Thought leadership for B2B companies: part 1 of 2

At 2020 Social we used to suggest a lot of our B2B prospects of a thought leadership way to inbound marketing and we used to practice it ourselves for our own marketing for 2020 Social. (All of us used to regularly write about social media marketing and social business strategies on our company blog). Believe me, almost all of our marketing effort went into showcasing our thought leadership in social media marketing and we rarely spent a penny on anything else. And even though we were a start up, we got a good number of prospects contacting us rather than we calling them up and asking them whether they have any requirements!

Today many B2B focussed services companies want to seen as thought leaders in their space; as companies that can help their clients not just with execution but also with ideas. They want to show that they know their stuff well, they think ahead of their competitors and they want to remain in a preaching mode. However, perhaps it would be wrong to say that this is a new concept because we saw this very thing being practiced years ago by Ogilvy and Mather for their own advertising campaigns. Here is a snapshot I took from the book 'Ogilvy on Advertising'. You can see that O&M's advertisements used to be one page articles teaching about 'How to do better advertising'

In this book, David Ogilvy writes - "The purpose of my ads (for his own company- O&M) was to project the agency as knowing more about advertising. You may argue that this strategy was ill-advised, knowledge being no guarantee of creativity. But at least it was unique, because no other agency could have run such advertisement - they lacked the required knowledge. My ads not only promised useful information, they provided it. And they worked - in many countries."


It is fascinating to to see that even at a time before there was web 2.0, the ideology of marketing oneself through one's knowledge existed. And today, when social technologies have given us all the tools to comfortably preach and publish our thought leadership in our area of expertise, I see very few companies actually practicing this in a proper manner.

I think among the companies that I have seen showcasing their thought leadership in their areas of expertise, Adaptive Path (a user experience design company) understands it the best. If you visit their homepage, it gives you a glimpse of what is recent on their blog and Twitter page. Moreover, most of their blog entries show that the company thinks ahead of others when it comes to user experience design and gives the reader the impression that it has got a team of some very smart people. Also you will notice that their homepage is designed differently than others. Three out of the seven tabs on the header talk about the thought leadership of the company - blog, events, ideas, which shows that the organization has a serious focus towards exhibiting their ideas. Also the homepage is designed in a way that you can get an idea of  'who is adaptive path' and 'what they do' in 15-20 seconds of staying on the homepage.

Among Indian companies, an organization which understands this ideology better than others is Infosys. You must visit their blogs page where the company has multiple blogs running about upcoming IT technology and its need in various industries.

This post is more about showing that if your are a B2B focussed company, and if you are indeed in the business of thinking ahead of the market then it is high time that you start showcasing your thought leadership. Ogilvy preferred printed posters, adaptive path prefers blogs and events. What other ways exist in exhibiting thought leadership and how are some other organizations doing it differently? These are some of the questions I will like to take up in my upcoming posts.