In truth, there are multiple ways to create thought leadership content in B2B marketing. So many, in fact, that it can be bewildering knowing where to place your focus.
But, in broader terms, your core options can be brought together into three broad buckets.
Many companies focus on just one. The best get all three working together.
Here’s a number that might make you uncomfortable: according to research from Edelman and LinkedIn, 71% of B2B decision-makers say that less than half of the thought leadership they read gives them valuable insights.
Less than half.
This means most of what passes for thought leadership is simply noise. All too often, it’s created because someone decided the company needed content (often for SEO reasons) not because anyone had something worth saying. And today, this is being turbocharged with the rise of AI slop. A million empty platitudes are just a prompt away.
But here’s the other side of that coin: Edelman and LinkedIn also found that, when thought leadership is done well, 75% of decision-makers and C-suite executives say it has led them to research a product or service they weren’t previously considering. And 60% say good thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium to work with that organisation.
The difference between empty noise and real-world influence often comes down to understanding which type of thought leadership you’re creating and why.
Research from LinkedIn has identified three distinct categories of thought leadership, each serving a different purpose. Think of them as three different conversations you can have with your market:
The companies that succeed in breaking through the noise understand when to use each type. They know that B2B buyers spend an hour or more each week reading thought leadership content. They understand these customers are looking for insights. But they also know that customers and prospects are not always looking for the same kind of insights.
Industry thought leadership appeals to those who are ‘horizon scanning’. Those senior execs who are looking to understand where their industry is headed. Who are trying to spot opportunities, mitigate potential threats and ensure their business is fit for the future.
Operational thought leadership tends to focus on how things get done and, critically, how they could get done better. It’ll cover methodologies and practical models. It may look at research into what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes, it’ll even allow buyers to self-diagnose where they sit on a maturity scale. Fundamentally, it’s where blue-sky thinking meets feet-on-the-ground practicality.
Finally, organisational thought leadership focuses on what makes a business distinctive on a cultural level. Often, this is more internally focused and will regularly play a key role in recruitment. However, to leave it there is to miss a trick. Organisational thought leadership is also a way for potential customers to assess whether you may be a good fit for their business. It can also be a way to link belief and value to outcomes – because we believe X, we do Y and you get Z.
Let’s look at each type in a bit more detail with some real-world examples.
Fundamentally, this is where you aim to bring clarity to your sector. You’re not talking about your product. You’re talking about the forces reshaping your customers’ worlds: what’s changing, new opportunities, emerging risks.
It will often have a mid- to long-term time horizon. While LinkedIn commentators love a hot take, industry thought leadership more often focuses on an in-depth, reasoned view of where your industry is headed.
What it looks like: Commentary on emerging trends. Analysis of key market forces. Predictions about where the industry is heading. Fresh perspectives on familiar problems.
The key word here is fresh. Edelman and LinkedIn found that 81% of decision-makers want provocative insights. By this, they mean ones that challenge their assumptions rather than a validation of their current thinking. They don’t want you to tell them what everyone else is saying. They want you to help them see what others are getting right, getting wrong and missing completely.
Recent years have seen radical changes in how people work. Covid became an accelerant of a process that reached back a decade or more. As a result, HR leaders are looking to discover new ways to develop their best talent to make their businesses fit for the future.
To help, we created a research-based piece of industry thought leadership: The People Development Balancing Act. This examined five foundational elements of modern people development. It looked at how leaders, HR pros and employees are viewing the process and practices of people development today. And it explored the need to balance short-term people performance with long-term business strategy.
Use industry thought leadership when you understand your customers’ world better than they do. When you can connect dots they haven’t connected. When you can see around corners.
This may sound difficult. But research has shown that those companies that can teach their customers something valuable about the customer’s business, massively outperform those who take more traditional routes. (See the excellent Challenger Sale book for more on this.)
The payoff: according to research by Edelman, 57% of buyers say thought leadership builds awareness for new or little-known brands. If you’re not the established market leader, this is your opening.
At its core, operational thought leadership is about transformation. Not your transformation, your customers’.
It’s about translating the big picture into actionable strategy and effective tactics. All too often, thought leadership gets stuck in the clouds. It’s all vision, little action.
