Crafting fantastic thought leadership content is useless if no-one manages to see it—how you get that content into the hands of your target audience is just as important.
How can you create differentiated thought leadership?
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Our recent research has shown that thought leadership plays an integral role when it comes to the extent to which clients trust consulting firms, as well as the prices they are willing to pay. With thought leadership clearly playing such an important role, it is more important than ever that your firm’s thought leadership output stands out in the marketplace.
Are you losing your readers at hello?
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Picture the scene: You’re on your favourite wine merchant’s website, looking to buy a few bottles of wine. You find the perfect bottle and click “add to basket”. A form pops up asking you to fill in a list of personal details. You really do want to buy that wine, so you reluctantly comply, but you are then informed that you will receive an email when you have been approved as a purchaser.
Can high-quality thought leadership push up fee rates?
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It’s no secret that justifying your investment in thought leadership with some clear, quantifiable financial evidence can be a tricky thing to do. Few firms have completely nailed the whole approach to KPIs—and it’s easy to see why. Take, for example, the (entirely hypothetical) story of Charlotte. In 2019, Charlotte worked as a senior manager for a manufacturing company and came across a well-researched article by Firm A about innovation that stayed in her mind. She started to read more of Firm A’s content and found it to be of consistently high quality.
What role does thought leadership play in building trust?
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Trust has always played a critical role in the purchasing decisions of consulting buyers: The fact that clients are often sharing their most business critical problems with their professional advisers points to the need for a profound level of trust between client and consultant. However, that ability to build trust—particularly with new clients—has unquestionably been impacted by the pandemic.
Three thought leadership recommendations for 2022
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Firms often ask us for our insights on the latest trends in thought leadership—insights we are well-placed to offer given the time we spend looking at all the content produced by the world’s most prolific publishers, and the energy we put into understanding the views of clients. Here are three of our recommendations for 2022:
How to boost the credibility of your content
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Attracting the attention of legal services clients
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The rollercoaster of the last 18 months has taught us a lot about the importance of thought leadership. While the headline news is that clients of professional services firms have increasingly turned to thought leadership to help them navigate their way through the challenges they face, we wanted to dig beneath these headlines to investigate the needs and preferences of different client groups.
Giving clients what they want
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Unlike lots of well-loved but now obsolete features of the early 2000s (Blockbuster Video, classified ads in the newspaper, and floppy disks, anyone?), we at Source are proud to have created something in the noughties that has aged beautifully. We are referring, of course, to our thought leadership ratings methodology—the criteria we use to assess the quality of a piece of thought leadership.
Hello (Mr.) blue sky
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Looking at examples of the thought leadership output of many professional services firms, it’s clear that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cast a long shadow. This is hardly surprising given the upheaval it has caused, and the way that it forced firms to pivot quickly away from their well-thought through 2020 content calendar to an approach that effectively focused on providing emergency assistance to clients in the form of “action leadership.” This focused less on data points and challenging established thinking, and much more on providing next step actions and downloadable checklists.