B2B thought leadership is a powerful tool to drive the growth of a business. It enables companies to build visibility among their target market by showcasing their expertise.
But it is possible to get it wrong. Badly wrong.
And one of the biggest mistakes is to confuse B2B thought leadership tactics with B2C thought leadership approaches.
Whether you're targeting a narrow professional audience or the mass public will have a significant impact on how you devise your thought leadership strategy.
In this article, we will look at how to design an effective B2B thought leadership strategy by shining a light on how it differs from a B2C campaign.
In a B2B thought leadership campaign, a company will often have a sharply defined and specific audience.
In fact, it is entirely possible that the target audience of a B2B campaign might be just a handful of people.
For example, if you're a new tea brand who wants to get your products stocked in the leading UK retailers, your target audience might just be the 10 major buyers at the large supermarkets.
No one outside of that tight audience really matters for you for achieving that goal. Whereas if you were running a B2C campaign for this same brand, you might be targeting all tea drinkers in the UK.
In most cases, this B2B audience might just be the target customers of the business – but that needn't be the case. Equally a B2B thought leadership campaign might target investors, potential employees, or regulators.
A full list of audiences for a B2B campaign includes:
Team members within a company
Industry peers
Investors
Regulators
Customers
Partners
Suppliers
In comparison, a B2C thought leadership campaign will, generally, be targeted at the mass public.
In fact, if you're running a B2C campaign, you will be targeting hundreds of thousands of people.
And while your audience might have certain demographics in common, perhaps 'young professionals who drink tea', it will not be possible to actually identify a list of the specific people (or companies) you are targeting.
In a B2B thought leadership campaign, it is important to hyper-target your messaging and narrative to your specific audience.
The main upshot is that in a B2B thought leadership campaign, it is possible (and, indeed, important) to hyper-target and laser-focus your messaging and narrative to your specific audience.
In fact, given you are targeting a tightly defined audience, it should be possible to literally pick out the individual problems that they are facing – and tailor your thought leadership content and messages to those individual problems and challenges.
Returning to the tea example:
In the case of a B2C campaign, a campaign might highlight the general positive attributes of the product, like its great taste.
In the case of a B2B campaign, it's important to micro-target the challenges of your audience, like how the packaging takes us less space on the shelf.
This also means before kickstarting a B2B thought leadership campaign you must know and understand your audience intimately. Otherwise you risk wasting your time, effort, and resources.
A B2B thought leadership audience will also, generally, be much more knowledgeable (and interrogative) than a mass B2C audience.
The reasons should be obvious enough:
You will be targeting other professionals within your own industry – and, as a direct result, they will naturally have more background knowledge than a mass audience.
You will be targeting them in a workplace context, where they are likely to be much more considered, thoughtful, and professional about their decisions. They are unlikely to make impulsive purchasing decisions.
Outside of the two reasons above, an average career professional (and industry decision-maker) is generally just more sophisticated and thoughtful than audience that an average member of the public.
Taken together, these factors mean that the benchmark for a B2B thought leadership campaign is much higher than a B2C campaign.
Whereas a mass audience might allow you to get away with making platitudinous claims supported with weak evidence, that is definitely not going to be the case with a business-to-business audience.
When it comes to B2B thought leadership campaigns, you need to support your thought leadership with credible, concrete evidence
On one hand, you need to make sure that you're saying something genuinely new, fresh, and original.
If your audience has heard it all before, they will generally zone out what you have to say. Even worse, it could actively damage your brand by making your audience think that you're behind the industry curve.
On the other hand, you need to support your thought leadership with credible, concrete evidence.
As this is a more sophisticated audience with a background in the industry, they will be inherently sceptical of new claims – and they will, understandably, need to be convinced by your arguments.
Again, returning to the tea company example, if the CEO made the claim (in a thought leadership campaign) to large supermarket buyers that younger consumers were increasingly looking for sweeter tea products, they would have to back that up with evidence, probably in the form of a survey of this audience.
But evidence doesn't always need to take the form of a survey or poll, instead the following forms of evidence could also help make your case:
Academic research
Testimonials
Case studies & examples
Surveys and market research
Trend analysis
Government data
News analysis
Logical arguments
Whatever form your evidence takes, it is important to back up all B2B thought leadership claims with a strong justification. B2B audiences will expect it, and they will want to put your arguments under pressure.
Finally, while all B2C thought leadership campaigns are generally focused on selling more products (or services) to customers, that is definitely not the case for B2B thought leadership campaigns.
In fact, in a B2B context, thought leadership campaigns tend, on the whole, to be focused on objectives other than sales.
What else might a B2B thought leadership campaign be focussed on? Over the last 12 months, the following campaigns have been especially popular:
Investor focused. A campaign that seeks to raise the profile of a business and its leadership team among investors to generate investment or help support a company's share price.
Regulator focused. A campaign that seeks to showcase to regulators (or, potentially, wider political stakeholders) that a business is acting in a responsible, compliant, and fair way – and even leading the industry on these fronts.
Recruitment focused. A campaign that seeks to strengthen the company's employer brand to appeal to top talent from across the industry. This might involve highlighting the company's credentials on innovation, growth, or diversity.
The result is that while a company might have a single B2C focussed thought leadership campaign, it is entirely possible – and, in fact, very likely – that a business might be running multiple B2B thought leadership campaigns at the same time.
In B2B contexts, it is important to laser-focus messaging and ensure that claims are well-evidenced.
Each of these campaigns will be targeting a different tight audience to achieve a very specific objective. Of course, these campaigns may intersect and complement each other, but it's very important to have dedicated streams of activity.
Taken together, a B2B thought leadership campaign is very different to a B2C thought leadership campaign, and they have to be approached from very different directions.
While is might be possible to run a single, mass-market, highly generic B2C campaign, in the case of B2B campaign, it is important to laser-focus messaging, ensure that claims are original and well-evidenced, and run separate campaigns for different audiences.