While customers may buy into the vision, this level of change has risk written all over it. The road from A to Z is paved with many potholes and numerous dead-ends. Operational thought leadership looks to de-risk the sale, giving customers a clear route map forward. It demonstrates that you don’t just talk the talk, you know how to walk the walk and have done it many times before.
What it looks like: Best practices. Strategic roadmaps. How-to guides and workbooks that show how you deliver the kind of change that matters to customers.
Here’s the critical distinction: while the focus on your products and services may be more apparent in this type of thought leadership, your #1 focus is showing people how to do their jobs better.
All too often, health and safety ends up being a reactive exercise in response to when something goes wrong. It’s an endless firefight of fixing dangerous situations. Intelex wanted to change the picture.
So we created The Intelex Environmental, Health & Safety Blueprint. This practical piece of operational thought leadership takes health and safety professionals through a data-backed maturity assessment of where they are right now. Finally, we developed a five-step blueprint to give them practical steps for making progress.
Operational thought leadership walks a fine line. Done poorly, it’s just a sales pitch dressed up as education. Done well, it establishes your authority by genuinely helping people improve.
People know when they’re being pitched. More often than not they don’t like it. Especially when what they’re really looking for are insights into dealing with the challenges that are keeping them up at night.
Don’t be that brand. Be useful, build authority and credibility, and when the time is right, those same customers will come to you.
According to LinkedIn’s research:
Notice what’s not on that list: features, pricing or product specifications.
While the first two types of thought leadership are about the wider market and how businesses can thrive in it, organisational thought leadership is about your culture, your values and what it’s like to work with you and for you.
Now, of course, the danger here is that you only ever view this kind of content as an internal puff-piece. Look how great we are. Aren’t we clever?
This would be a mistake.
A good way to think about organisational thought leadership is that it helps the reader determine whether you and they are a good fit for each other. Sure, this may be about whether you will be a good employer. But just as important will be helping a customer figure out whether you’ll be a good partner. Or a private equity investor understand whether you’ll be a good fit for their portfolio.
What it looks like: Behind the curtains pieces on how your company operates. Cultural values in action and what they mean for employees and customers. The human side of your organisation.
Dynacast creates high-precision metal components for some of the world’s most demanding companies. Attracting the right people matters. A lot.
But at this level, the right people are in short supply. To help, we created what we term a soul book. This shows existing and prospective employees just what it means to be part of the firm. Importantly, should it find its way into the hands of a prospective customer, it also demonstrates the calibre of the team they’ll be working with.
Everybody wins.
The current acceleration of a range of technologies (AI being just the latest) is rapidly dehumanising business. We don’t speak to sales, we use a chatbot. We don’t send our CV/resume to HR, we upload it via LinkedIn.
Yet people buy from people. People work for and with other people. We ignore the human at our peril.
Organisational thought leadership can be a powerful way to connect with customers and employees on a more human, more authentic level.
The best B2B marketers don’t pick one just one type of thought leadership. They use all three strategically.
Think of it like this: Industry thought leadership gets you into the conversation. Operational thought leadership demonstrates your expertise. And organisational thought leadership builds the relationship.
The data shows that 9-in-10 decision-makers and C-suite executives say they are moderately or very likely to be more receptive to sales or marketing outreach from a company that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership. Not one brilliant piece. Consistent production over time and across different types.
Of course, not every organisation has the resources to excel at all three types of thought leadership simultaneously. No one has a never-ending budget or endless time.
As with most things to do with B2B marketing, the best approach is generally to start where you can make the most impact.
Is there a gaping information hole in your industry that you can fill? Start with industry thought leadership.
Do you have a genuinely transformative approach to solving a real-world customer problem? Lead with operational thought leadership.
Is your culture a competitive advantage? Begin with organisational thought leadership.
Then build from there.
There is a lot of talk these days about personal branding. Or founder-led growth.
This kind of executive thought leadership cuts across all three types. In many ways, it is more a channel than a core type.
And of course it has value. According to LinkedIn’s research, 67% of buyers prefer thought leadership that features the prominent point of view of an identifiable author. (Although, this is very much a LinkedIn view of the world.)
Arm Holdings, the British semiconductor company, demonstrates this at the C-suite level. Their CEO and leadership team position the company in AI infrastructure discussions. They provide executive insights on UK AI capabilities. They combine technical expertise with strategic market vision.
