea is one that matters highly to a significant number of your clients and prospects.

The # 1 objective of thought leadership is to start conversations with clients and prospects, and your chances of starting a conversation with multiple clients and prospects will clearly increase if you try to talk to them about issues that matter.  In fact we think that marketing and business development, and relationship development is fundamentally about “conversations that matter“.

So how do you decide what matters? We recommend that you:

Start With Market Intelligence

This means gathering data and information and performing research that identifies the issues that matter to clients and prospects.

There are multiple sources of this information including:

• Client interaction (but make sure you gather input from multiple clients!), whether from marketing calls or existing projects and matters, and don’t forget to review intelligence from client satisfaction/feedback activities
• Business, trade and professional publications
• Published or bespoke research
• Trade and professional associations
• The internet and social media
• Competitors (we’ll discuss competitors further in other Best Practices)

Clearly there is no shortage of information.  However, what is often missing is the synthesis and analysis of this information, comparing and contrasting different data points and sources, weighing and prioritizing information to build a balanced view as to what is in fact important to your clients and prospects.

Equally important (and perhaps this is best practice #1A) is to continuously update your market intelligence.  Not only does this help you keep up to date with changing priorities, it also provides a mechanism for validating and refining your understanding of what matters.

Firm leaders and practice leaders should ideally be gathering and sharing this kind of market intelligence as part of the firms ongoing strategic planning and management activities (which should in turn be driving marketing), but we recognize this is not always the case.  Regardless, firm and practice leaders should gather, share, evaluate and update market intelligence as a critical component of their marketing and thought leadership programs.  Failure to do so risks investing considerable time and money into marketing initiatives and collateral that are at best of interest to a very small subset of the firms target market and at worst likely to sink without a trace.

By contrast, effective use of market intelligence sets the foundation for effective thought leadership marketing and increased marketing ROI.

Market Intelligence Checklist

Use the following questions to assess the level of intelligence that starts your firm’s thought leadership programs:

1. How are decisions made in your organization about which issues and topics to focus your thought leadership on?
2. How much intelligence is gathered as input to those decisions?
3. What sources of intelligence do you use?
4. Who is that intelligence shared and debated with?
5. How often is it updated?
6. How do you evaluate the level of interest in the thought leadership topics and initiatives that are actually delivered – and how does this evaluation feed into your future thought leadership decisions?

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