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Shelby Stephens

01/31/2023, 5:53 PM
Hey all - we've been working with a lot of B2B companies who want to establish authority and Thought Leadership for their founders / key executives as a way to support marketing and sales, and also as a way to consistently create content to be used in outbound sales prospecting sequences etc. We distilled our recommendations down and sharing here in case anyone wants to grow their audience, establish authority and boost sales. 👉 First, Thought Leadership content should be 1) video and 2) authentic aka non-scripted. • Short-form video: More so today than ever before, if you want to establish authority in your industry, you must be sharing video content. Videos should be 1-3 minutes in length (although occasionally can be longer) and should feature the person who will be established as the authority (usually a founder, executive or key department head like Head of Product). • Authentic & Human: Never, ever script your content. Your customers want to experience an authentic, unscripted delivery of your unique knowledge and ideas. One format that works very well is to simply answer a question that your customers may be wondering about. This is not overproduced marketing content. • Bonus: Mix Video & Text. In addition to videos, you should also be sharing text content in the form of mixed-length posts related to topics your customers care about. 👉 Second, create customer-centric content by using a simple, repeatable process that only requires 1 hour of the founder's time per month. • After defining your target customer, list 10 of your customer’s biggest problems and strongest desired outcomes. Here, you’re aiming for 10 total topics, so shoot for about 5 big problems your customer faces, and about 5 outcomes your customer desires (an outcome is the state your customer hopes to achieve after solving a key problem). • Then, expand each problem and desired outcome into ten questions, to generate a total of 100 questions: For each of those 10 problems and outcomes, write a list of 10 questions you can answer. For example, if the problem is “It’s hard to keep track of all the products in my warehouse”, then a relevant question might be “What are some of the struggles warehouse managers face when organizing their inventory?” This step should yield a total of 100 questions. • And last, record your content. Schedule an hour for your founder or key exec to get on a Zoom with either their co-founder or someone from marketing. Ask them ten questions, one at a time, and record the whole session. Slice it up, one answer per video, and get ‘em scheduled at a pace of about 2 per week. I suggest dripping them from the founder’s own personal social and then using company accounts to repost and paid-boost them. If you use this approach, you can convert 1 hour of your founder’s time per month into an entire month of thought leadership content 🙌 Also, this type of content works wonders in sales sequences (think: instead of sending “hey did you see my last email” type messages, replace them with “Hey, I / my company’s founder shared these thoughts on {{insert timely issue that’s relevant to the customer/industry}} and I thought you’d find them valuable” type messages. Happy to answer any questions. Also we laid out this entire process in an e-guide if you want a free copy just LMK 🙂