Obstacles to Success

We’ve talked quite a bit about what makes thought leadership work, but what makes it stop? What are the obstacles you’re either going to have to find a way around, or that you’re going to run smack into.

Lack of Leadership Support

Programs like this cost money. There’s often some additional headcount, but mostly they draw resources away from other functions. Developers have to write news content, designers have to design new content, marketers have to promote new content.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that thought leadership is “free.” It’s never free. You might get away without additional line-items on the budget, but eventually you will understand that it’s costing you money in terms of reduced capacity for other things.

When this happens, who champions the cause and keeps it moving?

Lack of Publishing Channels

Content requires a place to manifest. Where does it exist to the public?

Most corporate blogs are completely wasted spaces that no one ever visits. How do you create some channel with the correct brand and tone for the content you plan to create and the reaction you want to obtain?

A lot of this comes down to attribution and voice. I maintain that good thought leadership has a voice, and sometimes that makes people in the upper echelons of the org chart nervous. How do you balance the need for voice against the need for the content to represent the organization?

Unrealistic Expectations of ROI

ROI is possible, but the unrealistic expectations are: (1) the time horizon in which it occurs, and (2) the clarity which we can measure it.

Thought leadership needs time to develop. Unless you’re literally at the opening stages of a new industry, you don’t achieve value in a matter of months. Often it takes years.

And the payoff can be maddeningly hard to quantify. Thought leadership is a very indirect play. How do you track all the future actions of someone who reads a blog post, figure out how the original blog post ricocheted off everything else, and then distill that down to a dollar amount of return?

Lack of Follow-up Integration

One way to prove the value of thought leadership is to make the thought leaders in your organization available to other functions.

For example, say your seller sends a blog post to a prospect about something that relates to their situation. If the prospect consumes that and it resonates, then what? How do you capitalize on that? Should we get the author of that blog post on a call with the customer so they can discuss it and the potential solutions your product offers?

Put another way, are your thought leaders available to other functions? Do they have contact with sales, with customer success, with R&D? How do you prevent thought leadership from being nothing but a technical exercise in vanity and magnify its value in other areas of the business?

Lack of Internal Marketing and Promotion

You’ll need to recruit content creators and those who have “done the work,” and you’ll need to make sure your sellers and customer success staff now how to leverage what gets created.

The only way this works is if you get enough creators inside the company, and they know how the content is being used. If you can’t supply a steady stream of content, or creators don’t think anything is being read or utilized, they’ll drop out and the program will slowly slide into irrelevance.