Content marketing and thought leadership: two oft-conflated strategies that serve the same goal, but do so in very different ways. Simply put, content marketing aims to develop your customer-brand relationships, while thought leadership helps you establish an intellectual presence in your field and business community.
While both tools can help brands acquire new customers, your emphasis should not be solely on making a good first impression. When properly aligned, these two strategies can become a powerful retention tool — and keep in mind that improving retention by just five percent can raise profitability from 25% to 95%.
To keep customers loyal, you have to give them a reason to come back. Here’s a brief overview of how content marketing and thought leadership can work together to achieve just that.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the strategic creation and distribution of content for your target audience. Its primary goal is to draw customers into your marketing funnel by ensuring each item is valuable to these customers and relevant to their needs.
While content marketing has immense potential for lead generation, it’s also a boon for retention. If customers rely on your content for regular updates, industry news, or other valuable info, they will trust your brand to keep their interests at heart. And trust, along with authenticity, is key to building lasting consumer-brand relationships.
Content marketing can take many forms. Blogs, infographics, case studies, videos, whitepapers, and how-to guides are all common examples. No matter what format you choose, it’s essential to measure the success of your campaign, even though that’s not always easy to do.
What is thought leadership?
Thought leadership is content produced by people or organizations with exceptional aptitude, knowledge, and experience in a particular field or topic. It is typically published in the form of byline articles, press outlets, or owned channels — such as an executive’s LinkedIn page.
While this technique has commonalities with content marketing, it does not explicitly promote any products or services. Instead, thought leaders offer unique perspectives, make enlightened predictions, or distill complex ideas into digestible articles. Over time, the best thought leadership pieces will enhance your brand’s credibility as customers follow the content for unique insights.
How to merge techniques for customer retention
- Publish consistently. Whether you’re posting on a blog or placing bylines in media outlets, the central idea is to keep your brand visible. Consistent publishing ensures customers have a steady stream of content that speaks to their ongoing needs. On the thought leadership front, consistency ensures your brand is always a top-of-mind element in relevant industry discussions.
- Write with the customer in mind. Over time, data collected from your content marketing efforts will deepen your understanding of your audience. What are they clicking on over and over? Which content has the most engagement? Use these insights to inform your thought leadership strategy.
- Tread lightly with sales language. There’s a time and a place to make a sales pitch. Most third-party publications will reject thought leadership submissions that have a sales-focused context or are overtly self-promotional. Meanwhile, a content marketing blog post aimed at a top-of-funnel audience shouldn’t assume readers are ready to close a deal. Wherever possible, your content should highlight interesting and relevant content over sales language — but you can link to lower-funnel, feature-rich pages for when your audience is ready to make the leap.
If you can keep these effective guidelines in mind when deploying content marketing or thought leadership, loyal customers will depend on your trusted insights for years to come.