Wider afield, the impact of the Sam Altmans, Tim Cooks and Satya Nadellas of the world is clear for all to see.
Their thought leadership could fit into any of the three types. It’s then made even more powerful because it comes from an identified executive with deep experience.
We’ve already talked about the problem of overcoming noise in the market. So what separates good thought leadership from the blah-blah?
There are a multitude of elements but four stand out:
Of course, today, there’s a new challenge that no one can ignore. Can you guess what?
AI appears to be everywhere. Who knew?
Research by Graphite found that, in November 2024, the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of human-written articles. Now, of course, only a tiny proportion of this will be thought leadership (even by its loosest definition). But the noise is getting noisier.
This partially explains why quality is declining. Only 15% of decision-makers rate the overall quality of thought leadership they consume as very good or excellent according to Edelman’s research. When you consider that your thought leadership is up against both your competitors’ offerings and major global publications, the bar is very high. But, today, that’s the price of entry.
AI is trained on millions of pieces of existing content. It is the average of the average. Brilliant at looking back into the past, incapable of creating anything new about the future.
You can’t automate insight. You can’t prompt-engineer a fresh perspective. The companies that will win are those that use AI as a tool for research and analysis, not as a replacement for original thinking.
There’s a practical consideration in all this: various stats have claimed that most B2B buyers are somewhere around 70% or so of the way through their buying cycle before they ever speak to a sales representative. They’re doing their own research. They’re forming opinions. They’re building shortlists.
This means your thought leadership needs to be findable. It needs to rank.
But…
Research by Bain found that 80%–90% of buyers have a set of vendors in mind before they do any research. And 90% of them will ultimately choose a vendor from this Day One list.
It’s not that they’re running off to Google unprepared. These are not stupid people. They are typically experts in their business with decades of experience and a ton of personal connections.
Often, the credit gets chalked up to Google because that’s the first place people show up on analytics.
And…
AI search is becoming a thing. While lots of people are claiming to know how you can ‘rank’, the reality is that most are guessing. The top citations appear to come from the top search results (so an argument for just doing SEO). But each platform seems to do things slightly differently – Ahrefs research found that just 14% of the top 50 mentioned sources were shared across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI.
So, yes, SEO and rankings are important. But you still need the fundamentals.
Google’s E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) reward quality thought leadership. Long-form, in-depth content performs better than shorter efforts. Clear structure with headings and subheadings improves both readability and rankings. All good.
In short, the answer is complicated.
True thought leadership often involves ideas that don’t exist yet. As such, it will be relatively low volume in search. This is one of the reasons why a good approach is to connect new ideas to old ones. You hitch the unsearched to the often searched. It’s also why you should focus on customers’ real-world problems. These get searched for day-in, day-out.
But the real prize is to become the brand known for understanding customer problems and having interesting, innovative solutions. As soon as your brand name gets added to the search term, you are well on your way to Day One list status.
If thought leadership was easy, everyone would be doing it well. But the evidence says otherwise. And today, you need to do it very well to be heard above the noise.
So where do B2B marketers go wrong? Here are three for starters:
Traffic is vanity. Influence is what matters.
If you’re building a thought leadership strategy, here are 8 steps to get you started:
According to the research, 52% of decision-makers and 54% of C-suite executives spend an hour or more each week reading thought leadership content. They’re looking for trusted sources. Become one.
The three types of thought leadership (industry, operational and organisational) each serve a different purpose.
Industry thought leadership positions you as someone who understands the market.
Operational thought leadership demonstrates how you solve problems.
And organisational thought leadership shows who you are (and why anyone should care).
Most companies do one tolerably well. Few do all three. The opportunity lies in that gap.
The data makes the case: 75% of decision-makers say thought leadership has led them to research products they weren’t considering. 60% say they’ll pay a premium for companies with strong thought leadership. And perhaps most importantly, 70% say thought leadership has led them to question whether they should continue working with an existing supplier.
Your competitors’ customers are reading thought leadership right now. The question is whether they’re reading yours.
Jason Ball is the founder and managing director at Considered. With a multi-decade career in B2B marketing, he’s worked with world-leading brands such as Adobe, Google, EY and Cisco together with niche specialists in technology, manufacturing and professional services.