Thought Leadership Studio Podcast Episodes:
Let's Expand Our Vision of Marketing Leadership
Episode Ten: Expand your message by aiming for more global impact. Expand your audience with a more universal mission.
#inspiration, #marketingstrategy, #motivation, #nlp, #persuasion, #strategicthoughtleadership, #thoughtexperiments, #thoughtleadershipexamples, #thoughtleadershipmarketing
Or Click here to listen or subscribe on appExpand Your Influence and Open the Funnel
This episode is about the power of aiming for larger scale impact. It illuminates the challenges and rewards of positively influencing your entire field, business niche, or profession.
The podcast explains how to open your focus and use persuasion skills and strategies to aim at a bigger picture than just lead generation and lead conversation. This actually creates a great return on investment for your time, efforts, and expense because it naturally creates more leads and increases conversion.
People are drawn to and trust those who lead from the heart.
What is the scale of your positive influence?
In many cases, it can be about leading the whole marketplace, the whole niche, the whole profession in a different direction. Instead of just saying, "here's how you need to view what I'm selling", it's pointing out how the entire field should be doing things that they're not yet.
Take a leading position in a niche to influence it in a positive way, and that ends up being so much more PR worthy than typical sales aims. It is because you're creating a manifesto around a more global impact that does not come across as self-serving. So it naturally generates more press and is shared more on social media. The positive attention harvests into business through a halo effect.
I'm not saying stop doing everything that you do to sell. Keep doing that. But this will open up the top of the funnel so everything else works so much better. Your conversion rate will be better. Your lead flow will be better. Your rapport with the marketplace will be so much better. Your ability to harvest PR, your social sharing will enhanced because you become more of a mission oriented business. Your mission is very clear and is about so much more than your business itself, which means it's going to fuel the growth of your business.
You'll create and convert more leads if you expand your vision for larger positive impact.
Know the Frame You are Building Your Business Within
What I mean by frame is a mental model. I have discovered patterns of mental models that prevent leaders from maximizing their effectiveness in thought leadership. Most over-focus on lead generation and lead conversion and under-focus on the larger scale influence and PR that brings prominence that makes lead generation and conversion much easier.
If you aim to impact your whole field, profession, or industry positively, you can start by publishing a white paper that isn't just addressed to people shopping for what you're selling at the moment. It's addressed to everyone in the field with a vision of moving it forward together.
A Meta-Example: Positively Impacting the Marketing Profession
I offer the following example of a little beginning to a thought leadership model for impacting the marketing industry in a positive way.
One of the most prevalent yet toxic marketing models is that of customer-as-data-to-target. This paradigm is supported with how marketing technology has primarily been used so far. It sees prospective customers through the very narrow lens of data targeting. The values marketers aim to satisfy with this usually include growth and success. But, since the customer is in control, they often inadvertently undermine themselves.
It's like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We need to enlarge the prominence of our prospects, not shrink it.
There's nothing wrong with using technology for growth. But if you back up and better see the larger system, you'll see that it needs to include the customer point of view, which will likely alter how we use it. Since the customer sets the value of our services and media, then it is actually to our benefit as well as they will value what we do more, so it will be more profitable and successful.
How can we move MarTech (marketing technology) to the customers' point of view?
The basic difference in the paradigm here is that your marketing content should serve the customer instead of target the customer. I believe my organization is leading the way here by demonstrating the insight that can be gained through respectful, non-invasive analysis of online conversations that reveal marketplace thinking and potential opportunities for thought leadership.
Example Position Paper: From Customer as Product to Respect-Based Marketing
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